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 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer Science+Business Media LLC New York is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) 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 v 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 vii 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 ix 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. xi