Article ID: CBB834980935

Machines That Cook or Women Who Cook? Lessons from Mali on Technology, Labor, and Women's Things (2020)

unapi

Laura Ann Twagira (Author)


Technology and Culture
Volume: 61
Issue: 2 supplement
Pages: S77-S103


Publication Date: 2020
Edition Details: Theme of the Issue: Africanizing the History of Technology
Language: English

By the last quarter of the twentieth century, grain mills had proliferated across rural Mali and were central to the story of women and development. Yet, proponents of such supposed labor-saving technologies often assumed that women in Africa have little technological experience or knowhow. The present article examines this well-worn narrative with an emphasis on the ways in which Malian women have interrogated different technological interventions from their own shifting perceptions. It is a history that predates the introduction of grain mills and post-colonial development and focuses on women’s savvy when it came to assessing new technologies, especially in relation to cooking. This historical examination further illuminates not only women’s concern for labor-saving technologies, but also women’s ability to shape the infrastructure of their work. In so doing, they gender their tools as women’s things and assert control over the meanings of their own work and status.

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Article Laura Ann Twagira (April 2020) Introduction: Africanizing the History of Technology. Technology and Culture. unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Laura Ann Twagira
Downey, Gregory John
Faulkner, Wendy
Fren, Allison de
Gardey, Delphine
Irish, Sharon
Journals
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Technology and Culture
Technology's Stories
Environmental History
History and Technology
Journal of Social History
Publishers
Akademika Publishing
Blackwell Publishers
Duke University Press
Fort Schuyler Press
Ohio University Press
University of Illinois Press
Concepts
Technology and gender
Women and technology
Labor and laborers
Technology
Technology and society
Technology and culture
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, late
21st century
19th century
17th century
18th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Africa
Mali
Finland
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