52 research outputs found
Diet and fertility among Kalahari Bushmen
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 1
Exchange, interaction and settlement in northwestern Botswana: past and present perspective
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 3
Auxilary instruments of labor: The homogenization of diversity in the discourse of ethnicity
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 3 May 1993In the creation of an image of national unity successful
political states employ their power of cultural hegemony to
facilitate the continual renewal of forms of involuntary
ascription, such as ethnicity, that can coexist with a
national consciousness without apparent contradiction
precisely because they are cultural, that is ascribed, and
therefore appear both natural and national from the
perspective of individuals. Continued tacit acceptance of
imposed ethnic terms for current political discourse (e.g., in
Eastern Europe, Islamic Asia, southern Africa, USA minorities)
reaffirms the established status of these terms as the most
readily available avenue for collective self-identification
and action. "So long as social practice continues to be
pursued as if ethnicity did hold the key to the structures of
inequality, the protectionism of the dominant and the
responses of the dominated alike serve to reproduce an
ethnically ordered world" (Comaroff 1987:xxx). It is
particularly important to stress this at a time' when a
philosophy of primordial ethnicity is being widely reasserted
as a form of neo-racism to justify new or continued
suppression of dispossessed ethnic groups. In this paper, I
will analyze processes of ethnicization, identity
construction, and class formation in Botswana. In ethnicity and tribalism are conflated (e.g., Vail 1989). But
tribes, as Vail's authors make abundently clear, are a product
of colonial engagement; they are essentially administrative
constructs. On the other hand, ethnicity as a central logic
emerged out of conflicts engendered in competition for favored
positions among these tribal constructs. The emergent
ethnicities were formulated out of an amalgam of preexisting
indigenous and inserted colonial partitive ideologies. A
dominant class - in colonial Africa, this was often an
ascendent 'tribal' aristocracy - defined and determined the
terms of subordinate class competition which is the seedbed of
ethnicizing processes
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God\u27s Heart is a Hexagon or Some Reasons for Regularity in Settled Regions
Remote area dwellers in Botswana: an assessment of their current status
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 6
Those who have each other: land tenure of Kalahari foragers
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 9
A town community for the Navajo tribe
Thesis (M. Arch)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1959.Accompanying drawings held by MIT Museum.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-97).Edwin N. Wilmsen.M.Arc
The Archaeofauna from Xaro on the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana
We report on the fauna from the sites of Xaro 1 and Xaro 2 located on the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana.
Carbon isotopes from two human graves at Xaro Lodge located approximately 500 m south of Xaro 1 suggest an
economy oriented toward wild plants, fish and game similar to that of the modern baNoka, or ‘River Bushmen’. The
faunal remains from Xaro 1 and 2 corroborate this suggestion.Pottery from the Early Iron Age, radiocarbon dates from
the Later Iron Age, and glass beads from the European trade indicate there were two occupations at both sites, one
belonging to the 18th and 19th centuries and an earlier one containing ceramics consistent with a first millennium
AD date. The fauna from both occupations is dominated by fish and Chelonia (likely tortoise or terrapin). The people
also hunted a variety of game animals, most of which are associated with aquatic conditions. Sheep remains were
recovered from the later occupation of Xaro 1.http://www.journals.co.za/ej/ejour_nfi_ditsong.htmlam2013cp201
Ancient genomes reveal complex patterns of population movement, interaction, and replacement in sub-Saharan Africa
Africa hosts the greatest human genetic diversity globally, but legacies of ancient population interactions and dispersals across the continent remain understudied. Here, we report genome-wide data from 20 ancient sub-Saharan African individuals, including the first reported ancient DNA from the DRC, Uganda, and Botswana. These data demonstrate the contraction of diverse, once contiguous hunter-gatherer populations, and suggest the resistance to interaction with incoming pastoralists of delayed-return foragers in aquatic environments. We refine models for the spread of food producers into eastern and southern Africa, demonstrating more complex trajectories of admixture than previously suggested. In Botswana, we show that Bantu ancestry post-dates admixture between pastoralists and foragers, suggesting an earlier spread of pastoralism than farming to southern Africa. Our findings demonstrate how processes of migration and admixture have markedly reshaped the genetic map of sub-Saharan Africa in the past few millennia and highlight the utility of combined archaeological and archaeogenetic approaches
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