hamitic hypothesis quizlet

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• History in Africa

The "Hamitic Hypothesis" in Indigenous West African Historical Thought

• African Studies Association
• Volume 36, 2009
• pp. 293-314
• 10.1353/hia.2010.0004
• View Citation

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Ethnic Conflict and Genocide in Rwanda

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• First Online: 23 February 2019
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• Wendy Lambourne 2  

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Identity and ethnicity have played a significant and contested role in the history of Rwanda, the genocide of 1994 and its aftermath. This chapter traces the origins of ethnicity as the most salient identity marker for Rwandans since colonization and independence. Starting with an overview of precolonial relations between the three identity groups provides a backdrop for understanding how ethnic identity was constructed by the colonial powers, reinforced by the postindependence governments and became a driver for violent conflict and ultimately genocide. Continuing this tradition of mythmaking and manipulation of identity for social and political purposes, the government of Rwanda post-genocide has sought to replace ethnic identity with a superordinate Rwandan national identity in order to maintain stability and promote unity and reconciliation. The chapter concludes by examining the contemporary challenges and implications of this approach to identity transformation for peace in Rwanda. Central to the analysis is the recognition of how ethnicity has been constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed for strategic and pragmatic purposes before, during, and after the genocide, rather than being seen as a primordial and definitive marker and determinant of social and political relations and violence in Rwanda. Nevertheless, ethnic identity, although recognized as a political and historical construct, is also seen as a potential powder keg because of its powerful mythological characteristics and capacity to engender deep affective responses based on collective memories of oppression and violence.

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Wendy Lambourne

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Lambourne, W. (2019). Ethnic Conflict and Genocide in Rwanda. In: Ratuva, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0242-8_118-1

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Charles Gabriel Seligman and the Hamitic Hypothesis

Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873 – 1940), image: William Rothsteinעברית: ויליאם רוטשטיין, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On December 24 , 1873 ,  British physician and ethnologist Charles Gabriel Seligman was born. Seligman ‘s main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan . He was a proponent of the Hamitic hypothesis , according to which, some civilizations of Africa were thought to have been founded by Caucasoid Hamitic peoples.

Charles Gabriel Seligman – Background

Seligman was born into a middle class Jewish family in London, UK, the only son of wine merchant Hermann Seligmann  and his wife Olivia (Charles shortened his name to Seligman after 1914). His interests in natural science became early manifest: while still at a preparatory school, he began to collect butterflies and, at the house of a boy friend, carried out chemical experiments.[3] He studied medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital.Charles Gabriel Seligman studied medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital. He later worked as a physician and pathologist and then served the 1898 Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait. Later expedition included New Guinea, Ceylon, and Sudan. Seligman served as chair of Ethnology at the London School of Economics from 1913 to 1934.

Ethnographic Work in Africa

Charles Seligman is probably best known for his ethnographic work on the races of Africa. He recognized four major distinct races of the African continent: Bushmanoids (Bushmen), Pygmies, Negroids, and Caucasoids (Hamites). Further, the Hottentots, according to Seligman are a mixture of Bushmanoid, Negroid and Hamitic. As a staunch proponent of the Hamitic theory, in his work Seligman asserts that Hamitic Caucasoid North and Northeast Africans were responsible for introducing non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages (Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian) into Africa, as well as civilization, technology and all significant cultural developments.

He did acknowledge varying degrees of Negroid admixture amongst the Hamitic groups, but emphasized throughout his major works the essential racial and cultural unity of the various Hamitic peoples. In his Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1913), he wrote that the Northern and Eastern Hamitic “ groups shade into each other, and in many parts a Negro admixture has taken place, nevertheless, culturally if not always physically, either division stands apart from its fellow .”

The Hamites in general, and the Northern Hamites in particular, he asserted, have close “ kinship with the European representatives of the Mediterranean race “. Drawing from Coon, Seligman also discusses fairer features observed amongst a minority of Berbers or Northern Hamites, such as lighter skin, golden beards and blue eyes. Races of Africa, however, notably questions the belief held by some anthropologists in the early 20th century that these fairer traits, such as blondism, were introduced by a Nordic variety. Seligman’s most famous work Races of Africa is regarded the first major published work in English on the ethnography of Africa, widely regarded as an “ethnological classic”.

Selected works:

• Melanesians of British New Guinea   (1910)
• The Veddas   (1911) with   Brenda Seligman
• Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan   (1913)
• Races of Africa   (1930, 1939,1957,1966)
• The Pagan Tribes of Nilotic Sudan   (London: Routledge, 1932) with Brenda Seligman

References and Further Reading:

• [1]  Charles Seligman Short Biographical and Works at Britannica
• [2]  Charles Seligman Biographical at the Royal Society
• [3] Myers, C. S.  (1941).  “ Charles Gabriel Seligman. 1873–1940 “ .  Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society .  3 (10): 627–646.
• [4]  Catalogue of the Seligman papers   at the   Archives Division   of the   London School of Economics.
• [5] C. G. Seligman, The Races of Africa , London, 1930
• [6] Charles Seligman at Wikidata
• [7]  A Theory You’ve Never Heard Of | Michael Robinson | TEDxUniversityofHartford , TEDx Talks @ youtube
• [8] Timeline of British Ethnologists , via Wikidata and DBpedia

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From Noah's Curse to Slavery's Rationale

By Felicia R. Lee

• Nov. 1, 2003

As stories go, this one has all the elements of good soap opera: nudity, sex and dysfunctional families.

For many scholars, though, the enigmatic tale in Genesis 9 describing how Noah cursed the descendants of his son Ham with servitude remains a way to explore the complex origins of the concept of race: how and why did people begin to see themselves as racially divided?

