Cultural contact and change in naming practices among the Aari of southwest Ethiopia
When people of different cultures interact, a degree of linguistic and/or cultural adaptation is expected. This paper examines the implication of the relationship between the Aari and the Gama for the naming practices of the former. The Aari people, who speak Araf, came into contact with Amharic-speaking migrants from central and northern Ethiopia (collectively called the Gama) during the southward expansion of Emperor Menelik in the late nineteenth century. Traditionally, the Aari people used names to express their collective history, shared life experiences, major events, and their environment. The incorporation of Aariland into the Ethiopian empire led to economic, political, and cultural domination as well as resistance on the part of the Aari. Personal names that characterize the period of struggle against the dominant migrants became common until the 1974 revolution that ended the Gama hegemony. Afterwards, however, the naming tradition suffered a setback as evidenced in the decline of Aari personal names in favour of Amhara names and the alteration of the spelling and pronunciation of Aari names. The new changes in naming practices compromised the role of the Aari language as an expression of culture and a marker of identity.
Lexical Change in the Naming of the Months of the Year in Ekegusii
This paper documents the native terms used to name the months of the year in EkeGusii. EkeGusii is a language spoken by a Bantu speaking community (AbaGusii) in the South Western part of Kenya. It is a language with a rich cultural heritage manifested in elaborate cultural values, beliefs, traditions. The Kenyan society is multilingual with over sixty-seven languages. In order to transact Government business and ensure inter-ethnic communication, the Kenya Constitution (2010) identifies English and Kiswahili as co-official languages with Kiswahili doubling up as the national language. The two languages of wider communication have relegated the use of ethnic languages mostly to intra-ethnic interactions particularly among the aging populace. Consequently, ethnic languages such as EkeGusii are potentially endangered. Evidence for such endangerment is a shift from the use of native terms used to refer to the months of the year in EkeGusii to new names borrowed from English and Kiswahili. Further, there is no apparent intervention aimed at revitalizing the rich cultural side to the language of the AbaGusii people. Yet the Kenya Constitution (2010) calls for the protection and preservation of Kenyan languages which are threatened with extinction. To plug this research gap, this paper establishes the native names of the months of the year and their meanings and juxtaposes them to the new loan words from English and Kiswahili. The paper recommends consciousness-raising strategies such as introduction of EkeGusii programmes in local radio stations to popularize fading names with rich cultural meaning.
History, criminology and the ‘use’ of the past
This article considers why, despite an apparent congruence of subject matter and methodologies, the disciplines of sociological criminology and criminal justice history are not more closely aligned. It contends that intellectual traffic between the two fields is not usually limited by institutional barriers, nor is it a legacy of the disciplinary antipathy which existed between history and sociology in Britain during the mid-twentieth century. Rather, it is due to the different ‘purposes’ with which sociological criminologists and criminal justice historians imbue their work and to the differing disciplinary perceptions of the relationship between the past, present and future which result from this. These different ‘purposes’ are traced via a consideration of the paths of development of the two disciplines from the 1940s. The article concludes by proposing an arena for future collaboration between criminal justice historians and sociological criminologists.