A01=Yaari Felber-Seligman
African history
Author_Yaari Felber-Seligman
Category=JBCC6
Category=NHH
Category=NHTB
community building
East African history
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
history of fashion
history of trade
Indian Ocean studies
inland trade
linguistic anthropology
linguistic history
Malawi
material culture
Mozambique
popular fashion
precolonial Africa
Rufiji Ruvuma region
Ruvuma people
social networks
Tanzania
Product details
- ISBN 9780299350406
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Jun 2025
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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When viewed from the economic centers of the Indian or Atlantic Oceans, the Ruvuma region of East Africa, crossing what is now Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique, would look like a periphery. But the same factors that marginalize the region historically brought distinct opportunities. In Fashioning Inland Communities, Yaari Felber-Seligman traces the long history—from the first millennium CE into the twentieth century—of Ruvuma trade practices within a changing world. Felber-Seligman argues that Ruvuma trade should be understood fundamentally as a set of voluntary choices undertaken and revised to further communities’ aspirations.
Ruvuma used fashion to build varied communities, from local to pan-regional, reflecting the dynamic relationships among inland groups. Examples of Ruvuma popular fashions reveal processes of meaning-making and community building that call for us to expand our attention to the ways in which East African peoples interacted alongside, as well as beyond, trade networks that sourced prestige and commercial goods. Popular culture here emerges as a heterarchical force that shaped lasting multidirectional connections across and between Ruvuma and their neighbors. As both a subject and a strategy for analysis, the history of popular fashion shifts how we view histories of small, decentralized societies as they encounter larger economies. Felber-Seligman demonstrates that this has implications for our understanding not only of trade but of material culture, community, gender, and family.
Ruvuma used fashion to build varied communities, from local to pan-regional, reflecting the dynamic relationships among inland groups. Examples of Ruvuma popular fashions reveal processes of meaning-making and community building that call for us to expand our attention to the ways in which East African peoples interacted alongside, as well as beyond, trade networks that sourced prestige and commercial goods. Popular culture here emerges as a heterarchical force that shaped lasting multidirectional connections across and between Ruvuma and their neighbors. As both a subject and a strategy for analysis, the history of popular fashion shifts how we view histories of small, decentralized societies as they encounter larger economies. Felber-Seligman demonstrates that this has implications for our understanding not only of trade but of material culture, community, gender, and family.
Yaari Felber-Seligman is an assistant professor of history at the City College of New York. They specialize in the history of early Africa, comparative world history, and gender and sexual diversity.
