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In searching for the potential that lies in African societies, the chapters of this volume consider relationships between knowledge, education and social structure from multiple angles, from a macro-continental scale to national education systems, schools and local communities. The themes that cut across the chapters include education as a mode of transmitting values, the contrasting effects of school credentials and knowledge for use, politics and interactions among people surrounding a school and knowledge acquisition as a subjective process. The rich empirical analyses suggest that the subjective commitment of, and mutuality among, people will make the acquired knowledge a powerful 'tool for conviviality' to realize a stable life, even given the turmoil created by rapid institutional and environmental changes that confront African societies.
Marking the Land investigates how hunter-gatherers use physical landscape markers and environmental management to impose meaning on the spaces they occupy. The land is full of meaning for hunter-gatherers. Much of that meaning is inherent in natural phenomena, but some of it comes from modifications to the landscape that hunter-gatherers themselves make. Such alterations may be intentional or unintentional, temporary or permanent, and they can carry multiple layers of meaning, ranging from practical signs that provide guidance and information through to less direct indications of identity or abstract, highly symbolic signs of sacred or ceremonial significance. This volume investigates the conditions which determine the investment of time and effort in physical landscape marking by hunter-gatherers, and the factors which determine the extent to which these modifications are symbolically charged. Considering hunter-gatherer groups of varying sociocultural complexity and scale, Marking the Land provides a systematic consideration of this neglected aspect of hunter-gatherer adaptation and the varied environments within which they live.
Through moving life histories, Akira Takada gives the !Xun of north-central Namibia a voice in their own history. In contrast to other marginalised San minorities, the !Xun foster co-operative relationships with their neighbours, the Ovawambo and with the state. In the face of radical social changes over the past century, they have maintained traditional hunting and gathering as a backstop but also sold their skills and labour, acquired their own farms and livestock, and enriched their child-rearing practices in changing ecological conditions. Central to their identity and resilience are their kinship and naming practices which preserve their ethnic cohesion while promoting relationships with other groups. Contributing to an established literature on the San, Takada's book will allow detailed regional comparison on the !Kung-speaking groups of northern Namibia. Charming sketches from his notebooks give an intimate view of the anthropologist in the field.
While studies of San children have attained the peculiar status of having delineated the prototype for hunter-gatherer childhood, relatively few serious ethnographic studies of San children have been conducted since an initial flurry of research in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the author’s long-term field research among several San groups of Southern Africa, this book reconsiders hunter-gatherer childhood using “play” as a key concept. Playfulness pervades the intricate practices of caregiver-child interactions among the San: immediately after birth, mothers have extremely close contact with their babies. In addition to the mother’s attentions, other people around the babies activel...
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Joints in rocks, as distinct from tectonic faults, are fractures that form without "visible" displacement along the fracture plane. They are usually interpreted as tension fractures and analysed mechanically by employing a continuum mechanical theory of this fracture mode. "Rock Joints" deals exclusively with the mechanical genesis of joints in rocks. It is aimed at a coherent, critical and comprehensible presentation of the underlying mechanical processes of various types of joints and joint systems. In addition to tension fractures, the book extensively treats jointing from a different origin, i.e. hydraulic intrusion fractures, cleavage fractures, and shear joints. Throughout, special care is taken to elucidate and quantify the role of high fluid pressures in joint formation. Field examples illustrate formational aspects of jointing, and Mohr's stress circle used where possible to simplify the mathematics.
This book presents various useful processing techniques and applications of glasses and glass-ceramics. It covers various topics such as introduction to glass, its properties, thermodynamics of glass, heat transfer in glass melts, color in glass and advanced characterization techniques to analyze structure of glasses and glass-ceramics along with functional glasses and glass ceramics for advanced applications. This book will be a useful reference for students, researchers, scientists and technologists working in the field of materials science, especially glass.