African metallurgy in the Atlantic world

Technology and Culture, 2020

Azania:archaeological Research in Africa, 2011

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 2011

Moving beyond descriptive approaches to ceramic analysis, it offers new theoretical, conceptual and interpretive frameworks with which to examine how the physical, stylistic and technological attributes of ceramics shed light on processes of regional interaction, economic organisation, power relations, political formations and social reproduction of communities, families, and polities in Atlantic West Africa. The societies and former polities studied by the contributors include examples from modern-day Bénin, The Gambia, Senegal and Nigeria, offering a wide geographical expanse of the differences between larger regions such as the Bight of Benin, as well as smaller ones such as Senegambia. The contributors to this issue neither view ceramics as static markers of group affiliation nor as backdrops to culture making, but rather as an active material domain for cultural formation and transformation at multiple scales of quotidian lives. Therefore, these essays collectively demonstrate how ceramics can be used to explain some aspects of the cultural transformations that took place as a result of the interlocking of West Africa in the Atlantic world networks. Likewise, the papers in this volume explore the impact of broader social, political and economic interactions on ceramic manufacture and design, demonstrating the often rapid change in the techniques of ceramic production and in ceramic formal properties during this period and reflecting the broader societal trends and fluid interactions of which ceramics were a part. These articles also respond to some of the broad issues of relevance to the archaeology of the African Atlantic world. Utilitarian ceramic vessels have been at the centre of the study of African Atlantic archaeology, especially in making inferences about African identities in the Americas. The latter effort is, however, often plagued by oversimplification of the cultural complexity and changes within West African communities between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, something that gives rise to a tendency to draw one-to-one comparisons between the nineteenth-century societies in Africa and seventeenth through nineteenth-century archaeological contexts in the diaspora. This is particularly the case in relation to

Cooperativismo & Desarrollo, 2020

En este artículo se investiga a Nigeria como estudio de caso, y busca resaltar un modo de redirigir los recursos de África para resolver el problema de la pobreza que actualmente experimenta el continente. Se centra en la reestructuración de recursos humanos y canalización de recursos materiales. Usando el análisis descriptivo como método de investigación, examina datos relevantes e intenta hacer dos afirmaciones fundamentales y justificables. La primera afirmación es que el “cooperativismo innovador”, es una forma de socialización económica desarrollada entre personas en forma de autoayuda colectiva, construidas alrededor de las ideas de cooperación, cooperativas y economía solidaria, debería estar en el centro de romper el círculo duradero de la pobreza africana; un hilo de pobreza que tiene a menudo se muestra resistencia al desarrollo. Aunque el cooperativismo innovador es un concepto viable para abordar El desafío de la pobreza y la movilización para el desarrollo, el concepto ...

Critical Inquiry, 1992

2021

As the prevailing marker of the development of human productive forces, and as utilised as a historical paradigm for the justification of Artificial Intelligence technologies as the necessary and eventual feature of human life, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by cultural assumptions and intellectual presuppositions that are informed by the presently hegemonic Western intellectual heritage. The problem identified and elucidated in this chapter is that this epistemic status of this socioindustrial development is set asymmetrically against Africa. Africa does not produce but mainly consume and use these technologies that are designed and manufactured in alien cultural settings. I here go further and highlight that this problem does not only

The development of metallurgy was a turning point in human history in West Africa. The use of metal tools allowed humans to have some control over their environment, and enabled them to transform their settlement patterns, political organizations, and modes of economic production and warfare. Researchers have often speculated that metallurgy techniques were developed earlier in other parts of Africa and the Mediterranean and then introduced through processes of diffusion from outside influences into the cultures of West Africa. West African skills of metal working – and particularly iron working -- were later transferred to locations in the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In this article, I provide evidence of early metallurgy developments within West Africa itself, as seen through a focus on the practice of metallurgy by the Nok culture of central Nigeria. Finally, as to better understand the importance of metallurgy, I discuss the potential discourse between West African archaeologists and those that study African diasporas.

Technology's Stories, 2020

Until the beginning of 2020, the Sahel was something of an exception with respect to international rivalry between jihadists. This came to an end when violent clashes involving supporters of Al-Qaeda and those affiliated with the Islamic State were recorded in central Mali. The violent escalation that has taken place between Katiba Macina and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara in the inner Niger Delta should be framed as a battle between a dominant power whose position has begun to be contested, and a rising challenger trying to exploit the situation. More specifically, the rise of Islamic State appears directly connected to the material and symbolic crisis of the system of governance established by Katiba Macina in the area under its control. As the result of a process that cuts across various developments in the recent history of Mali, the conflict between the two jihadist movements threatens to unlock a new and more violent phase in Mali's longstanding crisis.