Life has an edge, sometimes keen, sometimes blunt. Enter iron—digging, cutting, shining, or rusting, but always transforming circumstances. Iron is “born” when smelting releases it from rock. How did sub-Saharan Africans affect these complex processes, sculpt natural-draft furnaces by hand, and create malleable iron to change the world? How did smelters and smiths know which ore to select, which wood to cut for charcoal, and how to position logs within the furnace to stoke fires of the astounding heat required to smelt iron? Who knew what to do, how to hammer, when to quench, and what to reheat? What arcane sciences were mastered, what dramas performed? Why this shape for a tool, weapon, or emblem of status and not that, and how was perfection realized and recognized? How did ironworking legitimize and empower leadership and rule, and vice versa, however ambiguous such roles most surely are? As a Yorùbá oríkì...
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Spring 2018
March 01 2018
Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths
Allen F. Roberts,
Allen F. Roberts
Allen F Roberts is Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA and a member of the UCLA African Arts editorial board. His most recent book, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (2013, Indiana University Press), won the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publications Award from ACASA for Best African Arts Book 2011–2013. [email protected].
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Marla C. Berns
Marla C. Berns
Marla C. Berns is Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA and a member of the UCLA African Arts editorial board. [email protected]
Search for other works by this author on:
Allen F. Roberts
Allen F Roberts is Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA and a member of the UCLA African Arts editorial board. His most recent book, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (2013, Indiana University Press), won the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publications Award from ACASA for Best African Arts Book 2011–2013. [email protected].
Marla C. Berns
Marla C. Berns is Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA and a member of the UCLA African Arts editorial board. [email protected]
Online ISSN: 1937-2108
Print ISSN: 0001-9933
© 2018 by the Regents of the University of California.
2018
The Regents of the University of California
African Arts (2018) 51 (1): 66–85.
Citation
Allen F. Roberts, Marla C. Berns; Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths. African Arts 2018; 51 (1): 66–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_a_00393
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