Download or read book Metals in Mandara Mountains Society and Culture written by Nicholas David and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 2012 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metals, especially iron, are critical factors of production and destruction, and they are deeply embedded in social relations and cultural life. In the Mandara Mountains of Cameroon and Nigeria, anthropological research over a period of six decades has generated a rich body of data that stimulates exploration of the multifaceted and complex relationship between technology, society and culture. Metals in Mandara Mountains' Society and Culture is the collaborative product of researchers from six nations, all with ongoing experience of the mountains and their inhabitants.
Download or read book Metals in Past Societies written by Shadreck Chirikure and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-18 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to communicate to both a global and local audience, the key attributes of pre-industrial African metallurgy such as technological variation across space and time, methods of mining and extractive metallurgy and the fabrication of metal objects. These processes were transformative in a physical and metaphoric sense, which made them total social facts. Because the production and use of metals was an accretion of various categories of practice, a chaine operatoire conceptual and theoretical framework that simultaneously considers the embedded technological and anthropological factors was used. The book focuses on Africa’s different regions as roughly defined by cultural geography. On the one hand there is North Africa, Egypt, the Egyptian Sudan, and the Horn of Africa which share cultural inheritances with the Middle East and on the other is Africa south of the Sahara and the Sudan which despite interacting with the former is remarkably different in terms of technological practice. For example, not only is the timing of metallurgy different but so is the infrastructure for working metals and the associated symbolic and sociological factors. The cultural valuation of metals and the social positions of metal workers were different too although there is evidence of some values transfer and multi-directional technological cross borrowing. The multitude of permutations associated with metals production and use amply demonstrates that metals participated in the production and reproduction of society. Despite huge temporal and spatial differences there are so many common factors between African metallurgy and that of other regions of the world. For example, the role of magic and ritual in metal working is almost universal be it in Bolivia, Nepal, Malawi, Timna, Togo or Zimbabwe. Similarly, techniques of mining were constrained by the underlying geology but this should not in any way suggest that Africa’s metallurgy was derivative or that the continent had no initiative. Rather it demonstrates that when confronted with similar challenges, humanity in different regions of the world responded to identical challenges in predictable ways mediated as mediated by the prevailing cultural context. The success of the use of historical and ethnographic data in understanding variation and improvisation in African metallurgical practices flags the potential utility of these sources in Asia, Latin America and Europe. Some nuance is however needed because it is simply naïve to assume that everything depicted in the history or ethnography has a parallel in the past and vice versa. Rather, the confluence of archaeology, history and ethnography becomes a pedestal for dialogue between different sources, subjects and ideas that is important for broadening our knowledge of global categories of metallurgical practice.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon written by Mark Dike DeLancey and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 831 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cameroon is a land of much promise, but a land of unfulfilled promises. It has the potential to be an economically developed and democratic society but the struggle to live up to its potential has not gone well. Since independence there have been only two presidents of Cameroon; the current one has been in office since 1982. Endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals and substantial forests, and a dynamic population, this is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. To all of this is recently added a serious terrorism problem, Boko Haram, in the north, a separatist movement in the Anglophone west, refugee influxes in the north and east, and bandits from the Central African Republic attacking eastern villages. This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Republic of Cameroon.
Download or read book Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa written by Peter R. Schmidt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides new insights into the distinctive contributions that community archaeology and heritage make to the decolonization of archaeological practice. Using innovative approaches, the contributors explore important initiatives which have protected and revitalized local heritage, initiatives that involved archaeologists as co-producers rather than leaders. These case studies underline the need completely reshape archaeological practice, engaging local and indigenous communities in regular dialogue and recognizing their distinctive needs, in order to break away from the top-down power relationships that have previously characterized archaeology in Africa. Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa reflects a determined effort to change how archaeology is taught to future generations. Through community-based participatory approaches, archaeologists and heritage professionals can benefit from shared resources and local knowledge; and by sharing decision-making with members of local communities, archaeological inquiry can enhance their way of life, ameliorate their human rights concerns, and meet their daily needs to build better futures. Exchanging traditional power structures for research design and implementation, the examples outlined in this volume demonstrate the discipline’s exciting capacity to move forward to achieve its potential as a broader, more accessible, and more inclusive field.
Download or read book Blacksmiths of Ilamba written by Crislayne Alfagali and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-05-08 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyzes the establishment of an iron foundry in the interior 18th-century of Angola. It was a fruit of the Portuguese Enlightenment, which encouraged investment in manufacturing, particularly of iron, a metal indispensable for military and technological purposes. However, the plans faced the resistance of African blacksmiths and founders who refused to learn foreign techniques and work processes. By emphasizing Central African agency, the book highlights the successful strategies of historical actors who scholars have largely ignored. Based upon a wide variety of sources from Brazilian, Portuguese, and Angolan archives, the book reconstructs how Africans were taken to work at the foundry and the important role they played in developing the form of production employed there. By emphasizing continuities with African technology and the quality of the iron produced, it counters interpretations of the project as an example of the failure of the Portuguese Enlightenment. The analysis demonstrates the circulation of knowledge about iron production, thus revitalizing debates that have posited knowledge transmission as unidirectional. It also highlights the relationship between local political leaders and the colonial government, in addition to elucidating the processes by which workers were organized.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology written by Peter Mitchell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 1077 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides a comprehensive synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. It includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates and situates the subject's contemporary practice.
