干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

This article discusses issues connected with the emergence and maintenance of cultural identities in multiethnic contexts. Migrations have been shunned during the past few decades as an explanatory tool in the emergence of new cultural entities. It is argued in this article that "migrations" are effective forces of cultural change but they have to be well documented and carefully investigated. The formation of ethnic identity is a complex but dynamic process that does not take place in a vacuum. It sometimes involves "foundational" events, such as key migration, encapsulated in the "social memory": the trek across the Sinai desert for the Israelites or the move westward along the Wadi-el-Malik for the Shuwa-Arabs to the Lake Chad Basin in West Africa. However, it is more often structured according opposite cultural "archetypes." The case studies marshaled in this discussion, one archaeological, from the Late Bronze-Iron Age I emergence of Isrealites in highland Canaan (ca. 1300-1100 B.C.), and the other ethnoarchaeological, concerning the Shuwa-Arab settlements of northern Cameroon, both offer distinct histories with striking parallelisms. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).