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Transient workspaces: Technologies of everyday innovation in Zimbabwe

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"In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities -- including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes. African creativities are found in African mobilities. Mavhunga shows the movement of people as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting in Zimbabwe as one example, he explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and of the forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, Mavhunga considers interesting questions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. He describes how African hunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with no remedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, and examines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlisting hunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, Mavhunga writes, is one of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economic or political crisis. He argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined as technologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating with Africans rather than for them."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press., 2014

Collation

1 online resource (xi, 296 pages) :illustrations.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262326155

Classification

NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Material Culture
Technology transfer
Subsistence hunting
Poaching
Economic anthropology

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

Other Information

Cataloger

umi

Source

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/2253/Transient-WorkspacesTechnologies-of-Everyday

Validator

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262027243.001.0001

Journal Volume

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Journal Issue

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Subtitle

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