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Papers by Sibel Kusimba
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2025
The papers in this collection explore how people make use of financial practices and institutions... more The papers in this collection explore how people make use of financial practices and institutions to organize, extend, and manage care relations. Much work in the social sciences views financial practices and money as corrosive to social relations. Our research uses situated ethnography and qualitative interviews to gain insights into how people use finance to practice, contest, and organize care in their families and communities. Such approaches alert us to the significant potentialities of finance in creating, sustaining and transforming relations, and to the central roles of financial discourses, practices, and institutions in structuring contemporary social arrangements. Ethnographically informed accounts of how people in Kenya, Vietnam, the United States, Brazil, and Tanzania engage with health insurance, home-based care, cash-based social assistance, caring for animals and crowdfunding highlight the constitutive relations between finance and care in diverse settings. By exploring how people use finance to organize, negotiate, and transform care, we show how financial products, services, and narratives are used creatively to practice care and to make claims about caring for others. Insights into people's everyday interactions around caring, money, and finance reveal the life worlds and values which inform people's relations and give care and money meaning.
We write to note the passing of world-renowned Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Isabel... more We write to note the passing of world-renowned Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Isabel Guyer, who died in Davis, California, on January 17, 2024, from complications from dementia. Born in Dunoon, Scotland, on New Year's Eve in 1943, she had just turned 80. Jane earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Rochester in 1972 and went on to teach at Boston University, Harvard, Northwestern, and, finally, Johns Hopkins, from which she retired in 2015. Jane is survived by her husband, Bernie; their three children, Sam, Nathan, and Kate; five grandchildren; and legions of friends, colleagues, and admirers across the world (see Figure 1). Jane's "extraordinarily profound and extensive contributions" (Ferguson, 2017, xvii) count among economic anthropology's most seminal works. Her extensive fieldwork in Nigeria and Cameroon-on household budgets, Indigenous currencies, intergenerational relations, taxation, and urban food supplies-inspired her lifelong interest in economic transformation in Africa and provided the foundation for her later work on global monetary and financial practices. Her husband, Bernie, remembers her as being "above all" committed to her interlocutors, "believing that knowledge emerged from real-life experiences." This approach resulted in meticulously documented individual and collaborative works that emphasized people's capacity for adaptation and invention in the face of economic crisis. Paying scrupulous attention to the stakes of individuals' lives, Jane had an extraordinary ability to look across scales of economic relation to consider the interplay between multiple "value registers" (Guyer, 2004) to discover how systemic processes articulate with and emerge from the lives of ordinary people. Jane used this approach to take on topics as varied as the creation of value and wealth, currency exchange, kinship and marriage, gendered divisions of labor, the impact of devaluation and structural adjustment policies, and the interface between informal and formal economies. The breadth of her scholarship attests to her intellectual acumen and boldness as a scholar, fearlessly tackling the quantitative data sets of economists and historians' archives. Trained at the London School of Economics in the traditions of British social anthropology, Jane's work helped transform the foundations of economic and anthropological thought, destabilizing notions of the household as a basic economic unit (Guyer, 1981), questioning what is real about the "real" economy (Guyer, 2016b; Neiburg & Guyer, 2017), and revealing that even counting may not be the simple, incremental act one might assume (Guyer, 2004). Critique was never her main ambition, however. Instead, she deconstructed economic concepts and fashioned new ones to explore fresh approaches to the data, opening "new methodological horizons" in economic anthropology (Hart & Ortiz, 2014, 474). This allowed her to explain, for example, "how new monetary relations are created without resorting to a single overarching narrative of what money is" (Hart & Ortiz, 2014, 474), giving us the tools to both reexamine capitalism and supersede its confining terminologies. Jane's unflagging confidence in the potential for economic anthropology to speak across disciplines and beyond the academy resulted in innumerable honors and invitations to speak and serve on steering committees. She advised the National Academy of Sciences projects on Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) and Lost Crops of Africa (2006-8), as well as the World Bank and the governments of Chad and Cameroon on their major Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project (2001-9). Earlier in her career, she was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and the US African Studies Association to traverse the country, meeting with university faculty, students, and administrators and analyzing the reams of data and documents they gave her, to write a report on "African Studies in the United States: A Perspective" (Guyer, 1996a). In it, she argued that Africa was not only being sidelined as a "special case" of poverty and stagnation but was furthermore being cast as a threat to the rest of the world's otherwise optimistic economic future. These assessments, she argued, were not only wrong on empirical grounds but obscured the inventiveness of economic practice on the African continent. Among her formal honors and recognitions, Jane was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (2008) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and was awarded an honorary chieftaincy by the town of Idere, Nigeria, where she carried out fieldwork. Here we present reflections by Jane's colleagues on her life and legacy, centered around three pivotal moments of her career and the bodies of work that emerged from them, to redefine economic anthropology. Sibel Kusimba first reflects on the impact of Jane's work on "wealth-in-people." Caroline Bledsoe then turns to the time surrounding the writing of Jane's seminal volume Marginal Gains at Northwestern University, drawing on the contributions and memories of Jane's husband,
Journal of Cultural Economy
Crowdfunding to support personal and medical needs has risen in popularity in recent years. Many ... more Crowdfunding to support personal and medical needs has risen in popularity in recent years. Many sociologists are critical of needy individuals' turn to online fundraising, seeing it as a response to deficits in health care and social protection, and arguing that it may widen social inequalities. Most of these studies have taken place in the United States, China, and Great Britain. This paper explores crowdfunding in sub-Saharan Africa, offering us an opportunity to rethink the context and value of crowdfunding and its relationship to family and friend networks, philanthropy, and charity. It also examines how online crowdfunding relates to cultural ideas about dependency and care. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork at the Nairobi crowdfunding platform M-Changa conducted from 2016 to 2021, I describe how social entrepreneurs, women, and NGO representatives raise money for philanthropic initiatives, medical and education costs, family rituals, and COVID-19 relief. The paper reveals the diverse financial relationships, identities and goals emerging on the platform. Reflecting on this diversity of caring finance, this paper then explores the ambiguous commercial, social, and political potentials of crowdfunding as peer-based digital finance in the Global South.
Reviews in Anthropology, 2021
A review of Reimagining Money from Reviews in Anthropology by Jennifer Huberman
Information Technologies and International Development, 2015
This research examines the interplay between social networks and mobile money remittances in West... more This research examines the interplay between social networks and mobile money remittances in Western Kenya. Research was conducted in Kenya’s Bungoma and Trans-Nzoia counties in 2012, 2013, and 2014, involving 12 family networks of between 8—70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relatives provide for household and emergency needs, contribute to ceremonies, and help pay school fees and medical bills. We find that digital money transfers follow and reinforce preexisting forms of emotional support and social relationships. In these families, the transfers strengthen maternal kinship ties as well relationships among siblings and cousins. Money networks are reciprocal, such that senders are also receivers, and individuals have many connections through which to access resources. Some individuals are “central” in networks, having more connections; others broker flows of e-value from one group of relatives to another. Mobile money strengthens social bonds but can also...
Ethics of DNA research on human remains: five globally applicable guidelines, 2021
We are a group of archaeologists, anthropologists, curators and geneticists representing diverse ... more We are a group of archaeologists, anthropologists, curators and geneticists representing diverse global communities and 31 countries. All of us met in a virtual workshop dedicated to ethics in ancient DNA research held in November 2020. There was widespread agreement that globally applicable ethical guidelines are needed, but that recent recommendations grounded in discussion about research on human remains from North America are not always generalizable worldwide. Here we propose the following globally applicable guidelines, taking into consideration diverse contexts. These hold that: (1) researchers must ensure that all regulations were followed in the places where they work and from which the human remains derived; (2) researchers must prepare a detailed plan prior to beginning any study; (3)
AFRICA, EAST | Foragers
Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2008
This article reviews major issues and evidence related to hunter-gatherers in East Africa, includ... more This article reviews major issues and evidence related to hunter-gatherers in East Africa, including archaeological sites of the Middle and Later Stone Age and the archaeological record of the transition to food production. The relevance of the ethnographic record to our understanding of ancient hunter-gatherers is also discussed.
East African archaeology: foragers, potters, smiths, and traders
... in Southern Kenya Sibel B. Kusimba and Cbapurukha M. Kusimba 1 2 The East African Neolithic: ... more ... in Southern Kenya Sibel B. Kusimba and Cbapurukha M. Kusimba 1 2 The East African Neolithic: A Historical Perspective Karega-Munene 17 3 ... at Kivinja, Tanzania Felix Chami 87 7 Ironworking on the Swahili Coast of Kenya Chapurukha M. Kusimba and David Killick 99 8 Iron ...
The development and collapse of precolonial ethnic mosaics in Tsavo, Kenya
Journal of African Archaeology, 2005
Archaeologists and historians have long believed that little interaction existed between Iron Age... more Archaeologists and historians have long believed that little interaction existed between Iron Age cities of the Kenya Coast and their rural hinterlands. Ongoing archaeological and anthropological research in Tsavo, Southeast Kenya, shows that Tsavo has been continuously inhabited at least since the early Holocene. Tsavo peoples made a living by foraging, herding, farming, and producing pottery and iron, and in the Iron Age were linked to global markets via coastal traders. They were at one point important suppliers of ivory destined for Southwest and South Asia. Our excavations document forager and agropastoralist habitation sites, iron smelting and iron working sites, fortified rockshelters, and mortuary sites. We discuss the relationship between fortified rockshelters, in particular, and slave trade.
African foragers: environment, technology, interactions
... Holl, Philip Kilbride, David Kuehn, Sally MacBrearty, Curtis Marean, Harry Merrick, Charles N... more ... Holl, Philip Kilbride, David Kuehn, Sally MacBrearty, Curtis Marean, Harry Merrick, Charles Nel-son, Peter Peregrine, James Phillips, Ronald Mason, Carol Mason, Anna Roosevelt, Fred Smith, Olga Soffer, Gil Stein, Thomas J. Riley ... The index was prepared by Amanda Halpin. ...
Economic Anthropology, 2020
In a world of social inequality, health disparities, and poverty, the economic value of people re... more In a world of social inequality, health disparities, and poverty, the economic value of people remains unrecognized, undervalued, and exploited. Recently, the ongoing conflict between capitalist markets and human value came to the fore again during the coronavirus pandemic, when many health systems were unprepared. In the United States, business and government leaders feared that quarantines would damage the economy. Their public statements urging the reopening of stores and public spaces pitted market value against the value of human lives. How can anthropology bring the value of people to light? How have varied societies valued human lives, qualities, and works? The articles in this special issue develop the 2019 Society for Economic Anthropology conference theme "Wealth-in-People." Inspired by ethnographies of certain African societies, the wealth-in-people literature has moved from politics and demography to inequality and marginalization to the pricing of life, and has settled on wealth-in-people as a collective that assembles individuals with diverse and complementary qualities. Collectives of wealth-in-people build on these qualities, including knowledge, skill, beauty, emotional and distributive labor, and artistic expression. They become more than the sum of their parts. Seen from our current moment, wealth-in-people as a theory of value takes us beyond false choices between the economy and people. By illuminating forms of economic life from the ground up, the wealth-in-people approach, like similar recent concepts, including the human economy and social worth, can catalyze a more democratic economy.
Trade and State Formation in Ancient East African Coast and Southern Zambezia
Feast, Famine or Fighting?, 2017
Why is social inequality a feature of so many societies? Every generation of archaeologists has s... more Why is social inequality a feature of so many societies? Every generation of archaeologists has sought to understand the transformation from egalitarian bands to today’s world of ‘savage inequalities.’ In this chapter, we draw from recent archaeological research in Eastern and Southern Africa to explain the emergence of socially and politically hierarchical chiefdoms, polities, and states. We identify three main sources of social power: trade, investment in extractive technologies , and elite monopolization of wealth-creating resources. Along the East African Coast, we find that autonomous city-states developed here on local, regional, and trans-continental scales because of Indian Ocean trade. In spite of the wealth the Swahili elites amassed, their city-states remained independent. In Southern Africa, the Southern Zambezian Culture developed similar political formations, but in this highland fertile plain some polities were able to extend their political control over larger geographical areas. Like the Swahili , the Zimbabwe elites were wealthy through trade, taking tribute from foot caravans of gold and ivory bound for the southern Swahili Coast. In the case of Zimbabwe, militarism was a second strategy to consolidate power over the geography of these trade conduits. Studying the evolution of social complexity among the Swahili city-states and the Zimbabwe Plateau demonstrates that trade and militarism are sources of political power for African elites, as they were in other parts of the ancient world. We discuss the impact of these findings in understanding today’s dilemmas of power and inequality.
Economic Anthropology, 2018
This article examines the role of gender in the use of digital finance in Kenya, including the we... more This article examines the role of gender in the use of digital finance in Kenya, including the well-known case of mobile money but also the emerging use of smartphone apps, payment tills, digital credit services, and digital fund-raising computer programs. Development professionals have explicitly feminist goals in bringing digital finance to women in the Global South. In several recent reports, they outline the belief that gender norms are a barrier to women's use of finance. They hope digital finance will bring women agency and control over money and consequently shift restrictive gender norms. This article offers a critique of these assumptions based on ethnographic conversations, a diary exercise, and network self-portraiture conducted in Kenya in 2016 among both rural farmers and urbanites. Adopting a distributed agency perspective, the ethnographic study demonstrates that Kenyan women and men use digital finance not to seek individual control of their money but to produce themselves as connected and trustworthy members of financial groups and collectivities. Gender norms may not hinder women from finance but rather enhance and deepen women's and men's financial relationships and bring women success in amassing funds.
Hinterlands and cities : Archaeological investigations of economy and trade in Tsavo, south-eastern Kenya
Nyame Akuma, 2000
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Acheulean
Encyclopedia of Prehistory Volume 1: Africa, 2001
Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers of Eastern and South-Central Africa Since 20,000 Years Ago
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013
Economic Anthropology, 2016
Kenyans use mobile money services to transfer money to friends and relatives via mobile phone tex... more Kenyans use mobile money services to transfer money to friends and relatives via mobile phone text messaging. Kenya's M-Pesa is one of the most successful examples of digital money for financial inclusion. This article uses social network analysis and ethnographic information to examine ties to and through women in 12 mobile money transfer networks of kin, drawn from field data collected in 2012, 2013, and 2014. The social networks are based on reciprocal and dense ties among siblings and parents, especially mothers. Men participate equally in social networks, but as brothers and mother's brothers more often than as fathers. The matrilineal ties of mobile money circulate value within the hearthhold (Ekejiuba 2005) of women, their children, and others connected to them. Using remittances, families negotiate investments in household farming or work, education, and migration. Money sending supports the diverse economic strategies, flexible kinship ties, and mobility of hearthholds. Gifts of e-money are said to express a natural love and caring among mothers and siblings and are often private and personal. Consequently, the money circulations of the hearthhold avoid disrupting widely shared ideals of patrilineal solidarity and household autonomy.
African Studies Review 2018
This paper, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle ritua... more This paper, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle rituals collect and distribute different forms of money, including land, property, personhood, animals, cash, and digital moneys. It specifically examines a ritual coming of age for adolescent boys. By organizing multiple forms of money relative to the phases of a human life, the past, and the future, these rituals serve to manage and transfer wealth across generations and to give these transfers social and moral dimensions. The study provokes a critique of financial initiatives in the Global South that often assume that the financial goals of the poor are short-term. Résumé: Basé sur des recherches de terrain dans l'ouest du Kenya de 2012 à 2016, cet article décrit comment des rites du cycle de vie sont mobilisés pour collecter et distribuer différentes formes d'objets de valeur, y compris la terre, la propriété, la personnalité, les animaux, l'argent comptant et l'argent numérique. Spécifiquement, nous examinons un rite de puberté pour des adolescents. En organisant plusieurs formes d'argent relatives aux phases d'une vie humaine, le passé et le futur, ces rites aident à gérer et transférer la richesse à travers les générations et donnent à ces transferts des dimensions sociales et morales. L'étude amène vers une critique des nouvelles initiatives financières introduites dans les pays du Sud qui souvent estiment que les objectifs des pauvres ne sont qu'à court terme.
Information Technology in International Development 2015
family networks of between 8-70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relativ... more family networks of between 8-70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relatives provide for household and emergency needs, contribute to ceremonies, and help pay school fees and medical bills. We ªnd that digital money transfers follow and reinforce preexisting forms of emotional support and social relationships. In these families, the transfers strengthen maternal kinship ties as well relationships among siblings and cousins. Money networks are reciprocal, such that senders are also receivers, and individuals have many connections through which to access resources. Some individuals are "central" in networks, having more connections; others broker ºows of e-value from one group of relatives to another. Mobile money strengthens social bonds but can also disrupt social relationships as when hiding digital value and remittances from in-laws or spouses.
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2025
The papers in this collection explore how people make use of financial practices and institutions... more The papers in this collection explore how people make use of financial practices and institutions to organize, extend, and manage care relations. Much work in the social sciences views financial practices and money as corrosive to social relations. Our research uses situated ethnography and qualitative interviews to gain insights into how people use finance to practice, contest, and organize care in their families and communities. Such approaches alert us to the significant potentialities of finance in creating, sustaining and transforming relations, and to the central roles of financial discourses, practices, and institutions in structuring contemporary social arrangements. Ethnographically informed accounts of how people in Kenya, Vietnam, the United States, Brazil, and Tanzania engage with health insurance, home-based care, cash-based social assistance, caring for animals and crowdfunding highlight the constitutive relations between finance and care in diverse settings. By exploring how people use finance to organize, negotiate, and transform care, we show how financial products, services, and narratives are used creatively to practice care and to make claims about caring for others. Insights into people's everyday interactions around caring, money, and finance reveal the life worlds and values which inform people's relations and give care and money meaning.
We write to note the passing of world-renowned Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Isabel... more We write to note the passing of world-renowned Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Isabel Guyer, who died in Davis, California, on January 17, 2024, from complications from dementia. Born in Dunoon, Scotland, on New Year's Eve in 1943, she had just turned 80. Jane earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Rochester in 1972 and went on to teach at Boston University, Harvard, Northwestern, and, finally, Johns Hopkins, from which she retired in 2015. Jane is survived by her husband, Bernie; their three children, Sam, Nathan, and Kate; five grandchildren; and legions of friends, colleagues, and admirers across the world (see Figure 1). Jane's "extraordinarily profound and extensive contributions" (Ferguson, 2017, xvii) count among economic anthropology's most seminal works. Her extensive fieldwork in Nigeria and Cameroon-on household budgets, Indigenous currencies, intergenerational relations, taxation, and urban food supplies-inspired her lifelong interest in economic transformation in Africa and provided the foundation for her later work on global monetary and financial practices. Her husband, Bernie, remembers her as being "above all" committed to her interlocutors, "believing that knowledge emerged from real-life experiences." This approach resulted in meticulously documented individual and collaborative works that emphasized people's capacity for adaptation and invention in the face of economic crisis. Paying scrupulous attention to the stakes of individuals' lives, Jane had an extraordinary ability to look across scales of economic relation to consider the interplay between multiple "value registers" (Guyer, 2004) to discover how systemic processes articulate with and emerge from the lives of ordinary people. Jane used this approach to take on topics as varied as the creation of value and wealth, currency exchange, kinship and marriage, gendered divisions of labor, the impact of devaluation and structural adjustment policies, and the interface between informal and formal economies. The breadth of her scholarship attests to her intellectual acumen and boldness as a scholar, fearlessly tackling the quantitative data sets of economists and historians' archives. Trained at the London School of Economics in the traditions of British social anthropology, Jane's work helped transform the foundations of economic and anthropological thought, destabilizing notions of the household as a basic economic unit (Guyer, 1981), questioning what is real about the "real" economy (Guyer, 2016b; Neiburg & Guyer, 2017), and revealing that even counting may not be the simple, incremental act one might assume (Guyer, 2004). Critique was never her main ambition, however. Instead, she deconstructed economic concepts and fashioned new ones to explore fresh approaches to the data, opening "new methodological horizons" in economic anthropology (Hart & Ortiz, 2014, 474). This allowed her to explain, for example, "how new monetary relations are created without resorting to a single overarching narrative of what money is" (Hart & Ortiz, 2014, 474), giving us the tools to both reexamine capitalism and supersede its confining terminologies. Jane's unflagging confidence in the potential for economic anthropology to speak across disciplines and beyond the academy resulted in innumerable honors and invitations to speak and serve on steering committees. She advised the National Academy of Sciences projects on Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) and Lost Crops of Africa (2006-8), as well as the World Bank and the governments of Chad and Cameroon on their major Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project (2001-9). Earlier in her career, she was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and the US African Studies Association to traverse the country, meeting with university faculty, students, and administrators and analyzing the reams of data and documents they gave her, to write a report on "African Studies in the United States: A Perspective" (Guyer, 1996a). In it, she argued that Africa was not only being sidelined as a "special case" of poverty and stagnation but was furthermore being cast as a threat to the rest of the world's otherwise optimistic economic future. These assessments, she argued, were not only wrong on empirical grounds but obscured the inventiveness of economic practice on the African continent. Among her formal honors and recognitions, Jane was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (2008) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and was awarded an honorary chieftaincy by the town of Idere, Nigeria, where she carried out fieldwork. Here we present reflections by Jane's colleagues on her life and legacy, centered around three pivotal moments of her career and the bodies of work that emerged from them, to redefine economic anthropology. Sibel Kusimba first reflects on the impact of Jane's work on "wealth-in-people." Caroline Bledsoe then turns to the time surrounding the writing of Jane's seminal volume Marginal Gains at Northwestern University, drawing on the contributions and memories of Jane's husband,
Journal of Cultural Economy
Crowdfunding to support personal and medical needs has risen in popularity in recent years. Many ... more Crowdfunding to support personal and medical needs has risen in popularity in recent years. Many sociologists are critical of needy individuals' turn to online fundraising, seeing it as a response to deficits in health care and social protection, and arguing that it may widen social inequalities. Most of these studies have taken place in the United States, China, and Great Britain. This paper explores crowdfunding in sub-Saharan Africa, offering us an opportunity to rethink the context and value of crowdfunding and its relationship to family and friend networks, philanthropy, and charity. It also examines how online crowdfunding relates to cultural ideas about dependency and care. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork at the Nairobi crowdfunding platform M-Changa conducted from 2016 to 2021, I describe how social entrepreneurs, women, and NGO representatives raise money for philanthropic initiatives, medical and education costs, family rituals, and COVID-19 relief. The paper reveals the diverse financial relationships, identities and goals emerging on the platform. Reflecting on this diversity of caring finance, this paper then explores the ambiguous commercial, social, and political potentials of crowdfunding as peer-based digital finance in the Global South.
Reviews in Anthropology, 2021
A review of Reimagining Money from Reviews in Anthropology by Jennifer Huberman
Information Technologies and International Development, 2015
This research examines the interplay between social networks and mobile money remittances in West... more This research examines the interplay between social networks and mobile money remittances in Western Kenya. Research was conducted in Kenya’s Bungoma and Trans-Nzoia counties in 2012, 2013, and 2014, involving 12 family networks of between 8—70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relatives provide for household and emergency needs, contribute to ceremonies, and help pay school fees and medical bills. We find that digital money transfers follow and reinforce preexisting forms of emotional support and social relationships. In these families, the transfers strengthen maternal kinship ties as well relationships among siblings and cousins. Money networks are reciprocal, such that senders are also receivers, and individuals have many connections through which to access resources. Some individuals are “central” in networks, having more connections; others broker flows of e-value from one group of relatives to another. Mobile money strengthens social bonds but can also...
Ethics of DNA research on human remains: five globally applicable guidelines, 2021
We are a group of archaeologists, anthropologists, curators and geneticists representing diverse ... more We are a group of archaeologists, anthropologists, curators and geneticists representing diverse global communities and 31 countries. All of us met in a virtual workshop dedicated to ethics in ancient DNA research held in November 2020. There was widespread agreement that globally applicable ethical guidelines are needed, but that recent recommendations grounded in discussion about research on human remains from North America are not always generalizable worldwide. Here we propose the following globally applicable guidelines, taking into consideration diverse contexts. These hold that: (1) researchers must ensure that all regulations were followed in the places where they work and from which the human remains derived; (2) researchers must prepare a detailed plan prior to beginning any study; (3)
AFRICA, EAST | Foragers
Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2008
This article reviews major issues and evidence related to hunter-gatherers in East Africa, includ... more This article reviews major issues and evidence related to hunter-gatherers in East Africa, including archaeological sites of the Middle and Later Stone Age and the archaeological record of the transition to food production. The relevance of the ethnographic record to our understanding of ancient hunter-gatherers is also discussed.
East African archaeology: foragers, potters, smiths, and traders
... in Southern Kenya Sibel B. Kusimba and Cbapurukha M. Kusimba 1 2 The East African Neolithic: ... more ... in Southern Kenya Sibel B. Kusimba and Cbapurukha M. Kusimba 1 2 The East African Neolithic: A Historical Perspective Karega-Munene 17 3 ... at Kivinja, Tanzania Felix Chami 87 7 Ironworking on the Swahili Coast of Kenya Chapurukha M. Kusimba and David Killick 99 8 Iron ...
The development and collapse of precolonial ethnic mosaics in Tsavo, Kenya
Journal of African Archaeology, 2005
Archaeologists and historians have long believed that little interaction existed between Iron Age... more Archaeologists and historians have long believed that little interaction existed between Iron Age cities of the Kenya Coast and their rural hinterlands. Ongoing archaeological and anthropological research in Tsavo, Southeast Kenya, shows that Tsavo has been continuously inhabited at least since the early Holocene. Tsavo peoples made a living by foraging, herding, farming, and producing pottery and iron, and in the Iron Age were linked to global markets via coastal traders. They were at one point important suppliers of ivory destined for Southwest and South Asia. Our excavations document forager and agropastoralist habitation sites, iron smelting and iron working sites, fortified rockshelters, and mortuary sites. We discuss the relationship between fortified rockshelters, in particular, and slave trade.
African foragers: environment, technology, interactions
... Holl, Philip Kilbride, David Kuehn, Sally MacBrearty, Curtis Marean, Harry Merrick, Charles N... more ... Holl, Philip Kilbride, David Kuehn, Sally MacBrearty, Curtis Marean, Harry Merrick, Charles Nel-son, Peter Peregrine, James Phillips, Ronald Mason, Carol Mason, Anna Roosevelt, Fred Smith, Olga Soffer, Gil Stein, Thomas J. Riley ... The index was prepared by Amanda Halpin. ...
Economic Anthropology, 2020
In a world of social inequality, health disparities, and poverty, the economic value of people re... more In a world of social inequality, health disparities, and poverty, the economic value of people remains unrecognized, undervalued, and exploited. Recently, the ongoing conflict between capitalist markets and human value came to the fore again during the coronavirus pandemic, when many health systems were unprepared. In the United States, business and government leaders feared that quarantines would damage the economy. Their public statements urging the reopening of stores and public spaces pitted market value against the value of human lives. How can anthropology bring the value of people to light? How have varied societies valued human lives, qualities, and works? The articles in this special issue develop the 2019 Society for Economic Anthropology conference theme "Wealth-in-People." Inspired by ethnographies of certain African societies, the wealth-in-people literature has moved from politics and demography to inequality and marginalization to the pricing of life, and has settled on wealth-in-people as a collective that assembles individuals with diverse and complementary qualities. Collectives of wealth-in-people build on these qualities, including knowledge, skill, beauty, emotional and distributive labor, and artistic expression. They become more than the sum of their parts. Seen from our current moment, wealth-in-people as a theory of value takes us beyond false choices between the economy and people. By illuminating forms of economic life from the ground up, the wealth-in-people approach, like similar recent concepts, including the human economy and social worth, can catalyze a more democratic economy.
Trade and State Formation in Ancient East African Coast and Southern Zambezia
Feast, Famine or Fighting?, 2017
Why is social inequality a feature of so many societies? Every generation of archaeologists has s... more Why is social inequality a feature of so many societies? Every generation of archaeologists has sought to understand the transformation from egalitarian bands to today’s world of ‘savage inequalities.’ In this chapter, we draw from recent archaeological research in Eastern and Southern Africa to explain the emergence of socially and politically hierarchical chiefdoms, polities, and states. We identify three main sources of social power: trade, investment in extractive technologies , and elite monopolization of wealth-creating resources. Along the East African Coast, we find that autonomous city-states developed here on local, regional, and trans-continental scales because of Indian Ocean trade. In spite of the wealth the Swahili elites amassed, their city-states remained independent. In Southern Africa, the Southern Zambezian Culture developed similar political formations, but in this highland fertile plain some polities were able to extend their political control over larger geographical areas. Like the Swahili , the Zimbabwe elites were wealthy through trade, taking tribute from foot caravans of gold and ivory bound for the southern Swahili Coast. In the case of Zimbabwe, militarism was a second strategy to consolidate power over the geography of these trade conduits. Studying the evolution of social complexity among the Swahili city-states and the Zimbabwe Plateau demonstrates that trade and militarism are sources of political power for African elites, as they were in other parts of the ancient world. We discuss the impact of these findings in understanding today’s dilemmas of power and inequality.
Economic Anthropology, 2018
This article examines the role of gender in the use of digital finance in Kenya, including the we... more This article examines the role of gender in the use of digital finance in Kenya, including the well-known case of mobile money but also the emerging use of smartphone apps, payment tills, digital credit services, and digital fund-raising computer programs. Development professionals have explicitly feminist goals in bringing digital finance to women in the Global South. In several recent reports, they outline the belief that gender norms are a barrier to women's use of finance. They hope digital finance will bring women agency and control over money and consequently shift restrictive gender norms. This article offers a critique of these assumptions based on ethnographic conversations, a diary exercise, and network self-portraiture conducted in Kenya in 2016 among both rural farmers and urbanites. Adopting a distributed agency perspective, the ethnographic study demonstrates that Kenyan women and men use digital finance not to seek individual control of their money but to produce themselves as connected and trustworthy members of financial groups and collectivities. Gender norms may not hinder women from finance but rather enhance and deepen women's and men's financial relationships and bring women success in amassing funds.
