Lines of Desire: Power and Materiality Along a Tanzanian Caravan Route |
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Authors: | Stephanie Wynne-Jones |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UU, UK |
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Abstract: | The caravan routes that connected the East African interior to the coast are well known from the nineteenth century, when
trade along them was intense and increasingly formalised. It is understood that this brought important changes in the structure
of society, in people–object relations and in the opportunities for the exercise of power; we also assume that this situation
differed from pre-colonial periods, yet very little archaeological work has examined that assumption. Understandings of the
incorporation of this region into a larger world of commodity exchange have been based upon implicit assumptions about the
role of trade; these often stress the underdevelopment of East Africa. Yet it is necessary to examine the ways in which foreign
goods were made commensurable with valuables and assets in the regional economy before it is possible to discuss the ways
that access to these goods may have affected local power structures. This paper attempts such an analysis, through a focus
on two areas in the interior which have been the subject of recent archaeological field work. By tracing the specific histories
of their interaction with objects before and during the nineteenth century, it examines the assumption that the accumulation
of exotic objects was necessarily the basis of authority. Instead, it will be argued that the ways in which new opportunities
and objects were incorporated were specific and local, fitting within existing schemes of understanding and the authorisation
of power. |
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