This document summarizes the book "Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies" by Eugenia Herbert. The book uses objects from museum collections to analyze cultural conceptions of gender and power related to iron smelting in precolonial Africa. It argues that iron smelting rituals were based on a paradigm of human reproduction with exclusive male control of fertility. Various practices symbolically referred to this. The book provides a profound and persuasive argument, but leaves some questions unanswered about how gender concepts influenced social practices as those practices changed over time in a flexible philosophical context.
This document summarizes the book "Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies" by Eugenia Herbert. The book uses objects from museum collections to analyze cultural conceptions of gender and power related to iron smelting in precolonial Africa. It argues that iron smelting rituals were based on a paradigm of human reproduction with exclusive male control of fertility. Various practices symbolically referred to this. The book provides a profound and persuasive argument, but leaves some questions unanswered about how gender concepts influenced social practices as those practices changed over time in a flexible philosophical context.
This document summarizes the book "Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies" by Eugenia Herbert. The book uses objects from museum collections to analyze cultural conceptions of gender and power related to iron smelting in precolonial Africa. It argues that iron smelting rituals were based on a paradigm of human reproduction with exclusive male control of fertility. Various practices symbolically referred to this. The book provides a profound and persuasive argument, but leaves some questions unanswered about how gender concepts influenced social practices as those practices changed over time in a flexible philosophical context.
cede their centrality as the major sources of evidence
from which to understand African cultural history. As a complement, one of the most important resources is the vast collections ofAfrican objects now stored in museums: the currencies, reliquaries, and masks whose loss probably deeply affected the very social dynamics the ethnographers described. Communicat- ing with those objects now becomes one of a limited roster of methods for recuperating the cultures of the past. Eugenia Herbert takes on that challenge with respect to cultural conceptidns of iron. The result is a major contribution-to method as well as to the the- ory of gender in precolonial society. She starts from an object-the gynecomorphic shape of many African smelting furnaces-and works outward through indigenous exegeses and direct evi- dential statements of observers to the full verbal and performative arts of the smelt, and then to analogs in other domains of activity. The second chapter reviews four well-described cases, ind then moves on to pre- served texts of '\arords, music and dance" (p' 65), medicines and sacrifices, and taboos against female access, the smelters' sexual exposure, and contact with menstruation. Analysis of the symbolism of the forge and the uses of iron to make marriages adds the weight of iteration and thereby authority to her inter- pretation, which is then presented in summary form in chapter 5. This series of intellectual explorations of objects and textual sources is built up logically and expertly, with self-questioning about its legitimacy at every point, and reminders even up to the last section of the last chapter that the author herself had "no idea" that the cultural configuration she found would turn out to be so widespread, and invites the reader to greet her findings with "considerable skepticism" (p. 233). In fact, however, her arguments in parts 1 and 2 of +++ this three-movement orchestration are profoundly persuasive. Herbert argues that 'the metallurgical Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transforma- drama" (p. 61) is based on a paradigm of human tion in African Sociefies. EUGENTA w. HERBERT. reproduction, but one in which there is "an exclusively Bloomin gton : lnd iana U niversity Press, 1993. 277 male control of fertility" (p. I27). Detailed practices pp.42 b/w photographs,9 figures, appendix, bib- relative to the smelt refer in direct and indirect ways liography, index. $39.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper). to these basic symbolic propositions, and furthermore there is an extended play of overlapping and intrud- ing meanings from metallurgyto chiefship to hunting, JANE I. GI.JYER all of which center on male powers of transformation. Northwestern University "Female power is not denied; it is appropriated or assimilated. . ." (p. 228). As a contrast and a test she As scholarship documents in increasing detail the explores the symbolism of pottery production, and changes that colonialism wrought, the classic ethnog- finds that even in their own productive domain female raphies published during the colonial period must works fall short of key male activities in'the degree ---*--
of ritualization and in the power they encod e" (p.27) .
The last section is the most ambitious and the least conclusive, as she herself points out. The power of the genderized imagery cannot fully explain social prac- tice because African rituals of transformation do not assume natural sexual dichotomies. Rather they pro- claim openly that gender is constructed. If so, then both the categories and the practices allow a substan- tial latitude for change, without alteration of the general principle of "male" appropriation. The book ends, then, on an invitation to think about a conun- drum: if gender is self-consciously a play on ideas, how do we describe the process bywhich conceptions became acts and acts provoked conceptualization, in the rapidly changing world that was pre-colonial Africa? Clearly Herbert is not thinking in classic struc- turalist terms about reproduction and transformation, because she takes on that historical challenge. But neither does she do a lot more than pose the problem: of the 'blank screen" with respect to evidence, the 'lnadequate terms to convey ideas of causality" (p. 235) and her own conviction that one missing piece of the story is the gender conceptions held by women. There are also other productive skills which could well demand the exquisitely detailed, erudite, and sensitive treatment that Herbert brings to metallurgy, leadership, hunting and pottery such as spinning and weaving, raffia cloth production, medicine-making, cultivation, and so on. These also, taken togethel might help to fill out the mysteries of "rnale appro- priation," in the context of a gender-flexible philoso- phy, major technical innovation, and massive trade. In my own view, howeveq our analytical categories for the knowledge-social action relationship are also part of the problem: the need for terms that capture and make available for comparative use the manifest realiry that is conveyed in this fine book, namely that the force of conceptual logic coexisted with open frontiers of possibility. *