AZANIA: ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN AFRICA, 2016

VOL. 51, NO. 4, 534–539

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0067270X.2016.1233765

COMMENTARY

Movementality: a reflection on the experience of mobility

Akinwumi Ogundiran
Department of Africana Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard,
Charlotte, NC 28223, United States of America

Mobility has always been central to archaeological thinking about a wide range of topics,
from ethnogenesis and identity formation to settlement process, social networks, regional
interactions, power relations, technological innovation and eco-adaptive strategies, among
others. However, as Antonites and Ashley rightly observe here, ‘mobility and movement’
has generally been axiomatic in archaeological thought. Archaeology is a science peren-
nially concerned with the human experience of time in space. Yet, it is ironic that it has
been a captive of an epistemology that privileges the rootedness of cultures, traditions
and people in particular places. Therefore, whenever the concept of mobility is invoked,
it tends to default to the explanation of the spatial relationships between monuments,
sites, communities, places and objects in which unidirectional migration and diffusion
generally play a major role.
The sea change that diaspora, transnational and globalisation studies have wrought on
the conceptualisation of space, place, time, identity and network in both the social sciences
and the humanities has no doubt jolted archaeologists to begin to rethink and refine their
conceptual toolkits about mobility and movement beyond the usual interests in migration
and interactional practices. Most of the recent works on the archaeology of mobility (e.g.
Beaudry and Parno 2013; Leary 2014) have been inspired by the ‘mobility turn’ in archae-
ology’s kindred disciplines of human geography, cultural anthropology and sociology
(Sheller and Urry 2006: 208). These archaeological efforts are attuned toward: (1) devel-
oping a more reflective understanding of movement of people, ideas and objects as an
explanatory model or framework for other research questions; and (2) making mobility
a subject of study in its own right. But there is another line of mobility and movement
thinking in archaeology that has been inspired by performance studies (e.g. Insoll 2009;
Insoll and Kankpeyeng 2014). The convergence or intersection of these approaches to
the study of mobility-movement is what I call ‘movementality’. This is a kinetic experience
that is made up of three components: axial (spine-centred), gestural (limb motion), and
locomotor (bodily, mind and experiential travels). Whereas the first two may be non-
spatial, the third is inherently spatial.
The five articles in this special issue of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa are
concerned only with the locomotor and spatial dimensions of movementality. Yet they
are very diverse not only in thematic focus but also in scale and methodology. Their
themes range from the assessment of sub-continental patterns of movement in the mar-
ginal Sahara ecosystem (Gallinaro and Biagetti) to the regional scope of deterritorialised

CONTACT Akinwumi Ogundiran Ogundiran@uncc.edu

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 AZANIA: ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN AFRICA 535

power and hierarchical relationships among far-flung communities and polities in the
Shashe-Limpopo Confluence area of southern Africa (Antonites and Ashley). And from
the use of anthropogenic soil and vegetation data for documenting hyper-mobile pastor-
alist communities in East Africa (Boles and Lane) to how places and landscapes were his-
torically produced by the agrarian communities of the Upper Cassamance region of West
Africa through the local practices of what Canós Donnay here calls ‘shifting sedentism’.
There is also is the more intimate assessment of movement at the smaller scale that
deals with how changes in the location (spatial movement) of craft workspace and the
organisation of production affect (dis)continuities in the inter-generational transfer of
craft knowledge (Fredriksen and Bandama).
All these articles are preoccupied with using the ideas of mobility to answer some of the
oldest questions in archaeology, especially for expanding its frontiers as a science of time
in space. I use three examples to discuss this in more detail before exploring what the
implications might be for taking up the experience of mobility (movementality) itself as
a primary subject of archaeological inquiry. First, Antonites and Ashley’s article provides
new insights on how the mobility of people and things shaped the regional configuration
of power and authority in their research region, as well as the dynamics of power relation-
ships in a hierarchical political landscape. The article resonates with time-tested archaeo-
logical interests in how certain ancient objects — glass beads, gold, silver, metal, woven
cloth — became mediators of political and power relations, and their roles as actants
for forging imagined communities regionally and, since 1500, globally. Its importance
lies, in particular, in its exploration of the spatial relationships between the regional ‘hier-
archies of power’ and access to ‘objects of power’. Access to the latter may decrease
between the centre and its immediate surroundings, but, after reaching a spatial threshold,
may increase in those areas that are farthest from the political centre. As a result, the direct
control of those peripheries by the centre may weaken or become loose. This scenario may
occur when those frontiers or edges of the polity were the sources of objects of power or
were central to the movement of the objects of power to politically charged destinations
(e.g. ports of inter-regional trade). In that case, the movement of goods and people
between the political capital and its far-flung periphery had to be carefully and creatively
managed in order to enable the political centre to secure and maintain buy-ins from the
outlying territories, especially those too distant to subdue militarily. In turn, the distant
provinces might crave the protection and prestige that affiliation with the political
capital offered. The implication of all of this is that we need to rethink our a priori hier-
archisation of nodes and networks in a regional system of highly mobile and fluid power
relations.
Second, Fredriksen and Bandama’s article challenges us to consider how the shifting of
the locale of practice, as well as the spatial restructuring and institutional reorganisation of
the mode of production, affect the processes of crafting and craft learning. Their article
resonates with a direction in archaeological studies that privileges ‘craft production as a
site of situated learning’ (Roddick and Stahl 2016: 3), a conceptual framework that has
been valuable for investigating the constitution, reproduction and atrophy of communities
of craft practice (Sassaman and Rudolphi 2001). Sites of situated learning — household
and workshop, among others — are often configured by the movement of ideas, capital
and people and are shaped by sociopolitical and economic regimes. These regimes of hege-
monic expansion and market economies are especially known to foster new practices of
536 A. OGUNDIRAN

