Challenging Tradition

Chair: Tamsin Gardner

“Memories of ‘convivencia’: Hernando de Baeza and the end of Muslim Spain” by Teresa Tinsley

Hernando de Baeza was witness to one of the great turning points in European history – the defeat of the Moorish kingdom of Granada and its handover to Spain’s ‘Catholic Monarchs’ in 1492. He wrote a short memoire which tells us how, as a Christian interpreter and go-between, he spent 4 years at the Moorish court in close contact with the royal family. His work has provided many insights into Moorish institutions and politics of the time and contrasts strongly with the other contemporary Spanish accounts in being strongly sympathetic towards Moorish culture. This is all the more remarkable given that at the time that it was written - sometime after 1504 - the (relative) religious and cultural tolerance of medieval Spain (‘convivencia’) had broken down into forced conversion and inquisition. Spain’s Moorish past now has an established, even privileged, place in the nation’s history, and Hernando de Baeza was probably the first Spanish language writer to attempt to capture something of this inheritance, yet very little is known about the man and neither he nor his work have been the subject of much research. My paper will set out the research directions I am exploring and findings so far.

“Lost in Translation? Investigating Identity and Beliefs in a Northern Namibian Village.” by Helen C. John

This research project addresses three questions: Were the traditional worldviews and identities of the Ovambo destroyed by the arrival of the missionaries to the northern Namibia plains? If not, did they survive in some capacity, precisely because of the way in which Christianity was ‘translated’ for a new environment? And, to what extent will the community’s worldviews and identities be ‘lost in translation’ in the execution of this research?

Scholarship on northern Namibia suggests that traditional religious beliefs and practice are no longer in evidence. This presentation seeks to outline how I intend to challenge that claim. This presentation will unpack two areas of methodological concern raised by cross-cultural research of this nature, centred on issues of translation, both literal and metaphorical.
The first of these methodological concerns surrounds the translation of language. Issues to be considered are the translation of religious terminology, orality and textuality, and performance.

The second concern surrounds the ‘translation’ and representation of culture. This will address the anthropological ‘crisis of representation,’ outsider-status, subjectivity, polyvocality and power relations.

Following this, I will justify my working hypothesis that there remains a residual influence of traditional worldviews. Finally, I will outline the dual aspect methodology to be adopted during fieldwork and demonstrate why it is appropriate in the investigation of the hypothesis.

““African fever finds in British pluck its most obstinate opponent”: Nature’s challenges and the Victorian imagination in the Abyssinian and Ashanti expeditions” by Ryan Patterson

My presentation will explore the published coverage (newspapers and book accounts) of the Abyssinian (1868) and Asante (1874) expeditions as a window into the pre-scramble British view of the natural world and their ability to successfully grapple with it. This was a pivotal time in the history of imperialism, when the image of Africa began to shift in the public imagination from an unbeatable threat to almost a mere engineering challenge. In my presentation, I will explore the very real natural threat that Africa was believed to pose to better understand the anxiety that made early-imperial Britain so eager to embrace the talisman of “science”.

The language used by expedition soldiers, embedded newspaper correspondents, and politicians in London all drew on similar images in the public imagination. My presentation will explore these images of:

• The land – Anthropomorphising disease, geography, and the “Bush”
• The locals – Discourses tying Africans to nature; as part of nature itself
• The conflict – Discourses projecting a war between civilization and nature onto the expeditions

The Abyssinian and Asante expeditions mark the start of a cultural tide of confidence in Victorian Britain as to their ability to dominate what was still known as the “white man’s grave”.