In the biblical account, Noah and his family are not described in racial terms. But as the story echoed through the centuries and around the world, variously interpreted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars, Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked.

By the 19th century, many historians agree, the belief that African-Americans were descendants of Ham was a primary justification for slavery among Southern Christians.

The debate about just what the story of Ham and Noah means has marched on into the 21st century. Today scholars are increasingly reading documents in the authors' original languages and going further back in time and to more places, as well as calling on disciplines like sociology and classics. Their ambitions are also bigger than just parsing Ham.

''What I've been trying to do for 40 years is move the emphasis of scholarship about slavery from a parochial emphasis to looking at early times,'' said David Brion Davis, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. That often means going to biblical or prebiblical sources and commentary, he said.

On Friday the center will begin a two-day conference on ''slavery and the construction of race,'' in which the origins of the idea of race will be discussed.

''People are just going back and doing a lot more research, a lot more probing of sources,'' said George M. Fredrickson, the author of ''Racism: A Short History'' (Princeton University Press, 2002) and an emeritus professor of history at Stanford.

As for Ham, he said, ''It's been a flexible curse -- Jews, peasants, Tatars, have been considered cursed over the years.''

David M. Goldenberg, a historian and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, spent 13 years investigating every reference to blacks in Jewish literature up to about the seventh century. He is publishing the results of his research next month in ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam'' (Princeton University Press). Among his surprising findings, he said, is evidence that a misreading of Hebrew and other Semitic languages led to the mistaken belief that the word ''Ham'' meant ''dark, black or heat.''

He concludes that in biblical and post-biblical Judaism there are no anti-black or racist sentiments, a finding that some scholars dispute. He also contends that the notion of black inferiority developed later, as blacks were enslaved across cultures. His findings, he said, dovetail with those of other scholars who have not found anti-black sentiment in ancient Greece, Rome or Arabia.

''The main methodological point of the book is to see the nexus between history and biblical interpretation,'' Mr. Goldenberg said. ''Biblical interpretation is not static.''

Stephen R. Haynes, a professor of religion at Rhodes College in Memphis, is less interested in the origins of Ham's supposed blackness than in why certain cultures have found the story so alluring.

''It appealed to racial slavery because Ham acted like you expected a black man to act,'' said Mr. Haynes, who published ''Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery'' (Oxford University Press) last year. ''Slavery was necessary in the white Southern mind to control the ungovernable black. Slavery is the response to Ham's rebellious behavior.''

In the Bible, Ham finds Noah drunk and naked in Noah's tent. He tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who proceed to cover their father without gazing at him. When Noah finds out what happened, he curses Ham's son Canaan, saying he shall be ''a servant of servants.'' Among the many questions attached to this tale are what Ham did wrong. Was it looking at his father or telling his brothers or some implied sexual transgression? And why was Canaan cursed for Ham's actions?

''The reason the text was so valued by 19th-century people was that it was about honor,'' Mr. Haynes said. ''Ham acted dishonorably, and slavery was life without honor.''

While thousands of people have tried to interpret Noah's curse, Mr. Haynes writes: ''Scholars of history and religion alike have failed to comprehend that pro-slavery Southerners were drawn to Genesis 9:20-27 because it resonated with their deepest cultural values.'' Too often, he writes, historians have a superficial knowledge of the Bible, and scholars of religion have a limited knowledge of Southern culture.

Benjamin Braude, a professor of history at Boston College and co-director of its program in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, argues that scholars are focusing on Ham and religious sources with wider lenses. He agrees with Mr. Goldenberg about the absence of racism in the ancient world and with his argument about the misinterpretation of rabbinic passages but disagrees with his assertion that there was no color-based identity in the ancient Near East or the Bible.

''In 18th- and 19th-century Euro-America, Genesis 9:18-27 became the curse of Ham, a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery,'' says Mr. Braude's paper for the Yale conference. ''In prior centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims had exploited this story for other purposes, often tangential to the later peculiar preoccupation.''

Like other scholars, Mr. Braude concludes that later social and economic forces turned Ham into a justification for slavery. ''Before the 16th or 17th century, the racial interpretation of Ham is absent or contradictory,'' he said in an interview. ''The clearest element is in Islamic culture, but even there it is contested and not universally accepted.''

John O. Hunwick, a professor of history and religion at Northwestern University, agrees that an examination of slavery in Islam, a subject he thinks has been neglected, may hold some answers. He theorizes that because Ethiopians were the first group held as slaves in Arabia, blackness became associated with servitude.

One of the pitfalls in answering questions about race is finger-pointing, said Werner Sollors, a professor of English and African-American studies at Harvard, who has written widely about race, including the curse of Ham.

''The question is: where does this thing we call racism or racial hierarchy start, and it's been very contentious,'' he said. ''It's a huge question and has a big blame attached to it. Is it the Christians, the Muslims or the Jews? You find evidence for all three.''

While the questions are not new, serious academic attention to blacks in antiquity began only in the 1960's, with books by Frank J. Snowden, a classics professor at Howard University, which is historically black, Mr. Sollors said.

And now, Mr. Braude said, ''a lot of people are pushing the questions about race much further in time and reinterpreting texts that have been misunderstood from the Renaissance onward.''

''This society is obsessed with race and color,'' he continued. ''There is, in fact, in the academy a commitment to understanding the social construction of race, but we don't look at the construction site. We are trying to see the elements that go into this -- to pull them apart and to see what fits and doesn't fit.''

An article in Arts & Ideas on Saturday about Noah's curse on the descendants of his son Ham and its relation to the concept of race misstated a view of Benjamin Braude, the co-director of Boston College's program in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. He says that he believes that there was little or no color-based identity in the ancient Near East and in the Hebrew Bible. He does not disagree with that assertion by another scholar, David M. Goldenberg.

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