mobility, including tributary, prestige, military, bureaucratic and commercial travels, as

well as pilgrimages. It is often in these contexts of diverse movements that new craft tech-
niques and styles are learned and collages of different craft traditions coalesce into new
practices. As a result, previous craft practices may disappear, especially where the organ-
isation of production is integrated into the larger systems of power relationships. Sites of
situated learning may proliferate across multiple social spaces that include, but also trans-
cend, households and workshops. Moreover, the very processes of learning associated
with the production of a new product may proliferate, especially as each of the stages of
the chaîne opératoire associated with that product become specialised. In the case of
ceramic production, for example, such stages may include clay mining, the preparation
of clay, potting (clay sculpturing), decoration and surface treatment and, ultimately,
firing. But rather than seeing these situated learning centres as bounded spaces — house-
holds versus workshops — we may borrow from Andrew Roddick’s (2016: 129-131)
articulation of the concept of juxtaposition in order to rethink how the back-and-forth
movement of objects, people, knowledge and power interlink multiple sites of situated
learning. This juxtaposition uncovers three likely sites for understanding how mobility
affects situated learning in craft production: (1) the new knowledge created and learned
in one site of situated learning (e.g. the workshop) may be brought back to another site
(e.g. the household) under the same or different regime of power and may then become
a new tradition for a new generation of agents; (2) the multidirectional movements
across multiple sites of situated learning and the accompanying juxtaposition may
change the gender, age, class/rank and ethnic profiles of craftsmen and craftswomen in
very unpredictable ways; and (3) there are situated sites of learning that are neither house-
holds nor workshops/collectives and that transcend the community of practice associated
with a particular craft. For example, a potter may develop new motifs and forms from the
situated learning sites of the woodcarver, metalworker, cloth weaver, basket weaver,
gourd/calabash carver, as well as in the market place, at festivals or in other spaces of
experience that an expanding or exploding regime of power has juxtaposed on one
another. These juxtapositions erase or diminish boundaries of skill and experience and
bring seemingly autonomous sites of situated learning closer together.
Third and finally, Canós Donnay’s concept of ‘shifting sedentism’ is particularly helpful
for rethinking the settlement dynamics of agricultural communities. This is a situated
practice whereby sizable villages (and towns) in the Upper Casamance region of
Senegal regularly shifted their location within a period of one to eight generations to
new sites ranging in distance between a few hundred metres to five kilometres from
one another, while at the same time keeping intact the same name, identity and core insti-
tutions, both political and ritual. This continuous process of settlement formation and
abandonment over the long term, a phenomenon that I have also called ‘settlement
cycling’ (Ogundiran 2002: 3), is a common feature of settlement behavior in the cultures
of Niger-Congo-speaking peoples, with implications for how we read the movement on
the landscape over the long-term (e.g. Stahl 2001; Ogundiran 2002; Usman 2012).
Drought, factional conflict, outbreaks of disease and unexplained quick successions of
death (of people and livestock), the quest for better security and population growth, con-
quest and incorporation into a new political structure and new trade routes have been
some of the reasons for population displacement, settlement abandonment and the cre-
ation of new settlements. All make the landscape alive with crisscrossing movements
 AZANIA: ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN AFRICA 537

