ABSTRACT
Africa, in anthropological terms, is now over-represented by studies of 'development', violence, ethnicity, land and witchcraft, in the same way as it once was in terms of, say, kinship, colonialism and witchcraft. Likewise African archaeology cannot be saved from its precarious positionality by 'ethno- or 'indigenous' archaeology; nor can anthropology by 'ethnographic theory' or 'ontography'. 'Centrifugalists' have tended to take the opposite view, but their creative thinking has, as a result, too often been relegated to anthropology's margins. The material engagements involved in the production of 'typologies' for culture history approaches, 'explanations' for processualism, and 'webs of meaning' of postprocessualism open some doors to material's excessive potentialities, but the demand to take stuff seriously would equally apply to all sorts of 'other ways' in which stuff is encountered and meaningfully constituted: performative, sensual, tactile, perceptive and imaginative.
