“Structural Analysis of the Evolutionary Motif, Portrait and Discourse of National Identity in the Kebra Nagast, Tobbiya and Dertogada”
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Date
2012-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Structuralism is a twentieth century approach or strategy which altered the conformist view of
nature and reality as metaphysics and historicism do. Structuralism can be taken as a way,
approach, method or philosophy of critical investigation of relationships among deep and surface
levels of being and human culture in general; the modern structural world view emerged as
prominent manner of study of universal rules and universality with the coming of Ferdinand de
Saussure’s book Course in General Linguistics in 1916. The Prague School that included Roman
Jakobson and S. Troubetzkoy are responsible for the enrichment of structural linguistics and
structuralism. Noam Chomsky and Levi-Strauss have also played an important role in the further
development of the structural approach and able to successfully maintain its promising influence in
the Western mode of thought from semiotics to cybernetics and general systems theory.
Structuralism, hence, is attributed with the undented manifestation of things in their entirety and
shared elemental constitution for an underlying principle is governing their existence and
interactions. This unequivocal approach, however, had been mistaken as a study of static forms or
refrigerated defunct even by some well-noted thinkers like J. Derrida and M. Foucault due to their
deplorable fallacies and dubious insights about the concept; contrarily structuralism is a highly
systematic and inclusive of the interconnectedness of things to form an relatively definable holistic
entity of small constantly transformative as well as self-regulative structures. Thus, the structural
insight situates itself somewhere in the middle, dispelling the inertially formalists and chaos
theorists; and philosophizing that things are chaotic forms or formal chaos.
Thereof, the painstaking conceptual framework of structuralism has been discussed and analyzed
in chapter three, following the introductory chapter and review of related literature respectively. In
chapter three the concept of structuralism is discussed in detail fully understood to avoid the
popular misconceptions including that of “post-structuralism”. Chapter four lines up next to
analyze the three focus materials’ (the Kebra Nagast, Tobbiya and Dertogada) historical, social,
political, and literary structural configurations, particularly accompanied with Northrop Frye’s
structural theory of recurrent formations. Thus, the analysis part of this research paper—
synthesizing literature, philosophy and politics—discusses the selected materials’ structural
interconnection and similitude. And finally, the conclusion is rendered in chapter five to elicit the
major points that have been constructed in the entire chapters, especially the fourth one.
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Keywords
National Identity in the Kebra Nagast, Tobbiya and Dertogada”