that were ultimately linked to resource utilisation strategies (e.g. the preservation of soil
fertility through shifting cultivation) and changing dynamics of intergroup relations.
Shallow stratigraphies, generally of less than 100 cm in depth, are the hallmark of these
shifting settlements. In these cases, as well as in those of mobile pastoralist settlement prac-
tices (see Boles and Lane), the exploration of horizontal multi-sited stratigraphy, rather
than investigations of deep vertically stratified deposits, is the pathway for developing
regional chronologies. The ‘mobility turn’ therefore offers us the opportunity to develop
a research strategy that allows us to understand an historical community as a moving
target, a multi-sited community that is widely distributed across the landscape through
abandoned and living settlements, shrines and memory sites, among others. In this
sense, mobility is not only about movement across space and between places, but also
across time and generations that include the ancestors and the unborn. It is also about
the memory of what was and an anticipation of what would be. Canós Donnay’s ‘shifting
sedentism’ therefore speaks to an experience of movement that was in search of eternity,
one in which mobility was not an antithesis of permanence, but the very process by which
permanence is made possible.
There are other dormant but familiar topics waiting for our movementality awakening.
A case in point: the architectures of movement such as potsherd pavements and ditch-
embankment complexes call our attention to different sets of questions about the
kinetic experience of space. Such questions may include how urban spaces were created
and different sections of the urban landscape were linked to, or disconnected from, one
another through festival, commercial and political mobilities. For example, major thor-
oughfares in the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in southwestern Nigeria were paved with potsherd
floors between about the eleventh and fourteenth centuries AD to convey residents and
visitors through the densely populated urban landscape in acts of pilgrimages, devotional
parades, commercial travels, political pageantry and quotidian lives. There are also tech-
nologies of mobility to consider — biological and mechanical and their hybrids. It is not
only in the past 200 years that aircraft, telecommunications and digital technologies have
collapsed space and time, transforming our planet into a hyper-mobile global ‘village’. As
archaeologists, we know too well the transformative impacts of camels, horses, horse-
drawn chariots, watercraft and other related technologies of mobility in the making of
human civilisations. Africa was a leader, not a laggard, in the genesis of some of these
ancient technologies.
So far, I have focused on aspects of the locomotor-spatial dimension of movementality,
in accordance with the scope of this collection of papers. What about the other two aspects
of this kinetic experience — axial and gestural movements? Here, I should point out that
there is an important body of literature on movement in African archaeology the referen-
tial importance of which deserves closer attention. That body of works was spearheaded by
Timothy Insoll and his collaborators and focused on the performativity of ritual and its
inherent dimensions of movement. While Insoll recognises that archaeologists usually
encounter ritual as static materiality, he states the obvious when noting that such static
configurations of ritual assemblages are often the products and instruments of intense
bodily and axial movements. In reaching this conclusion, Insoll seems not to have
taken his cue from the recent ‘mobility turns’in the social sciences, but to have been
inspired instead by performance theories in the study of ritual and religion (Bell 1992;
Parkin 1992). Through his work on the Nyoo shrine, an Earth shrine, in the Tongo
538 A. OGUNDIRAN

Hills of northern Ghana, Insoll has pioneered an archaeology of movement in African

archaeology that seeks to unite all the three dimensions of kinetic experience (movemen-
tality) — axial, gestural and locomotor. In this effort, Insoll and his collaborators have pro-
vided us with the following insights: (1) new imaginings of how archaeological
configurations of ritual were produced by bodily movement (e.g. dance) and how those
material configurations were co-opted for developing bodily sensors, acoustic experience
and embodied memory (Insoll 2009); and (2) elucidation of the meaning and meaningful-
ness of the bodily postures portrayed in sculptures from northern Ghana dated to between
AD 700 and 1500 (Insoll and Kankpeyeng 2014). Other recent works on rituals in African
and African Diaspora contexts have also conjoined movementality and materiality in
order to understand how ritual objects and spaces define movements and directionality
in the generation of social actions (Ogundiran and Saunders 2014). These works invite
us to consider astral mobility as a subject of archaeological inquiry. Astral movement,
despite the negative attitude of modern science, existed in the practice, reality and con-
sciousness of all past societies, just as it still does in most societies today. Our role as
archaeologists is to discover what materials were used in the past to alter the state of
basic human consciousness in order for certain individuals, groups and communities to
enter the astral plane and ‘embark’ on magical, miraculous, paranormal and telepathic
travels in the quest for self-realisation and transcendence.
In closing, these articles respond enthusiastically to Tim Creswell’s (2010) invitation
that we look at mobility as a flexible multiscalar concept, especially on how people,
things and ideas intersect with one another at multiple registers of temporal, social, and
spatial scales. But we should not stop our journey at the signpost of the ‘mobility turn’.
Rather, we should continue on farther up the winding and unwieldy road to embrace
movementality — a far more multidimensional experience of mobility and motion;
spatial and non-spatial; locomotor, axial, and gestural; physical and astral. That destina-
tion promises to widen our angles of vision, enabling us to ask new questions, develop
new research designs, collect new movementality-centred archaeological data and hope-
fully provide new answers. Indeed, the ontologies of movementality may offer us the tem-
plate to unite all the five dimensions of archaeological space-time systematics — spatiality,
materiality, temporality, sociality and historicity. And that would indeed bring us closer to
a unified science of archaeology.

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