Download or read book The Intangible Elements of Culture in Ethnoarchaeological Research written by Stefano Biagetti and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the intangible elements of human cultures, whose relevance in the study of archaeology has often been claimed but rarely practiced. In this book, the authors successfully show how the adoption of ethnoarchaeological perspectives on non-material aspects of cultures can support the development of methodologies aimed at refining the archaeological interpretation of ancient items, technologies, rituals, settlements and even landscape. The volume includes a series of new approaches that can foster the dialogue between archaeology and anthropology in the domain of the intangible knowledge of rural and urban communities. The role of ethnoarchaeology in the study of the intangible heritage is so far largely underexplored, and there is a considerable lack of ethnoarchaeological studies explicitly focused on the less tangible evidence of present and past societies. Fresh case studies will revitalize the theoretical debate around ethnoarchaeology and its applicability in the archaeological and heritage research in the new millennium. Over the past decade, ‘intangible’ has become a key word in anthropological research and in heritage management. Archaeological theories and methods regarding the explorations of the meaning and the significance of artifacts, resources, and settlement patterns are increasingly focusing on non-material evidence. Due to its peculiar characteristics, ethnoarchaeology can effectively foster the development of the study of the intangible cultural heritage of living societies, and highlight its relevance to the study of those of the past.
Download or read book Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past written by Francois G Richard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in ancient Africa were made and unmade in their intersection with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power.
Download or read book Reviewing Reality written by W. E. A. van Beek and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2013 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From crab divination in the Cameroon to friction oracles in the Congo Basin, from reading cast objects in Mozambique to spirit possession in Cote d'Ivoire, from Sudanese ebony diviners to South African Xhosa healers, divination systems throughout Africa serve their communities by answering questions and resolving problems. Divination helps people chart a course in their lives through a deeper understanding of past and present. This important book reveals the extraordinary diversity and complexity of African divination systems, focusing on self-knowledge, social reality, and intercultural and historical relations. (Series: African Studies / Afrikanische Studien - Vol. 50)
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology written by Bethany Walker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born from the fields of Islamic art and architectural history, the archaeological study of the Islamic societies is a relatively young discipline. With its roots in the colonial periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its rapid development since the 1980s warrants a reevaluation of where the field stands today. This Handbook represents for the first time a survey of Islamic archaeology on a global scale, describing its disciplinary development and offering candid critiques of the state of the field today in the Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The international contributors to the volume address such themes as the timing and process of Islamization, the problems of periodization and regionalism in material culture, cities and countryside, cultural hybridity, cultural and religious diversity, natural resource management, international trade in the later historical periods, and migration. Critical assessments of the ways in which archaeologists today engage with Islamic cultural heritage and local communities closes the volume, highlighting the ethical issues related to studying living cultures and religions. Richly illustrated, with extensive citations, it is the reference work on the debates that drive the field today.
Download or read book African Roads to Prosperity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together in a comparative analysis the results of studies of the various cultural, social, economic and historical aspects that are formative in African societies’ experiences of how people negotiated the spaces and times of being in transit on the road to prosperity. The book analyses the various outcomes of the process of mobility and the experience of spaces and times of transit across gender, generational, and class-differences. These experiences are explored and give insight into the socio-cultural and economics transformations that have taken place in African societies in the past century. Contributors are: Akinyinka Akinyoade, Walter van Beek, Marleen Dekker, Ton Dietz, Rijk van Dijk, Isaie Dougnon, Jan-Bart Gewald, Meike de Goede, Benjamin Kofi Nyarko, Samuel Ntewusu Aniegye, Taiwo Olabisi Oluwatoyin, Shehu Tijjani Yusuf, Augustine Tanle and Amisah Zenabu Bakuri.
Download or read book Burials Migration and Identity in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond written by M. C. Gatto and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places burial traditions at the centre of Saharan migrations and identity debate, with new technical data and methodological analysis.
Download or read book From House Societies to States written by Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2022-10-21 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The organization and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as ‘chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘state’, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence. In fact, recent research stresses the existence of other forms of socio-political organization, less vertically integrated and more heterarchical, that proved highly successful and resilient in the long term in tying together social groups. What is more, such forms quite often represented the basic blocks on which states were built and that managed to survive once states collapsed. Finally, nomadic, maritime and mountain populations provide fascinating examples of societies that experienced alternative forms of political organization, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In other cases, their consideration as ‘marginal’ populations that cultivated specialized skills ensured them a certain degree of autonomy when living either within or at the borders of states. This book explores such small-scale socio-political organizations, their potential and the historical trajectories they stimulated. A selection of historical case studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the emergence and organization of political complexity and the mechanisms that prevented, occasionally, the emergence of solid polities. They may also cast some light over trajectories of historical transformation, still poorly understood as are the limits of effective state power. This book explores the importance of comparative research and long-term historical perspectives to avoid simplistic interpretations, based on the characteristics of modern Western states abusively used retrospectively.
