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Human migrations and information networks: the African case

An examination of the transformation of the cultural environment of peoples of African origin as they were drawn into the social environment of the developing Atlantic world, with an obvious emphasis on slavery.

Reading: Thornton, chs. 7 & 8.

1. Why were Africans able to develop reasonably self-sustaining slave communities in the Americas?
2. What types of social and cultural environments developed within the slave societies of the Atlantic basin?
3. Why didn't people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries feel that each distinct "nation" (defined in ethnolinguistic terms) ought to have its own "state" (meaning only a single territory with some common governing authority)?
4. Why did distinct zones, with their own social and cultural environments, exist along Africa's Atlantic coast? What factors contributed to a reduction of social and cultural diversity among the peoples of this region?
5. What factors contributed to the decisions slave owners made about the degree to which they would mix slaves from different African regions in their labor force?
6. Why did authorities of the Roman Catholic Church in Castilian and Portuguese domains encourage the development in cities of African religious brotherhoods?
7. Why did Afro-Atlantic "culture" tend to become "more homogeneous than the diverse African cultures that composed it" (206)?
8. How does Thornton define "culture"? How is his definition different from Jeffrey Alexander's definition of the "cultural environment"? What elements of Thornton's definition of "culture" would fall within the sphere of Alexander's definition of the "social environment"?
9. How does Thornton define "language"?
10. How does Thornton define "religion"?
11. What other categories of "culture" does Thornton examine?
12. What factors influenced "cultural change" among Africans in the Atlantic world outside of Africa?
13. What is a "pidgin" language? a "creole" language?
14. What factors led to the development of pidgins and creoles in the Atlantic world?
15. Why did Africans often use kinship terminology to integrate people who were not kin into human collectivities?
16. What sort of corporate forms of organization were familiar to Africans?
17. Under what circumstances did African slaves in the Atlantic world outside of Africa elect kings and queens?
18. Why were aesthetic principles "the element of African culture that survived and endured the best in the Americas" (221)?
19. How does Thornton define "aesthetics"?

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Revised:  28 July 1999

URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/reading.23.html