Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience

306 Pages·2015·6.22 MB·English

by  François G. Richard (eds.)

Materializing Colonial Encounters
François G. Richard
Editor
Materializing Colonial
Encounters
Archaeologies of African Experience
1 3
Editor
François G. Richard
Anthropology
University of Chicago
Chicago, USA
ISBN 978-1-4939-2632-9 ISBN 978-1-4939-2633-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-2633-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944091
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
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Acknowledgments
As textual artifacts, books have a tendency to camouflage the tracks of their genesis
behind the orderly and coherent façade of the finished product. Once academic proj-
ects are converted into ink and pages, and bracketed by covers, the long and tortu-
ous histories of their making are recomposed into clean narratives flowing smoothly
from inception to completion. Like most book projects, this edited volume has a
more checkered prehistory. Through sinuous paths, it has traveled between many
sites, both physical and virtual. It has had a number of incarnations, not all of which
have seen the light of day or left traces in the present volume. And it has brought
together a lot more people than featured in the table of contents, many of whom
have made critical inputs at various stages along the way. Some were traveling
companions for a time, before the trade winds of scholarly interests and academic
obligations took them elsewhere; some joined midcourse; and others accompanied
the project from start to finish. I am grateful to all for their diverse contributions.
The seeds for this volume were sown at a session held at the 2008 Society for
American Archaeology meeting. The session brought together a collection of in-
sightful papers, which, we thought, had the potential to contribute fresh perspec-
tives to the interpretation of colonial situations, for colleagues working in archaeol-
ogy and other disciplines, in Africa and beyond. Three of the original participants
(Stahl, Weiss, Richard) contributed essays to this volume. Other chapters were
subsequently solicited from Brink, Crossland, Esterhuysen, Kus and Raharijaona,
Swanepoel, and Wynne-Jones, who kindly accepted the invitations. Two of the
original symposium participants, Akin Ogundiran and Maria das Dores Cruz, did
not write chapters for the volume, but actively contributed to the conversations sur-
rounding its conception. I extend many thanks also to Stephen Silliman and Mark
Hauser, our discussants at the 2008 symposium. Their generous and insightful re-
marks helped to shape the intellectual course of the volume, and have been taken
into account in nearly all aspects of the book. I am also thankful to Peter Schmidt
for his original involvement in the book, even as his tight schedule forced him to
ultimately withdraw from participation.
As I write these words 6 years later, this volume proved quite a bit longer in
the making than originally intended. In addition being grateful to the contributors
for their wonderful chapters, I would also like to thank them for their grace and
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vi Acknowledgments
patience in dealing with the book’s trials and tribulations, and for staying the course
until the end. Many thanks also are due to Mike Rowlands and Ibrahima Thiaw
for accepting to jump aboard the project as commentators, and for their invaluable
remarks on the chapters. I am especially happy that Thiaw, who initiated me to
archaeological research in Senegal, was able to take part in the volume, despite the
exacting schedule demanded by his many professional and academic commitments.
After a hazy and mitigated search for publication venues, I could not be happier
and luckier to have found a home for the book with Springer Press. Teresa Krauss
has been a model of professionalism, and a veritable pleasure to work with. I am
deeply thankful to her and Hana Nagdimov for giving the volume a chance, and
for their invaluable advice and assistance through the process. They have accom-
modated the many twists and turns in schedules and deadlines that have befallen the
project with appreciable aplomb. They have also been uniquely gracious in bearing
with the litany of computer problems, faulty internet connectivity, and logistical de-
lays associated with my frequent travels to rural Senegal in the past 4 years. I should
also thank the anonymous reviewers for their frank and appreciative critiques of the
draft volume. Their comments have certainly sharpened arguments and edges, and
raised critical points which the project left unaddressed. I have attempted to pick up
their concerns in the introduction framing the volume, and hope to have done justice
to their suggestions—the remaining errors being my own, of course.
Finally, my acknowledgments would not be complete without thanking Dores
