Whose meaning? the wax and gold tradition as a philosophical foundation for an ethiopian hermeneutic

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to assess critically the wax and gold tradition as a philosophical foundation of Ethiopian hermeneutics. In the first part, I shall analyze the wax and gold tradition as a poetic and literary tradition. After exploring how this tradition has shaped social and political interaction in the second part, in the third part I will show the implications of the wax and gold tradition for hermeneutics. I shall then make a critical assessment of the wax and gold tradition as an interpretive philosophy before closing the essay with concluding remarks. © 2010 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.