Fire-Eaters

Fire-Eaters
Author: Mwelwa C. Musambachime
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017-01-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1524594415
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As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite the many years of direct contact with European traders and the influx of European goods, most African societies still produced their own iron and its products, or obtained them from neighbouring communities through local trade. The quality of iron products was such that, despite competition from European imports, local iron production survived into the early twentieth century in some parts of the continent. The production process covered prospecting, mining, smelting, and forging. Different types of ore were available all over the continent and were extracted by shallow or alluvial mining. A variety of skills were required for building furnaces, producing charcoal, smelting, and forging iron into goods. Iron production was generally not an enclave activity but a process that fulfilled the totality of socio-economic needs. It also fit the gender division of labour within communities.

Chronicling Cultures

Chronicling Cultures
Author: Robert V. Kemper
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2002-04-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0759116687
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Some field sites have hosted anthropologists for as long as half a century. Chronicling Cultures collects articles from principals of many of the longest and best-known anthropology projects from four continents—the Kung, Harvard Chiapas Project, Gwembe Valley, Tzintzuntzan, and Navajo among others. These projects have brought a new understanding of change and persistence in communities over time. They have forced researchers to develop methods of involving local communities in research, of using data over generations of scholars, and of resolving ethical issues of research versus advocacy. The projects range from individual scholars who return 'home' year after year to large-scale institutionalized projects involving many researchers and numerous studies. This volume will be an important addition to the literature on fieldwork, on the history of ethnology, and on ethnographers' role in their host cultures.

Technological Choices

Technological Choices
Author: Pierre Lemonnier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134522991
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Technological Choices applies the critical tools of archaeology to the subject of technology and its impact on humankind throughout the ages. An examination of the challenges technological innovations present to various cultures, Technological Choices asserts that in any society, such choices are made on the basis of cultural values and social relations, rather than on the inherent benefits in technology itself. Of course, this revolutionary viewpoint has critical implications for contemporary Western societies. Based on case studies covering a wide range of chronologies and geographies, Technological Choices moves rapidly from Neolithic Europe to the modern industrial age, stopping on the way to examine the tribes of Papua, New Guinea, rural Indian and North African societies as well as several European peasant communities. The techniques studied range from the manufacture of stone implements to the development of high-tech transportation devices. With its breadth of subject matter and multidisciplinary approach, Technological Choices offers new insight into the interrelationship between technology and society. Also unprecedented is the book's emphasis on the functional aspects of material culture.

Beads of life

Beads of life
Author: Marie-Louise Labelle
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Crafts & Hobbies
ISBN: 1772823724
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Beads of Life is a fascinating exploration of traditional beadwork from eastern and southern Africa, as well as the socio-religious principles upon which many aesthetic choices were based. The author concludes with an examination of contemporary beadwork as seen, in particular, through the eyes of Canadians from these regions.

Material Explorations in African Archaeology

Material Explorations in African Archaeology
Author: Timothy Insoll
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191062227
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How people engaged with materials such as clay or stone, why people dug features such as pits, why they decorated their bodies, or treated their dead in certain ways, were all meaningful in the African past. However, these are subjects that have been generally neglected by archaeologists working in Africa until recently. Material Explorations in African Archaeology examines materiality in African archaeology by exploring concepts of material agency and material engagement and entanglement in relation to their manifest presence in persons, animals, objects, substances, and contexts. It investigates the magnificent and complex world of past African materiality by considering a range of case studies. These include, for example, why standing stones were erected, the potential meanings of bodily alteration practices such as scarification and dental modification, and why, recurrently, Africans in the past gave ritual importance to objects, materials, and locations thought of as exotic or different. Adopting a multidisciplinary focus, the volume draws not only on archaeology but also, among other areas, ethnography and history, discussing themes such as bodies, landscape, healing and medicine, and divination, as well as concepts such as memory and biography, transformation, and metaphor and metonym.