Cruz, one last time, for her invaluable editorial and conceptual help in the formative
stages of the volume. I am deeply grateful for her insightful suggestions on draft
versions of the chapters, and on the volume’s ideas more generally.
Contents
1 Materializing Colonial Pasts: African Archaeological Perspectives ... 1
François G. Richard
Part I Circulations: Scale, Value, Entanglement
2 Small Change: Cowries, Coins, and the Currency Transition
in the Northern Territories of Colonial Ghana .................................... 41
Natalie Swanepoel
3 Circulations Through Worlds Apart: Georgian and
Victorian England in an African Mirror ............................................... 71
Ann B. Stahl
Part II Mediations: Things, Texts, Oral Traditions
4 Historical Archaeology, Language, and Storytelling at the
Cape of Good Hope and Elsewhere ....................................................... 97
Yvonne Brink
5 The Signs of Mission: Rethinking Archaeologies of Representation .... 129
Zoë Crossland
Part III Memory: Imagining and Remembering Colonial Worlds
6 B iographies of Practice and the Negotiation of Swahili at
Nineteenth-Century Vumba ................................................................... 155
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
7 Margins of Difference: A Study of the Collapse and
Restoration of the Kekana Chiefdom Under the Rule of
Chief Mugombane ................................................................................... 177
Amanda Esterhuysen
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viii Contents
Part IV Power: Politics, Capitalism, and the Making of
Colonial Worlds
8 T he “Dirty” Material and Symbolic Work of “State”
Building in Madagascar: From Indigenous State-Crafting to
Indigenous Empire Building to External Colonial Imposition
and Indigenous Insurrection .................................................................. 199
Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona
9 T he Politics of Absence: The Longue Durée of State–Peasant
Interactions in the Siin (Senegal), 1850s–1930s .................................... 229
François G. Richard
10 Modernity’s Rush: Time, Space, and Race in the
Shadows of the Diamond Fields ............................................................. 263
Lindsay Weiss
Part V Discussion
11 On Materializing Colonial Encounters: A Commentary ...................... 291
Ibrahima Thiaw
12 A frican Archaeologies in Transition:
Hybrid Knowledge of Colonial Pasts ..................................................... 295
Michael Rowland
Index ............................................................................................................... 305
Contributors
Yvonne Brink Archaeology Department, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch,
South Africa
Zoë Crossland Department of Anthropology, Columbia University in the City of
New York, New York, NY, USA
Amanda Esterhuysen School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental
Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Susan Kus Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Rhodes College, Mem-
phis, TN, USA
Victor Raharijaona Chercheur Associé de l’Université de Fianarantsoa, Fianara-
ntsoa, Madagascar
François G. Richard Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chi-
cago, IL, USA
Michael Rowland Department of Anthropology, University College London, Lon-
don, UK
Ann B. Stahl Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC,
Canada
Natalie Swanepoel Department of Anthropology & Archaeology, University of
South Africa, Unisa, South Africa
Ibrahima Thiaw Laboratoire d’Archéologie, IFAN-Université Cheik Anta Diop
de Dakar, Dakar, Senegal
Lindsay Weiss Stanford Archaeology Center & Department of Anthropology,
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Stephanie Wynne-Jones Department of Archaeology, University of York, York,
UK
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About the Editor
François G. Richard is an associate professor of Anthropology and in the College of Social
Sciences at the University of Chicago. His interests lie in social theory, political landscapes, gov-
ernment, subjectivity, materiality, colonialism and postcolonialism, and peasant societies, in Africa
and within the African diaspora. He has published papers on the history of archaeological thought
in Senegal, histories of objects and valuations, and geographies of power in Senegambia over
the past 500 years. He has recently currently completed a book, titled Reluctant Landscapes:
Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin (Senegal) (to appear with the Univer-
sity of Chicago Press), which examines how the material qualities of rural worlds both assisted
and obstructed projects of political centralization in west-central Senegal during the Atlantic and
colonial eras.
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