Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa

Abstract

Collecting Food, Cultivating People is a three thousand year history both of agricultural societies from the perspective of those farmers who also hunted, fished, and gathered and of the central and southern African savannas from the perspective of those who lived not within the orbits of its famous precolonial kingdoms, but within a central frontier encircled by those polities. Cereal agriculture and trade are often considered axiomatic to political change in the premodern world. Instead, political innovation in farming societies in precolonial central Africa was actually contingent on developments in hunting and fishing. The difference between food collection and cultivation was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners who worked hard to distinguish their activities from agriculture by inventing a novel path to celebrity, friendship, and ancestorhood based on their knowledge of the bush. This book reveals the interrelated, contingent histories of subsistence, fame, talent, political authority, landscape, and personhood (both in life and in death) across the watershed events of central African history, from the transition to a Neolithic, cereal-based economy to the invention of matrilineality, the centralization of political authority in neighboring kingdoms, and the intensification of long distance trade. This story changes what we know about the development and character of political complexity in Neolithic societies by foregrounding the affective dimensions of techn…