Memories of the Slave Trade
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A01=Rosalind Shaw
africa
anthropology
Author_Rosalind Shaw
cannibalism
Category=JHM
Category=NHTS
ceremony
colonialism
commodities
community
divination
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
folklore
guilt
history
memory
money
morality
nonfiction
politics
postcolonialism
rebellion
responsibility
revolution
rite
ritual
shame
sierra leone
slave trade
slavery
sociology
spirits
temne
visions
war
wealth
witchcraft
witches
Product details
- ISBN 9780226751313
- Weight: 624g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 08 Apr 2002
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research. Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.
Rosalind Shaw is associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at Tufts University. She is coeditor of Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis and Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa.
