Suchergebnisse

Tourist crafts in Namibia serve as memories of exciting trips and holidays. The consumption of craft intersects with the consumption of culture because craft is seen as a marker of cultural identity. Purchasing decisions are made by an evaluation of cultural attributes of objects on offer. This paper describes the valorisation process of craft in the Namibian craft market. The history of craft objects will be contrasted with the perspectives of the tourists on craft in order to demonstrate how value(s) is imposed on craft objects. By presenting the production chain of Namibian crafts, colonial traces in the creation of value will be exposed. This paper shows that the perceptions of the tourists contradict with the history and the conditions of production of craft objects which leads to a fetishization of the crafts.

This article offers an overview of the research undertaken in Namibia in 2019 by a group of emerging academics studying at Hamburg Germany to shape the core of this volume. We aim to tackle the challenging question of the speaker position within a field of discourse around post-colonialism from which our group can legitimately speak, and sketch the necessities for and challenges facing a decolonization of language, action and research. It is impossible with a small - though sensitive and ambitious - group of upcoming anthropologists to do more than scratch the surface of a problem that is so big and multidimensional. So, in this volume we present partial glimpses of our encounter with post-colonial realities in Namibia, and do not claim to be able to paint more than a rough picture. Here we have chosen to present our projects within a broader description of the current Namibian condition including aspects of history, sociality, politics, economics and ecology, religion, gender, identity and art. Such a contextualized depiction, we hope, will offer the reader a more comprehensive picture with which to understand our contributions.