process through which
individual users, as well as collectives, negotiate the values and symbols of the technology while integrating it into the cultural setting. . . . Through domestication, technology changes as well as the user and, in the next step, the culture. More than within other constructivist theories on technology and users . . . the domestication perspective enables a thorough analysis of the users without relating directly to the design and manufacturing of the technology. It allows for redefinitions of practice and meanings even after the construction of the technology is closed from the producers’ and designers’ points of view.18
Rather than stressing the “closure mechanisms” through which the meanings of technologies are “stabilized” once and for all,19 domestication approaches foreground a continuing process of user reinterpretation and re-innovation, and the coexistence of alternative understandings of a given artifact—over and above the hegemonic codes that might originally have been loaded into any such artifact by producers, advertisers, or any others likely to overdetermine meaning.
As shown by Jeremy Prestholdt, domestication perspectives are especially useful in examining situations of cross-cultural consumption.20 Decoupling users from inventors and designers, domestication perspectives make it possible to study appropriation as a creative act in itself. This is a powerful tool in exploring the life of any object, but especially so when looking at how ostensibly peripheral societies use externally introduced technologies—such as firearms—for their own purposes, and imbue them with functions and meanings that do not always replicate those for which the objects in question had first been devised in their original, usually Western settings.
David Howes, who reads cross-cultural consumption through the lens of “creolization,” articulates an essential dimension of the phenomenon.
When one takes a closer look at the meanings and uses given to specific imported goods within specific “local contexts” or “realities,” one often finds that the goods have been transformed, at least in part, in accordance with the values of the receiving culture. . . . What the concept of creolization highlights . . . is that goods always have to be contextualized (given meaning, inserted into particular social relationships) to be utilized, and there is no guarantee that the intention of the producer will be recognized, much less respected, by the consumer from another culture.21
Owing something to Marshall Sahlins’s seminal Islands of History and its stress on “existing understandings of the cultural order,”22 Howes’s key intuition is not only that processes of functional remaking and symbolic reinscription do take place, but also that such processes of recontextualization are shaped by local sociocultural conditions and political interests—conditions and interests that the dynamics of appropriation themselves might subtly transform. In this sense, “domestication” and “creolization” are coterminous categories, for each emphasizes the contingent dimension of technology transfer and consumption, and the extent to which the latter activities are interwoven with preexisting circumstances and resources.23
THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY AND CONSUMPTION IN AFRICA
The history of technology in Africa has scarcely received the attention it deserves. Writing in 1983, Ralph Austen and Daniel Headrick bemoaned “the neglect of Africa by general historians of technology.”24 The situation over the past thirty years has not changed a great deal, as even a cursory glance at such specialist journals as Technology and Culture and History and Technology reveals. As a result, the field has until recently been almost completely unaffected by the paradigm shifts summarized above.
On the African continent, despite vivid displays of grassroots inventiveness and eclecticism in the sphere of everyday technology, technological determinism—the notion, that is, that society is the passive recipient of innovation, by which it is “determined”—has enjoyed a much longer lifespan than elsewhere. It is not coincidental that the most influential book on technology in Africa is still Headrick’s Tools of Empire,25 which remains standard reading in most undergraduate courses on imperialism and the history of science and technology.26 In Tools of Empire, European imperial expansion in Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century is presented as the simple, automatic result of innovations in the fields of transport, armament, and medicine affecting, with unprecedented impact, non-Western societies. The manner in which colonial (or soon-to-be-colonial) subjects received, engaged with, appropriated, and sometimes subverted these same technologies falls outside the author’s argument. Headrick’s more recent work has remained, by and large, faithful to this original interpretative scheme: his latest tour de force—a catalogue of inventions, from early modern shipbuilding to twentieth-century air control—is revealingly entitled Power over Peoples.27
Studies of the co-construction of technology and society in Africa are not completely absent. The impetuous spread of new communication technologies, especially mobile telephony, over the past decade or so has given rise to a significant literature.28 Only rarely, however, has this scholarship adopted a more than tokenistic historical perspective. Although there are happy exceptions to the rule—Brian Larkin’s historically informed account of media consumption in Kano, Northern Nigeria, for instance, or the emphasis placed on processes of African appropriation in a recent collection devoted to the history of the motor vehicle29—the points stand that students of past technological change have given African users short shrift and that the latter’s deep history of engagement with externally introduced artifacts remains poorly researched and understood. Writing about a large swathe of the colonial world in the twentieth century, David Arnold has recently pointed to our ignorance as to “what indigenes, rather than colonizers, made of new technologies” and how these same technologies “were locally received and adapted.”30 Valid as they are for the colonial period, Arnold’s remarks are even more cogent in respect to precolonial Africa, to which the bulk of this book is dedicated.
Altogether more impressive have been the achievements of anthropologically oriented Africanist historians who have studied processes of commoditization without presenting the spread of consumer goods as the reprehensible indication of “global homogenization” and the erosion of “cultural differences.”31 Rather, the agency of Africans in forging the practices of their daily lives has been central to a scholarship that—in the words of Timothy Burke—has sought to foreground the collective and individual “acts of will and imagination, engagement and disinterest” that underlie the consumption of commodities.32 In challenging dominant understandings of modern globalization as a purely Western-driven initiative, for instance, Prestholdt has illuminated the nonutilitarian dimensions of Zanzibari consumerism in the second half of the nineteenth century and the extent to which “global symbols,” such as Western manufactures, were deployed in accordance with local norms and “in the service of local image-making practices.”33
A number of social histories of such widespread consumer goods as imported alcohol and clothing have reached compatible conclusions and provided important insights into the “orientational functions” of consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and the workings of the cross-cultural domestication that accompanied it.34 Dmitri van den Bersselaar’s The King of Drinks is a good case in point.35 This excellent social history of Dutch gin in West Africa is especially commendable for casting the spotlight both on African initiative and the chronological dimension of processes of commodity appropriation by southern Ghanaian and Nigerian consumers from the nineteenth century onwards. It was West African consumers—much more than foreign producers and advertisers and colonial policy makers—who were responsible for the paradoxical post–World War I metamorphosis of Dutch gin from “a mass consumer commodity, an iconic consumption item of modernity,” to “a good with restricted, ritual circulation, an aspect of African ‘traditional’ culture, its use bound up with ritual and the authority of those who claim[ed] the sanction of custom.”36 The new local meaning bestowed upon
