Remembering Turkana

This book explores aspects of the socio-economic and political history of the Turkana of northern Kenya, examining the making and remaking of the regional economy via the trajectories of socio-material interaction that have structured key practices, relationships and livelihoods over the past century. Traversing Turkana’s constituent livelihoods and examining the historical relationships between them in relation to shifting economic, ecological and political factors, the book asks what perspective emerges from an in-depth understanding of the everyday things that have taken part in processes of substantial socio-cultural transformation. By setting out a series of new examples established through long-term research in the region, it offers a characterisation of Turkana’s iterative transformation as the articulation of a set of long-term continuities. Investigating quotidian personal and community histories, it argues that Turkana’s complex network of livelihood interactions has, on the whole, strengthened over time through its continual reformulation, as identities, livelihood practices and social institutions have been re-imagined and reshaped with each new generation in order to reconstruct accumulated memory and knowledges. Remembering Turkana provides a wide-ranging socio-historical overview of the Turkana region and people, situating critical contemporary issues within diverse bodies of literature. The characterisation of long-term change and continuity, as articulated and enacted via material culture production, use and exchange, that it offers will be of significance to a broad array of scholarly disciplines, including archaeology, history, anthropology and political science.

Since the 1990s, Mirzeler has travelled to East Africa to apprentice with storytellers. Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro is both an account of his experience listening to these storytellers and of how oral tradition continues to evolve in the modern world.

The Jie people of northern Uganda and the Turkana of northern Kenya have a genesis myth about Nayeche, a Jie woman who followed the footprints of a gray bull across the waterless plateau and who founded a “cradle land” in the plains of Turkana. In Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro, Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler shows how the poetic journey of Nayeche and the gray bull Engiro and their metaphorical return during the Jie harvest rituals gives rise to stories, imagery, and the articulation of ethnic and individual identities. Since the 1990s, Mirzeler has travelled to East Africa to apprentice with storytellers. Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro is both an account of his experience listening to these storytellers and of how oral tradition continues to evolve in the modern world. Mirzeler’s work contributes significantly to the anthropology of storytelling, the study of myth and memory, and the use of oral tradition in historical studies.

Mobile pastoralist activities occur at different scales across the landscape, including local, regional, and supra-regional scales. Most archaeological studies of mobile pastoralist social organization have focused on the latter two scales via the extant monumental and herding landscapes. Household levels of analysis figure much less in these studies. This volume brings together the work of archaeologists currently engaged in mobile pastoralist household research in different regions of the world to highlight the importance of household studies and the utility of both archaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches in understanding mobile pastoralist household formation, continuity, and adaptation to environmental, social, economic, and political change.

Conditioned by local ways of knowing and doing, Great Zimbabwe develops a new interpretation of the famous World Heritage site of Great Zimbabwe. It combines archaeological knowledge, including recent material from the author’s excavations, with native concepts and philosophies. Working from a large data set has made it possible, for the first time, to develop an archaeology of Great Zimbabwe that is informed by finds and observations from the entire site and wider landscape. In so doing, the book strongly contributes towards decolonising African and world archaeology. Written in an accessible manner, the book is aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and practicing archaeologists both in Africa and across the globe. The book will also make contributions to the broader field such as African Studies, African History, and World Archaeology through its emphasis on developing synergies between local ways of knowing and the archaeology.

African Islands provides the first geographically and chronologically comprehensive overview of the archaeology of African islands. This book draws archaeologically informed histories of African islands into a single synthesis, focused on multiple issues of common interest, among them human impacts on previously uninhabited ecologies, the role of islands in the growth of long-distance maritime trade networks, and the functioning of plantation economies based on the exploitation of unfree labour. Addressing and repairing the longstanding neglect of Africa in general studies of island colonization, settlement, and connectivity, it makes a distinctively African contribution to studies of island archaeology. The availability of this much-needed synthesis also opens up a better understanding of the significance of African islands in the continent's past as a whole. After contextualizing chapters on island archaeology as a field and an introduction to the variety of Africa’s islands and the archaeological research undertaken on them, the book focuses on four themes: arriving, altering, being, and colonizing and resisting. An interdisciplinary approach is taken to these themes, drawing on a broad range of evidence that goes beyond material remains to include genetics, comparative studies of the languages, textual evidence and oral histories, island ecologies, and more. African Islands provides an up-to-date synthesis and account of all aspects of archaeological research on Africa’s islands for students and academics alike.

This book explores the archaeology of the Acacus massif and surrounding areas in southwestern Libya over approximately 2500 years of the Early Holocene, utilising fresh theoretical approaches and new explanations of the social and cultural processes of the area. Archaeological and rock art evidence, much of which is unpublished until now, is used to explore the crucial period that encompasses the onset of the “Green Sahara” to the introduction of domestic livestock. It provides a basis for understanding the original cultural and social developments of hunter-gatherers and foragers of the central ranges of the Sahara. The work also bears upon the wider area informing the reconstruction of the environment and cultural dynamics and stands as key reference point for the larger Sahara and North Africa. The book, rich in illustrations, provides a critical synthesis and overview of the developments of central Saharan archaeology within the broader African framework. The book is invaluable to archaeologists, palaeoenvironmental scientists, and rock art researchers working on the Sahara and North Africa and as comparative work for researchers in African archaeology in general.

Mega-Infrastructure Projects (MIPs) represent a central element of globalized development. MIPs like the Chinese driven `Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI) include large-scale agrarian, road, rail, port and energy networks. They are complex ventures involving international capital and multiple stakeholders. `Disenchanted Modernities' presents 16 case studies showing that the promise of a sustainable modern development by MIPs leave many local users disenchanted: They don't profit from the MIPs but lose access to their resources often held in common. The book describes the strategies of states and companies as well as local responses to MIPs in Asia, Africa, Americas and Europe.

How long can a traditional religion survive the impact of world religions, state hegemony, and globalization? The ’Karamoja problem’ is one that has perplexed colonial and independent governments alike. Now Karamojong notoriety for armed cattle raiding has attracted the attention of the UN and USAID since the proliferation of small arms in the pastoralist belt across Africa from Sudan to stateless Somalia is deemed a threat to world security. The consequences are ethnocidal, but what makes African peoples stand out against state and global governance? The traditional African religion of the Karamojong, despite the multiple external influences of the twentieth century and earlier, has remained at the heart of their culture as it has changed through time. Drawing on oral accounts and the language itself, as well as his extensive experience of living and working in the region, Knighton avoids Western perspectivism to highlight the successful reassertion of African beliefs and values over repeated attempts by interventionists to replace or subvert them. Knighton argues that the religious aspect of Karamojong culture, with its persistent faith dimension, is one of the key factors that have enabled them to maintain their amazing degree of religious, political, and military autonomy in the postmodern world. Using historical and anthropological approaches, the real continuities within the culture and the reasons for mysterious vitality of Karamojong religion are explored.