The present report describes the activities and results of primary research in 2017 on Gebusi violence and conflict management funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation as a follow up to research separately funded by HFG in 2016 (see previous 2016 final project HFG report). The project investigates the causes of homicide reduction among Gebusi of Papua New Guinea, who the PI documented to have one of the highest rates of homicide ethnographically known during the precolonial, colonial, and early postcolonial periods (Knauft 1985a, 2013) – following which there has been a now-confirmed reduction of homicide to zero, since 1989. The presently-described research was undertaken successfully in May-July 2017. Unforeseen circumstances included an intense La Niña cloudy and rainy season that reduced solar power and computer use in the field to a minimum along with other challenges that included closure of the nearest airstrip at Nomad; failure of all outside communications; difficulty of arranging flights in or out of the area at the beginning and end of fieldwork (there are no roads); deterioration of supplies stored locally in 2016; and various health difficulties. Despite these issues, fieldwork was completed very successfully, with dramatic new developments both reinforcing and extending the preliminary project results obtained in 2016.
The earliest Acheulian in East Africa is dated to ~1.75 million years ago (Ma) and is well documented at Kokiselei in Kenya, and at Konso in Ethiopia. Archaeological investigations at Gona, in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, have also produced early Acheulian stone assemblages dated to ~1.7-1.6 Ma. Several sites at Gona, including DAN-5, BSN-12, BSN-17 and OGS-12, have yielded archaeological materials comparable to Konso. The stone assemblages from the Gona sites consist of ‘large cutting tools’ including unifacially and bifacially shaped crude handaxes and picks, as well as Mode I (Oldowan) cores, and débitage. Although technologically similar, at Konso a majority of the bifaces were made on flake blanks, whereas at Gona they were made equally on cobbles as well as large flakes (>10 cm). A variety of raw materials were exploited at Gona, but trachyte and rhyolite were the most utilized for making the large cutting pieces, particularly at BSN-12, -17 and DAN-5, and basalt dominated at OGS-12. The differences could be related to proximity to raw material sources. At BSN-12, -17 and DAN-5 raw materials were locally available, whereas the source(s) for OGS-12 have yet to be identified.
Nos últimos 15 anos, a história da África se consolidou no Brasil. Durante os governos do Partido dos Trabalhadores (2003-2016) houve apoiou a investigação, financiamento para a organização de eventos e incentivo à produção acadêmica sobre a história africana. Lamentavelmente, esse compromisso foi destruído depois de abril de 2016. O livro Sobas e homens do rei, da historiadora Flávia Maria de Carvalho, é o resultado do investimento e do compromisso que o governo federal teve com o ensino de história da África e com o fortalecimento do departamento da Universidade Federal Fluminense como um centro de excelência na formação de africanistas. Flávia Carvalho se debruça, de forma fascinante e minuciosa, sobre a conquista e a presença portuguesa em Angola nos séculos XVII e XVIII, fazendo uma inter-venção importante na discussão sobre o colonialismo português e suas consequências, tema que surpreendentemente segue sendo polêmico no Brasil e em Portugal.
In some excellent articles in the first issue of The International Journal of Transitional Justice, scholars have examined in very thoughtful ways the relationship of feminism and feminist theory to the field of transitional justice and post-conflict. This article examines some of this work and suggests ways that we might build on these insights by working more with feminist theories of the state, feminist critiques of international human rights law, and with a gendered historical consciousness of colonialism and the post-colonial state in Africa.
O presente dossiê reúne investigação de historiadores do Brasil, Canadá, Estados Unidos, México e Portugal, em torno das categorias sociais empregadas para classificar os africanos e seus descendentes nos impérios ibéricos. O elemento central das diversas contribuições é a tentativa de problematizar as classificações e as hierarquias na documentação e nas sociedades aqui examinadas, sejam elas Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, Paraíba, Coimbra, o norte de Moçambique, a fronteira sul do Brasil, a Nova Espanha ou o Reino do Congo. Na problematização, os autores acabam por historicizar as diferenciações sociais que, em distintos espaços e épocas, resultavam em privilégios ou exclusões
Silvia Hunold Lara graduated in History (1977) and received her PhD in Social History (1986) from the University of São Paulo. That same year, she became a professor in the History Department of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), becoming a tenured professor in 2004 and a tenured professor in 2009. She is currently a retired associate professor. She has been a visiting researcher at several institutions, such as the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center at Northwestern University (2006). She has directed and participated in several research projects funded by public agencies, and was a CNPq researcher 1A. Her research focuses on the history of slavery, the relations between culture and power in Portuguese America, and History and Law. She is the author of Campos da Violência. Escravos e senhores na Capitania do Rio de Janeiro, 1750-1808 (1988) and Fragmentos Etecentistas. Escravidão, cultura e poder (2007); editor, with Joseli M. Nunes Mendonça, of Rights and Justice in Brazil (2006) and, with Gustavo Pacheco, of Memory of Jongo (2007); and organizer of the annotated edition of Ordenações Filipinas , book V (1999) and of the repertoire Legislation on African Slaves in Portuguese America, in: José Andrés-Gallego (coord), Nuevas Aportaciones a la Historia Jurídica de Iberoamérica (2000, CD-Rom).
Phillips and Cheney preface an analysis of the ASA’s Graduate Student Paper Prize in a discussion with past Prize winners with a review of the sociological literature on awards and scholarly critiques of the history of African Studies. They find that the Prize has played an important role in amplifying and recognizing the voices of young scholars who have pushed the thematic and theoretical boundaries of the field. But these contributions are attended by limitations that the ASA should remediate as they consider the GSP Prize in relation to efforts to realize anti-colonial and social justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production.
African art specialists often lack detailed information to assess the original meanings, uses, and contexts of so-called historical or traditional arts of Africa, and they rely on indirect evidence to interpret the works. Thus, claims about African arts often reflect speculation rather than irrefutable details. When specific documentation for an object does exist, the circumstances of its creation require careful evaluation as well. The assessment of the quality and reliability of any claim is of particular importance in attempts to determine an object’s place of origin in the ongoing debates about restitution.
by
Henry B. Lovejoy;
Paul E. Lovejoy;
Walter Hawthorne;
Edward A. Alpers;
Mariana Candido;
Matthew S. Hopper;
Ghislaine Lydon;
Colleen E. Kriger;
John Thornton
Regionalizing pre-colonial Africa aids in the collection and interpretation of primary sources as data for further analysis. This article includes a map with six broad regions and 34 sub-regions, which form a controlled vocabulary within which researchers may geographically organize and classify disparate pieces of information related to Africa’s past. In computational terms, the proposed African regions serve as data containers in order to consolidate, link, and disseminate research among a growing trend in digital humanities projects related to the history of the African diasporas before c. 1900. Our naming of regions aims to avoid terminologies derived from European slave traders, colonialism, and modern-day countries.
This is an exciting time in African Diaspora studies, as scholarship increases in breadth and depth to engage more extensively – or for the first time – with a dazzling array of black communities, histories, cultures, politics, literatures both within and without the continent of Africa. This is also a challenging time, as a broader array of scholars and scholarly approaches necessarily encounter fundamental differences with one another. The heated exchanges that have occurred at recent conferences on the African Diaspora, African American studies and Black European studies point to the arrival of ›new‹ epistemologies of black subjectivities and collectivities that challenge many of the accepted truths of established epistemologies.