Personalism in African Cultures and Ethics: The Examples of the Bantus in Central, Southern Africa and of the Mossi in West Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Currently, more than ever, the issue of the human being has been at the centre of debates. Each culture, each philosophical trend has been trying to break the mystery of Man and to give meaning and value to human activities. Throughout the world, “personalism” has taken many forms in the history of peoples’ philosophy. Therefore, in sub-Saharan Africa, some communities of the Bantu and of the Mossi developed their own “personalism” based on their cosmogonic and anthropological notion which shaped their ethical vision of Man and his behavior in society. As for the Bantus, there is no dichotomy between the being and the Vital Force which vivifies anything that exists and lasts. Any attempt to reduce or to destroy the Vital Force of a person is gross guilt to be punished. With respect to the Mossi in Burkina Faso who are eager to show both the richness and the ambiguity in the human being, they designed anthropology based on four things: The “sigré”, meaning the primary Vital Force inherited from their forefathers; The “kinkirga” who represents the private and immortal unearthly vital energy; The “siiga”, the earthly vital energy; and, lastly, the “yinga”, the Human Body, the carnal structure in which these three types of vital energies join to form the human being who expresses himself in society in an ambivalent manner. The objective of this research was to study the phenomenology of the human being among the Bantu and Mossi, in order to better understand their ethical and social personalism. A synthesis study, based on a specialized scientific bibliography related to their culture and anthropology, will allow presenting their ethical and social personalism. Under the auspices of African anthropology and through the advent of philosophical trends, such as “ontological vitalism” by Tempels and “vitalogy” by N’kafu, who rank life as the primary principle and emphasize and praise man’s action in society, Africa has been developing a “personalism” of the social brand.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".