A Material Culture: Consumption and Materiality on the Coast of Precolonial East Africa

A Material Culture focuses on objects in Swahili society through the elaboration of an approach that sees people and things as caught up in webs of mutual interaction. It therefore provides both a new theoretical intervention in some of the key themes in material culture studies, including the agency of objects and the ways they were linked to social identities, through the development of the notion of a biography of practice. These theoretical discussions are explored through the archaeolo...