African Material Culture

"This volume has much to recommend it -- providing fascinating and stimulating insights into many arenas of material culture, many of which still remain only superficially explored in the archaeological literature." -- Archaeological Review"... a vivid introduction to the topic.... A glimpse into the unique and changing identities in an ever-changing world." -- Come-All-YeFourteen interdisciplinary essays open new perspectives for understanding African societies and cultures through the contextualized study of objects, treating everything from the production of material objects to the meaning of sticks, masquerades, household tools, clothing, and the television set in the contemporary repertoire of African material culture.

MARY JO ARNOLDI is Curator for African Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

CHRISTRAUD M. GEARY is Curator of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.

KRIS L. HARDIN is a Research Associate with the Smithsonian Institution.

Preface
Introduction: Efficacy and Objects	p. 1
Technological Style and the Making of Culture: Three Kono Contexts of Production	p. 31
Magical Iron Technology in the Cameroon Grassfields	p. 51
When Nomads Settle: Changing Technologies of Building and Transport and the Production of Architectural Form among the Gabra, the Rendille, and the Somalis	p. 73
Ceramics from the Upemba Depression: A Diachronic Study	p. 103
Objects and People: Relationships and Transformations in the Culture of the Bambala	p. 130
Sticks, Self, and Society in Booran Oromo: A Symbolic Interpretation	p. 145
Material Narratives and the Negotiation of Identities Through Objects in Malian Theatre	p. 167
The Consumption of an African Modernity	p. 188
Household Objects and the Philosophy of Igbo Social Space	p. 214
Hoes and Clothes in a Luo Household: Changing Consumption in a Colonial Economy, 1906-1936	p. 243
The Passive Object and the Tribal Paradigm: Colonial Museography in French West Africa	p. 265
Art, Politics, and the Transformation of Meaning: Bamum Art in the Twentieth Century	p. 283
Mami Wata Shrines: Exotica and the Construction of Self	p. 308
Zairian Popular Painting as Commodity and as Communication	p. 334
Contributors	p. 356
Index	p. 359
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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African Material Culture

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials