Akan Weights and the Gold Trade PDF Download

Author: Timothy F. Garrard
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
This thesis discusses the value and meanings of cultural artifacts from the Akan material culture known as gold weight. Before colonial contact, the gold weights were essential objects in the everyday lives of the Ashanti, also known as the Akan people of Ghana, West Africa. The weights were called abrammuo in the Akan language, made of brass alloy mounted with geometrical motifs and figurative symbols. The abrammuo, as a set of miniature weights, were kept in the futuo, a leather bag that also contains additional apparatus such as brass spoons, scales, brushes, feathers, gold pans, etc. According to Garrard (1980), "as long as gold dust remained a currency in Akan society, gold weights has been significant for weighing gold at the market or during social, and political arrangements such as birth, rites of passage, deaths, and funerals, during marriage or for state fines and toll purposes" (Garrard 1980,171-176). In other contexts, the gold weights played the role of an agent of social, economic and political stability among the Akan and within the gold trade system network. With the fall of the Ashanti kingdom to British colonialism, a significant number of weights lost their primary functions and found their way into a net of western art collectors, private art galleries, and museum collections. I argue that the value (s) embedded in the weights in traditional Ashanti culture were traded for a western canon of artistic and aesthetic values. My inquiry focuses on the changing meaning and significance of the gold weights through western museum representation and exhibition

Author: Tom Phillips
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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A comprehensive survey of these lively and imaginative artifacts.

Author: D. J. Mattingly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108186998
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Saharan trade has been much debated in modern times, but the main focus of interest remains the medieval and early modern periods, for which more abundant written sources survive. The pre-Islamic origins of Trans-Saharan trade have been hotly contested over the years, mainly due to a lack of evidence. Many of the key commodities of trade are largely invisible archaeologically, being either of high value like gold and ivory, or organic like slaves and textiles or consumable commodities like salt. However, new research on the Libyan people known as the Garamantes and on their trading partners in the Sudan and Mediterranean Africa requires us to revise our views substantially. In this volume experts re-assess the evidence for a range of goods, including beads, textiles, metalwork and glass, and use it to paint a much more dynamic picture, demonstrating that the pre-Islamic Sahara was a more connected region than previously thought.

Author: Jan Gyllenbok
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3319666916
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 977

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This second volume of Gyllenbok's encyclopaedia of historical metrology comprises the first part of the compendium of measurement systems and currencies of all sovereign states of the modern World (A-I). Units of measurement are of vital importance in every civilization through history. Since the early ages, man has through necessity devised various measures to assist him in everyday life. They have enabled and continue to enable us to trade in commonly and equitably understood amounts, and to investigate, understand, and control the chemical, physical, and biological processes of the natural world. The encyclopeadia will be of use not only to historians of science and technology, but also to economic and social historians and should be in every major academic and national library as standard reference work on the topic.

Author: Eugenia W. Herbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134676522
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Original theoretical viewpoint of thematic material. Historical and anthropological. A. Bernard Knapp is a well-known and respected author. Goes beyond economic/technological analysis to social, economic, historical and anthropological. Covers themes of gender, colonialism, ethnicity, production, consumption.

Author: Robert P. Crease
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393072983
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Millions of transactions each day depend on a reliable network of weights and measures. Crease traces the evolution of this international system from the use of flutes to measure distance in the dynasties of ancient China and figurines to weigh gold in West Africa to the creation of the French metric and British imperial systems.

Author: Angus E. Dalrymple-Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004417125
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 by Angus Dalrymple-Smith offers a new interpretation of the move from slave exports to ‘legitimate commerce’ in the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra.

Author: T. C. McCaskie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521894326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
A detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante.

Author: Michael A. Gomez
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861715
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge. After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation.