Ethnic Ambiguity And The African Past

The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.

The sheer diversity of the Asian American populace makes them an ambiguous racial category. Indeed, the 2010 U.S. Census lists twenty-four Asian-ethnic groups, lumping together under one heading people with dramatically different historical backgrounds and cultures. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American. Exploring a variety of subjects and cultural artifacts, Ho reveals how Asian American subjects evince a deep racial ambiguity that unmoors the concept of race from any fixed or finite understanding. For example, the book examines the racial ambiguity of Japanese American nisei Yoshiko Nakamura deLeon, who during World War II underwent an abrupt transition from being an enemy alien to an assimilating American, via the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. It looks at the blogs of Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese Americans who were adopted as children by white American families and have conflicted feelings about their “honorary white” status. And it discusses Tiger Woods, the most famous mixed-race Asian American, whose description of himself as “Cablinasian”—reflecting his background as Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Native American—perfectly captures the ambiguity of racial classifications. Race is an abstraction that we treat as concrete, a construct that reflects only our desires, fears, and anxieties. Jennifer Ho demonstrates in Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism.

Catholic and Protestant missionaries followed their own, competing agendas rather than those of the colonial state. This volume unravels these agendas and challenges received wisdom on the histories of Rwanda and Burundi, as well as the colonial relationship between state and mission. The archives of the White Fathers Catholic missionary order in Rome and Paris are read alongside primary sources produced by the British Protestant Church Missionary Society to analyse their impact between 1900 and 1972 in Rwanda and Burundi. The colonial state was weaker than often assumed, and permeable by external radical influences. Denominational competition between Catholic and Protestant missionaries was a key motor of this radicalism. The colonial state in both kingdoms was a weak, reactive agent rather than a structuring form of power. This volume shows that missionaries were more committed and influential actors, but their inability to manage the mass demand for the education that they sought and delivered finally undermined the achievement of their aims. Missionaries and the Colonial State is a resource for historians of Christianity, Belgian Africa specialists, and scholars of colonialism.

Slavery, capitalism, and colonialism were understood as racially justified through false olfactory perceptions of African bodies throughout the Atlantic World.

The debate about ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa has come to an uneasy consensus in the 1990s, but it has to be asked if we are really close to a solution. How can comparative and historical views help to inform the debate? In this work, seven scholars bring in a long-term perspective to ethno-cultural solidarities, which they explore within a multi-disciplinary framework. This return to the 'heart of the ethnic group', twenty-five years after Elikia M'Bokolo's and Jean-Loup Amselle's path-breaking reinterpretation of ethnicity in Africa, argues for a reappraisal of approaches to ethnicity that have been adopted in recent decades. Focusing on two major geographical regions of the African continent - Senegambia including Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, and the area of Southern Tanzania and the northern half of Mozambique -, the chapters in this volume provide a new historical interpretation of the processes of identity-building in sub-Saharan Africa.

This book is an ambitious integration of ecological, archaeological, anthropological land use sciences, drawing on human geography, demography and economics of development across the East Africa region. It focuses on understanding and unpicking the interactions that have taken place between the natural and unnatural history of the East African region and trace this interaction from the evolutionary foundations of our species (c. 200,000 years ago), through the outwards and inwards human migrations, often associated with the adoption of subsistence strategies, new technologies and the arrival of new crops. The book will explore the impact of technological developments such as transitions to tool making, metallurgy, and the arrival of crops also involved an international dimension and waves of human migrations in and out of East Africa. Time will be presented with a widening focus that will frame the contemporary with a particular focus on the Anthropocene (last 500 years) to the present day. Many of the current challenges have their foundations in precolonial and colonial history and as such there will be a focus on how these have evolved and the impact on environmental and human landscapes. Moving into the Anthropocene era, there was increasing exposure to the International drivers of change, such as those associated with Ivory and slave trade. These international trade routes were tied into the ensuing decimation of elephant populations through to the exploitation of natural mineral resources have been sought after through to the present day. The book will provide a balanced perspective on the region, the people, and how the natural and unnatural histories have combined to create a dynamic region. These historical perspectives will be galvanized to outline the future changes and the challenges they will bring around such issues as sustainable development, space for wildlife and people, and the position of East Africa within a globalized world and how this is potentially going to evolve over the coming decades.

Heritage under Pressure examines the relationship between the political perspective of the UK government on 'soft power' and the globalising effect of projects carried out by archaeologists and heritage professionals working in the historic environment. It exemplifies the nature of professional engagement and the role of the profession in working towards a theory of practice based on the integrity of data, the recovery and communication of information, and the application of data in real world situations. Individual papers raise complex and challenging issues, such as commemoration, identity, and political intervention. A further aim of the volume is to illustrate the role of professionals adhering to standards forged in the UK, in the context of world heritage under pressure. Papers also contribute to the emerging agenda developing as a result of the re-orientation of the UK following the Brexit vote, at once emphasising the global aspiration of the Uk’s professional archaeological body – the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists – in relation to the global reach of UK academic practice. By implication the volume also addresses the relationship between professional practice and academic endeavour. The volume as a whole contributes to the emerging debate on the authorised heritage discourse and provides an agenda for the future of the profession.