In Praise of the Ancestors: Names, Identity, and Memory in Africa and the Americas

By Susan Elizabeth Ramírez and Susan E. Ramirez

Book Overview

Apart from collective memories of lived experiences, much of the modern world's historical sense comes from written sources stored in the archives of the world, and some scholars in the not-so-distant past have described unlettered civilizations as "peoples without history." In Praise of the Ancestors is a revisionist interpretation of early colonial accounts that reveal incongruities in accepted knowledge about three Native groups.

Susan Elizabeth Ram rez reevaluates three case studies of oral traditions using positional inheritance--a system in which names and titles are inherited from one generation by another and thereby contribute to the formation of collective memories and a group identity. Ram rez begins by examining positional inheritance and perpetual kinship among the Kazembes in central Africa from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Next, her analysis moves to the Native groups of the Iroquois Confederation and their practice of using names to memorialize remarkable leaders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, Ram rez surveys naming practices of the Andeans, based on sixteenth-century manuscript sources and later testimonies found in Spanish and Andean archives, questioning colonial narratives by documenting the use of this alternative system of memory perpetuation, which was initially unrecognized by the Spaniards.

In the process of reexamining the histories of Native peoples on three continents, Ram rez broaches a wider issue: namely, understanding of the nature of knowledge as fundamental to understanding and evaluating the knowledge itself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1496231473
• ISBN13: 9781496231475
• Release Date: June 2022
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"