BiblioVault - Books about Imports

Downtown Ladies

Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica

Gina A. Ulysse

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The Caribbean “market woman” is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica.

Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.

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European Metals in Native Hands

Rethinking Technological Change 1640-1683

Kathleen L. Ehrhardt

University of Alabama Press, 2005

The first detailed analysis of Native metalworking in the Protohistoric/Contact Period

From the time of their earliest encounters with European explorers and missionaries, Native peoples of eastern North America acquired metal trinkets and utilitarian items and traded them to other aboriginal communities. As Native consumption of European products increased, their material culture repertoires shifted from ones made up exclusively of items produced from their own craft industries to ones substantially reconstituted by active appropriation, manipulation, and use of foreign goods. These material transformations took place during the same time that escalating historical, political, economic, and demographic influences (such as epidemics, new types of living arrangements, intergroup hostilities, new political alliances, missionization and conversion, changes in subsistence modes, etc.) disrupted Native systems.

Ehrhardt's research addresses the early technological responses of one particular group, the Late Protohistoric Illinois Indians, to the availability of European-introduced metal objects. To do so, she applied a complementary suite of archaeometric methods to a sample of 806 copper-based metal artifacts excavated from securely dated domestic contexts at the Illiniwek Village Historic Site in Clark County, Missouri.

Ehrhardt's scientific findings are integrated with observations from historical, archaeological, and archival research to place metal use by this group in a broad social context and to critique the acculturation perspective at other Contact Period sites. In revealing actual Native practice, from material selection and procurement to ultimate discard, the author challenges technocentric explanations for Native material and cultural change at contact.

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Imports and Immigrants

Near Eastern Contacts with Iron Age Crete

Gail L. Hoffman

University of Michigan Press, 1998

While scholars have long acknowledged the importance of artistic relationships between ancient Greece and the Near East, recent discourse on multi-culturalism and diversity has ignited new debate over these issues both among scholars and in the broader public. Charges and countercharges of historical revisionism and systematic undervaluation of the debt owed by ancient Greece to the Near East and Africa have polarized the debate and obscured the actual evidence. In Imports and Immigrants, Gail L. Hoffman explores the primary archaeological basis for such discussions, namely the preserved physical remains, providing a foundation for constructive discussion of the relations and exchanges between ancient Greece and the Near East.
Drawing together all the evidence and arguments for Near Eastern immigrants in Crete, Hoffman demonstrates there are basic problems with the accepted interpretations. Evidence of continued technical expertise casts doubt on the necessity of reintroduction, while careful scrutiny of the evidence supporting immigrant craftsmen reveals many inadequacies in the currently accepted analyses.
Imports and Immigrants identifies the need for reassessing all dimensions of the question of artistic relationships between ancient Greece and other regions of the Aegean basin and suggests new avenues of inquiry in this important debate. The volume also reassesses arguments made for the presence of Near Eastern immigrants in Crete. This book includes a catalogue indispensable for future work on these issues and illustrations of most of the known imports to Crete.
Gail L. Hoffman is Associate Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology, Department of Classics, Yale University.

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