Racism, Climate Change, and More-Than-Human Agency in Tropical West Africa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I weave together archaeological and historical narratives about two plants in West Africa to explore the pitfalls and potentials of multispecies approaches. I argue that in West Africa, both individual plants and climate change have often been accorded more agentive power than African people in historical and archaeological research. In my first case study, I consider how human interactions with economic plants, particularly oil palm, have often been minimized in favor of arguments that over-emphasize climate change and local ecological dynamics. In my second case study, I reveal how maize’s adoption as part of the Columbian Exchange has overshadowed the agricultural capabilities of African farmers. Both cases portray a tendency to underplay the ability of African peoples to modify their environments, contrary to empirical data demonstrating quite the opposite. I consider the racist implications of according more agency to plants than to humans, as well as how (and if) multispecies frameworks can move forward in tropical West Africa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37278.0