Women in the Nexus of State Power in the Oyo Empire

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Women’s work and administrative leadership were essential to the running of the Oyo Empire (ca. AD 1570–1836). As wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, enslaved and free bureaucrats, traders, artisans, and laborers, women played a wide range of roles in palace administration and in financing and reproducing the state (materially and biologically). Archaeological research in the borderlands, frontiers, colonies, and the metropolis of the empire has uncovered several contexts that allow us to explore questions of gender and power, especially how women were mobilized to serve the interest of the state. This presentation will examine the material practices and living contexts that give us insights into the entanglement of women in state power, the implications for understanding the political economy of the Oyo Empire, and the very meaning of womanhood in the Oyo cultural universe. Social class, citizenship vs. non-citizenship, free vs. enslaved, age, skill (i.e., type of work), and marital status affected the ontologies of gender. This intersectionality will be used to interrogate the archaeological record towards developing an empirically grounded theoretical framework for understanding the ontology of gender in the Oyo Empire and its implications for the operationalization of power in the production and reproduction of the empire.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36777.0