Download or read book Archaeologies of Listening written by Peter R. Schmidt and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-04-26 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists tend to rely on scientific methods to reconstruct past histories, an approach that can alienate local indigenous populations and limit the potential of archaeological research. Essays in this volume argue that listening to and learning from local and descendant communities is vital for interpreting the histories and heritage values of archaeological sites. Case studies from around the world demonstrate how a humanistic perspective with people-centric practice decolonizes the discipline by unlocking an intellectual space and collaborative role for indigenous people. These examples show how listening to oral traditions has opened up broader understandings of ancient rituals in Tanzania—where indigenous knowledge paved the way to significant archaeological finds about local iron technology. Archaeologists working with owners of traditional food ovens in Northern Australia discovered the function of mysterious earth mounds nearby, and the involvement of local communities in the interpretation of the Sigiriya World Heritage Site in Sri Lanka led to a better understanding of indigenous values. The ethical implications for positioning archaeology as a way to bridge divisions are also explored. In a case study from Northern Ireland, researchers risked sparking further conflict by listening to competing narratives about the country’s political past, and a study of archival records from nineteenth-century grave excavations in British Columbia, where remains were taken without local permission, reveals why indigenous people in the region still regard archaeology with deep suspicion. The value of cultural apprenticeship to those who have long-term relationships with the landscape is nearly forgotten today, contributors argue. This volume points the way to a reawakening of the core principles of anthropology in archaeology and heritage studies. Contributors: Peter Schmidt | Alice Kehoe | Kathryn Weedman Arthur | Catherine Carlson | Billy Ó Foghlú | Audrey Horning | Steve Mrozowski | George Nicholas | Innocent Pikirayi | Jonathan Walz | Camina Weasel Moccasin | Jagath Weerasinghe
Download or read book Tracing Language Movement in Africa written by Ericka A. Albaugh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great diversity of ethnicities and languages in Africa encourages a vision of Africa as a fragmented continent, with language maps only perpetuating this vision by drawing discrete language groups. In reality, however, most people can communicate with most others within and across linguistic boundaries, even if not in languages taught or learned in schools. Many disciplines have looked carefully at language movement and change on the continent, but their lack of interaction has prevented the emergence of a cohesive picture of African languages. Tracing Language Movement in Africa gathers eighteen scholars together to offer a truly multidisciplinary representation of language in Africa, combining insights from history, archaeology, religion, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. The resulting volume illuminates commonalities and distinctions in these disciplines' understanding of language change and movement in Africa. The volume is empirical -- aiming to represent language more accurately on the continent -- as well as theoretical. It identifies the theories that each discipline uses to make sense of language movement in Africa in plain terms and highlights the themes that cut across all disciplines: how scholars use data, understand boundaries, represent change, and conceptualize power. The volume is organized to reflect differing conceptions of language that arise from its discipline-specific contributions: that is, tendencies to study changes that consolidate language or those that splinter it, viewing languages as whole or in part. Each contribution includes a short explanation of a discipline's theoretical and methodological approaches to language movement and change to ensure that the chapters are accessible to non-specialists, followed by an illustrative empirical case study. This volume will inspire multidisciplinary conversations around the study of language change in Africa, opening new interdisciplinary dialogue and spurring scholars to adapt the questions, data, and method of other disciplines to the problems that animate their own fields.
Download or read book The Lives of Stone Tools written by Kathryn Weedman Arthur and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lives of Stone Tools gives voice to the Indigenous Gamo lithic practitioners of southern Ethiopia. For the Gamo, their stone tools are alive, and their work in flintknapping is interwoven with status, skill, and the life histories of their stone tools. Anthropologist Kathryn Weedman Arthur offers insights from her more than twenty years working with the Gamo. She deftly addresses historical and present-day experiences and practices, privileging the Gamo’s perspectives. Providing a rich, detailed look into the world of lithic technology, Arthur urges us to follow her into a world that recognizes Indigenous theories of material culture as valid alternatives to academic theories. In so doing, she subverts long-held Western perspectives concerning gender, skill, and lifeless status of inorganic matter. The book offers the perspectives that, contrary to long-held Western views, stone tools are living beings with a life course, and lithic technology is a reproductive process that should ideally include both male and female participation. Only individuals of particular lineages knowledgeable in the lives of stones may work with stone technology. Knappers acquire skill and status through incremental guided instruction corresponding to their own phases of maturation. The tools’ lives parallel those of their knappers from birth (procurement), circumcision (knapping), maturation (use), seclusion (storage), and death (discardment). Given current expectations that the Gamo’s lithic technology may disappear with the next generation, The Lives of Stone Tools is a work of vital importance and possibly one of the last contemporaneous books about a population that engages with the craft daily.
