[Ugnet] Baganda Material Culture Since 1900

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 17:14:17 -0800


Publisher:
 
 
 
AUTHOR: Kivubiro Tabawebbula


STATUS: Forthcoming

PRICE: $79.95

ILLUSTRATIONS: About 100 colour and blackand- white photographs, maps and diagrams
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FORMAT: Portrait; hardcover; c. 200 pages

DIMENSIONS: 240 x 214 mm

ISBN: 1863332340
 

Baganda Material Culture Since 1900 Indingenous Concepts of Meaning and Ritual

This study contributes to the study of African material culture by exploring indigenous tools and African-based criteria for interpreting African artefacts. It also makes significant advances on the study of Baganda material culture, which was last attempted in 1971. The manuscript is illustrated with mostly never-published full-colour photographs of Baganda artefacts.

This interpretation of Baganda material cult ure is based upon an indigenous and precolonial conception and organisation of Baganda society into Divinity, Royal and clan institutions, in which various indigenous artefacts are seen functioning socially, economically and spiritually, well into the 21st Century. These institutions formed the basis for the Baganda as a cultural entity, and the material culture related to them became central to Baganda socialisation, identity and cultural integrity.

This study asserts that the most prominent _expression_ within indigenous Baganda material culture was ancestry, as the most important principle of kinship and social cohesion. Material culture was used to promote and maintain Clan, Divinity and Royal ancestors as the foundations of Baganda society.

The book argues that material culture was used as a focus for indigenous beliefs and ideology that united the Baganda into an ancestor-based kinship and Kabaka-dominated social system. It was also used to maintain the hierarchic al status of institutions and individuals within Baganda society. Material culture mediated in kinship and interpersonal relations as a communication system, carrier, regulator and promoter of indigenous Baganda belief systems. Material culture made the intangible world of spirits, the realm of Divine, Clan and Royal ancestors a reality. In the process of their use in rituals within Clan, Divinity and Kabaka institutions, the artefacts encompassed and illustrated associated oral and other traditions and were a source of legitimacy. Ancestral artefacts recalled Baganda�s founding ancestors, and the historical relationships between them, and can be used as material evidence of important events upon which the principles of Baganda social organisation, belief and kinship systems were based.

The book also asserts that indigenous forms of material-culture _expression_ will continue if Baganda institutions and belief systems persist. The study explores material evidence showing B aganda survival as an ethnic group and cultural entity into the 21st century, despite acculturation instigated by colonialism. The material-culture production over the past century reflects an ongoing conflict between indigenous Baganda and Western value systems, with historical origins in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Baganda society. Indigenous material culture as an integral part of Baganda institutions has generally declined or been transformed over the past hundred years. However, artefacts provide material evidence of precolonial Baganda cultural traits surviving within indigenous institutions, as particularly expressed through Divinity, Kabaka and Clan ancestral material culture today.
 

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