Book
First-time: the historical vision of an Afro-American people
Johns Hopkins University Press • Baltimore • Published In 1983 • Pages: 189
By: Price, Richard.
AbstractBrief abstract written by HRAF anthropologists who have done the subject indexing for the document
This is an oral history of the Saramakans, collected and annotated by the ethnographer. History is learned at the feet of elders who themselves learned it in this way. Each Saramakan historian throughout the course of his life picks up bits and pieces of genealogies, verbal maps, proverbs, songs, epithets, commemorative place names, etc. from other historians and puts together his own understanding of events. Price includes the edited transcripts of various versions, provides commentary, and, where he can, compares them with contemporary written accounts by European officials, planters and missionaries. The histories tell of the different runaway slave groups, or clans, their leaders and their magic, the settlements they formed and reformed, the relationships they developed with each other, the battles they had with the planters and the final Peace in 1762. The histories are important in establishing the relative status and authority of the clans and their territorial claims. Perhaps most important, however, the histories evoke the pride of a people who banded together to survive and fight for their freedom, beholden to no one but themselves.
- SubjectsDocument-level OCM identifiers given by the anthropology subject indexers at HRAF
- Traditional history
- Settlement patterns
- Slavery
- Clans
- Warfare
- Peacemaking
- Texts translated into english
- cultureCulture name from the Outline of World Cultures (OWC)
- Saramaka
- HRAF PubDateThe date HRAF published the document
- 1999
- RegionThe area the document pertains to
- South America
- Sub RegionThe more specific area the document pertains to, which is located within the Region
- Amazon and Orinoco
- Document TypeMay include journal articles, essays, collections of essays, monographs, or chapters/parts of monographs
- Book
- Evaluation
- Creator TypeThe type of person writing the document, e.g. Ethnographer, Missionary, Archaeologist, Folklorist, Linguist, Indigenous Person, and so on.
- Ethnologist
- Document Rating A ranking done by HRAF anthropologists based on the strength of the source material on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1 - poor; 2 - fair; 3 - good, useful data, but not uniformly excellent; 4 - excellent secondary data; 5 - excellent primary data.
- 4: Excellent Secondary Data
- 5: Excellent Primary Data
- AnalystThe HRAF anthropologist who subject indexed the document and prepared other materials for the eHRAF culture/tradition collection
- Ian Skoggard; 1997
- Field DateThe date the researcher conducted the fieldwork or archival research that produced the document
- 1976-1978
- Coverage DateThe date or dates that the information in the document pertains to
- 1685-1762
- Coverage PlaceLocation of the research culture or tradition (often a smaller unit such as a band, community, or archaeological site)
- Suriname
- NotesAdditional notes
- Richard Price
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-187)
- LCCNLibrary of Congress Control Number
- 83000029
- LCSHLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
- Saramacca (Surinam people)