Focusing as it does on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the early history of central Africa’s entanglements with gun technology—the exercise is mired in complexity. Given the nature and limitations of the available source material, the holistic treatment of firearms that I advocate will sometimes remain more of an ideal towards which to strive than a tangible realization. But the current “foreshortening of African history” recently decried by Richard Reid makes the effort worthwhile.3 This book, then, is driven by a double ambition, seeking both to make a stand against the increasing marginalization of African precolonial history in the academy and to take up David Edgerton’s call to shift the study of technology away from its “historically familiar surroundings.”4 My two overarching aims, in fact, are closely interlaced, for one key strategy to rekindle scholarly interest in precolonial history is to establish a dialogue with theories and concepts originating from other disciplines and historical fields. It is to a quick discussion of these literatures that the next two sections of this introduction are dedicated.
SOCIETY AND TECHNOLOGY
There used to be a time in which the relation between technology and society was understood in simple unidirectional terms: technological progress was the work of exceptional individuals, who deployed their genius and scientific prowess to invent the artifacts that mechanically transformed society and drove it forward, towards ever-increasing levels of well-being and/or mastery over previously unharnessed forces of nature. In this reading, technological evolution possessed a kind of inner, implacable logic. The great contribution of “social construction of technology” (SCOT) approaches has been to complicate this linear model of development and to hand back to users of technology their historical role. Beginning with the work of Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, whose “manifesto” first appeared in the mid-1980s,5 SCOT theorists showed that technologies were invariably the outcomes of compromises—compromises that called into question the inventors’ ostensible isolation from society and politics and that highlighted the inanity of any attempt to distinguish “between a world of engineering on the one hand and a world of the social on the other.”6 In so doing, they began to bring to the fore what they termed the “interpretative flexibility” of technology: the fact that a given technological artifact is open to more than one understanding and that its applications, far from always being the predetermined outcome of the intentions of inventors, are often also the result of the choices and predilections of users. What SCOT illuminated, then, was the agency of users in shaping technological innovation—and, therefore, producers’ strategies—by attributing both predictable and unanticipated functions to specific artifacts. The histories of technologies, in sum, reveal that the latter have frequently been “employed in ways quite different from those for which they were originally intended.”7
However, as pointed out by Ronald Kline and, again, Pinch in a famous intervention, the SCOT paradigm did suffer from some “important weaknesses” in its early formulation.8 Constructivist students of technology reconceptualized the inventor/user nexus, but did not quite explode it. As agents of technological change, users were rightly conceived of as belonging to “social groups,” but only rarely did SCOT theorists engage with these same groups’ internal composition and the dynamics of power that underlay them. The focus of this scholarship—as Gabrielle Hecht remarked—remained squarely on the “construction of technology,” rather than “on the construction of culture or politics.”9 This atrophied picture of social relations (what Pinch and Bijker themselves referred to in passing as the “wider sociopolitical milieu”10) was accompanied by a narrow focus on the functional—as opposed to the symbolic—properties of technologies.11
It is at this level that consumption studies, an important branch of “material culture studies” in the UK,12 have proved especially useful in shifting the field forward. By locating consumers in much broader networks of relations than did early constructivist students of technology, sociologists and anthropologists, in particular, have articulated “the importance of the sign value rather than the utility value of things.”13 Objects, in this perspective, are “socially and culturally salient entities,” which “change in defiance of their material stability” and which are endowed with expressive and symbolic attributes.14 To put it differently, they provide a means of communication, an idiom through which to convey a variety of aims relating to individual and collective identities. The meanings conferred to commodities by consumers “express cultural categories and principles, cultivate ideals, create and sustain lifestyles, construct notions of the self, and create (and survive) social change.”15 Material things, students of consumption have established, are embedded in human social relations, which they help forge, consolidate, and even subvert.
This concern for the “material constitution of sociality” has shaped the recent work of historians of material culture and their important debate about the origins and workings of modern consumer society.16 The power of things to construct identities and signify status is central to much of this scholarship—as attested, for instance, by Deborah Cohen’s influential study of the interiors of middle-class homes in nineteenth-century Britain.17 In Cohen’s expert hands, the story of Victorian domestic possessions is the story of their transformation from signs of sinful worldliness to means of individual self-expression in the face of the homogenizing pressures of mass society.
Within science and technology studies, a marriage of sorts between the findings of SCOT and anthropological approaches to consumption has been effected by analyses that adopt so-called “domestication” perspectives. As deployed by Anne Laegran (and, before her, by Merete Lie and Knut Sørensen), the category of “domestication” serves to capture the essence of the process through which
individual users, as well as collectives, negotiate the values and symbols of the technology while integrating it into the cultural setting. . . . Through domestication, technology changes as well as the user and, in the next step, the culture. More than within other constructivist theories on technology and users . . . the domestication perspective enables a thorough analysis of the users without relating directly to the design and manufacturing of the technology. It allows for redefinitions of practice and meanings even after the construction of the technology is closed from the producers’ and designers’ points of view.18
Rather than stressing the “closure mechanisms” through which the meanings of technologies are “stabilized” once and for all,19 domestication approaches foreground a continuing process of user reinterpretation and re-innovation, and the coexistence of alternative understandings of a given artifact—over and above the hegemonic codes that might originally have been loaded into any such artifact by producers, advertisers, or any others likely to overdetermine meaning.
As shown by Jeremy Prestholdt, domestication perspectives are especially useful in examining situations of cross-cultural consumption.20 Decoupling users from inventors and designers, domestication perspectives make it possible to study appropriation as a creative act in itself. This is a powerful tool in exploring the life of any object, but especially so when looking at how ostensibly peripheral societies use externally introduced technologies—such as firearms—for their own purposes, and imbue them with functions and meanings that do not always replicate those for which the objects in question had first been devised in their original, usually Western settings.
David Howes, who reads cross-cultural consumption through the lens of “creolization,” articulates an essential dimension of the phenomenon.
When one takes a closer look at the meanings and uses given to specific imported goods within specific “local contexts” or “realities,” one often finds that the goods have been transformed, at least in part, in accordance with the values of the receiving culture. . . . What the concept of creolization highlights . . . is that goods always have to be contextualized (given meaning, inserted into particular social relationships) to be utilized, and there is no guarantee that the intention of the producer will be recognized, much less respected, by the consumer from another culture.21
Owing something to Marshall