Negotiating Local Tastes in Trade Networks: Reflections on Ann Stahl’s Contributions to West African Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

My research on local tastes and embodied practices during the Afro-European trade in Ghana is greatly influenced by Ann Stahl’s extensive theoretical work in West Africa. The 19th and early 20th centuries in West Africa witnessed a surge in the demand and export of botanical commodities like palm oil. Nonetheless, historical accounts often overlooked the active participation and embodied practices of hinterland people who produced these commodities. In this talk, I suggest that local people and their embodied practices were central to forming and maintaining trade networks. In Amedeka, Southeastern Ghana, where this research is situated, local tastes and their related performances are conceptualized as nkudzedze ("pleasing to the eyes"). I draw on Indigenous and Black feminist archaeology perspectives, along with the local performances of nkudzedze as a radical framework to decentralize our methodologies and research questions from the Eurowestern gaze and colonial epistemologies that continue to "otherize" local and Indigenous communities. I pay tribute to the influence of Ann Stahl’s research on mine and underscore her efforts to advance theories about Africa’s positionality in regional and overseas trade. Stahl emphasized the significance of Indigenous embodied practices as channels to comprehend Africa’s experiences of global entanglements.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39378.0