Concepts of Right and Left in African Cultures

Bibliographic Data

ID4788729
AuthorsHeinz A Wieschhoff
Year1938
Volume58
Issue1
Pages202
Publication date1938-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Oriental Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0279 • E-ISSN: 2169-2289
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/594208
OpenAlexW2318249734
LanguageEN
Citations received9

QUESTIONS connected with right and left in their physiological and psychological aspects have been treated extensively in the book Handedness, Right and Left by Ira S. Wile.' According to his special frame of interest he devotes a few pages to the treatment of material touching this problem as applied to the African continent. I cannot consider it to be my task to adopt a critical point of view towards the author's data and its interpretation, although his views, as I regard them, are not generally sustainable throughout in an anthropological sense. This, however, is not important for the validity of his thesis in general. Here I shall only present the material itself in an ordered manner. The right and left problem will be offered in its cultural confines, and no attempt will be made to discuss the question of handedness physiologically. As may be expected the material available in the literature is rather poor, not only in that information is lacking from many parts of Africa, but that many references are not trustworthy and may consequently be eliminated. It may be well to arrange the data on the basis of the following classification

Left and right · Engineering · Hemispheric Asymmetry in Neuroscience · History

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