Hinterlands and cities : Archaeological investigations of economy and trade in Tsavo, south-eastern Kenya
Nyame Akuma, 2000
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Acheulean
Encyclopedia of Prehistory Volume 1: Africa, 2001
Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers of Eastern and South-Central Africa Since 20,000 Years Ago
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013
Economic Anthropology, 2016
Kenyans use mobile money services to transfer money to friends and relatives via mobile phone tex... more Kenyans use mobile money services to transfer money to friends and relatives via mobile phone text messaging. Kenya's M-Pesa is one of the most successful examples of digital money for financial inclusion. This article uses social network analysis and ethnographic information to examine ties to and through women in 12 mobile money transfer networks of kin, drawn from field data collected in 2012, 2013, and 2014. The social networks are based on reciprocal and dense ties among siblings and parents, especially mothers. Men participate equally in social networks, but as brothers and mother's brothers more often than as fathers. The matrilineal ties of mobile money circulate value within the hearthhold (Ekejiuba 2005) of women, their children, and others connected to them. Using remittances, families negotiate investments in household farming or work, education, and migration. Money sending supports the diverse economic strategies, flexible kinship ties, and mobility of hearthholds. Gifts of e-money are said to express a natural love and caring among mothers and siblings and are often private and personal. Consequently, the money circulations of the hearthhold avoid disrupting widely shared ideals of patrilineal solidarity and household autonomy.
African Studies Review 2018
This paper, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle ritua... more This paper, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle rituals collect and distribute different forms of money, including land, property, personhood, animals, cash, and digital moneys. It specifically examines a ritual coming of age for adolescent boys. By organizing multiple forms of money relative to the phases of a human life, the past, and the future, these rituals serve to manage and transfer wealth across generations and to give these transfers social and moral dimensions. The study provokes a critique of financial initiatives in the Global South that often assume that the financial goals of the poor are short-term. Résumé: Basé sur des recherches de terrain dans l'ouest du Kenya de 2012 à 2016, cet article décrit comment des rites du cycle de vie sont mobilisés pour collecter et distribuer différentes formes d'objets de valeur, y compris la terre, la propriété, la personnalité, les animaux, l'argent comptant et l'argent numérique. Spécifiquement, nous examinons un rite de puberté pour des adolescents. En organisant plusieurs formes d'argent relatives aux phases d'une vie humaine, le passé et le futur, ces rites aident à gérer et transférer la richesse à travers les générations et donnent à ces transferts des dimensions sociales et morales. L'étude amène vers une critique des nouvelles initiatives financières introduites dans les pays du Sud qui souvent estiment que les objectifs des pauvres ne sont qu'à court terme.
Information Technology in International Development 2015
family networks of between 8-70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relativ... more family networks of between 8-70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relatives provide for household and emergency needs, contribute to ceremonies, and help pay school fees and medical bills. We ªnd that digital money transfers follow and reinforce preexisting forms of emotional support and social relationships. In these families, the transfers strengthen maternal kinship ties as well relationships among siblings and cousins. Money networks are reciprocal, such that senders are also receivers, and individuals have many connections through which to access resources. Some individuals are "central" in networks, having more connections; others broker ºows of e-value from one group of relatives to another. Mobile money strengthens social bonds but can also disrupt social relationships as when hiding digital value and remittances from in-laws or spouses.
Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution, 2020
Technology is rapidly is changing the way we think about money. Digital payment has been slow to ... more Technology is rapidly is changing the way we think about money. Digital payment has been slow to take off in the United States but is displacing cash in countries as diverse as China, Kenya, and Sweden. In Reimagining Money, Sibel Kusimba describes the rise of M-Pesa, and offers a rich portrait of how this technology changes the economic and social landscape, allowing users to create webs of relationships as they exchange, pool, borrow, lend, and share digital money in user-built networks. These networks, Kusimba argues, will shape the future of financial technologies and their impact on poverty, inclusion, and empowerment. She describes how urban and transnational migrants maintain a presence in rural areas through money gifts; how families use crowdfunding software to assemble donations for emergency medical care; and how new financial groups invest in real estate and fund weddings. The author presents fascinating accounts that challenge accepted wisdom by examining the notion of money as wealth-in-people-an idea long-cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa and now brought to bear on the digital age with homegrown financial
African Foragers: Environment, Technology, Interactions, 2003
East African Archaeology, 2003
Edited Volume on East African Archaeology