New Ethnogenesis: Ethnic Processes and Ethnicity Construction in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Convener: Prof. Vladimir A. Popov (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography [Kunstkamera], St. Petersburg, Russia);
e-mail: popoff@kunstkamera.ru

The research problems of ethnogenetical studies become highly important for the development of modern type of dialogue of civilizations and ethnic cultures at the worldwide. Nevertheless a new ethnogenesis phenomena as a special process of the era of globalization is underestimated. Meanwhile for the last 100 years ethnic mixing and ethnicity construction have become the most important ethno-transforming processes (naturally developed and artificially stimulated respectively) and provide dinamics of ethnocultural development of the mankind. The problems proposed for the discussion are as follows:
- comparative historical research of ethnocultural, ethnosocial, demographic (especially urbanistic), racial and socio-linguistic factors for ethnogenesis in colonial and postcolonial Sub- Saharan Africa;
- ethnicity construction in the British Eastern Africa and Nigeria (colonial “tribes” and technologies of artificially-driven ethnogenesis);
- ethnocultural and ethnopolitical characteristics of Lusotropicalism and apology of the creolization and metisation;
- finding out and ethnocultural charcterization of the new ethnic groups of mixed origin (“metis cultures” and “creole-syndrom”);
- creating of the new post-colonial ethnicity in the process of national-administrative construction including the invention of new ethnonyms, as well as ethnic planning together with the linguistic one (“one people = one language”);
- The development of ethnocaste units (for example, in the case of the Tutsi/Hima – Hutu/Iru –
Twa).
A special theme: an analysis of scholarly mythologization of ethnic processes, and critique studies for ideologically loaded historical and culturally-anthropological research studies in the countries of Ibero-America as well, where the group of communities, sharing African background, are said (on the both sides of the Atlantic Ocean) to be a special civilization. These ideas include, for example, a theory about Yoruba transatlantic complex (“the worldwide Yoruba ethnicity”).