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GOSSELAIN Olivier
Units
CReA-Patrimoine. Research Centre in Archaeology and Heritage
Person in charge of the Unit : Oui
The CReA-Patrimoine is a leading research centre of the Université libre de Bruxelles, promoting national and international programs on archaeology and cultural heritage. It constitutes the priviledged partner between the university and the public authorities in charge of cultural heritage. The CReA-Patrimoine is also responsible for practical training and field schools for undergraduate and graduate students in archaeology.
Center of Cultural Anthropology
Person in charge of the Unit : Oui
The Centre for Cultural Anthropology (CAC) of the ULB is specialised in the fields of religious anthropology, environmental anthropology, historical anthropology, cultural technology, and the study of material cultures. Its fieldworks are mainly situated in Africa, Asia and South America, both in rural and urban settings.
Projetcs
This research proposal focuses on Development Incomes (DI), namely on financial amounts drawn from the exploitation of natural resources and allocated to riverine communities with a view to invest in sustainable development. The major objective is to assess social and economic impacts generated by DI projects which are financed by private companies from the sectors of mining, forestry and ecotourism in West and Central Africa.
My doctoral thesis is based on an examination of the relation between waste and urban environment in Delhi. As Indian cities have been facing considerable population growth and concentrate wealth generation and rising consumption levels, solid waste generation increases rapidly in urban areas. In Delhi, the accelerated urbanisation pace and urban space densification processes of the last decades have remarkably transformed the urban landscape and brought about their own set of challenges. As a result, solid waste management is an ever more critical issue given the multiple shortcomings of which it is suffering. Primarily resting upon the municipal authorities and informal waste workers, it has opened up to large companies with public-private partnerships on the rise, along with other actors such as non-governmental organisations and other corporate actors. My research is inspired by urban political ecology and aims to describe how the urban environment is being produced and reproduced through the reconfiguration of solid waste management networks emerging from the arrival of new actors. This study's ambition is to analyse these changes through a multilevel approach and to provide a comprehensive picture of the sector's evolution as well as the sociopolitical, economic and cultural relations on which it rests. It puts into perspective firstly - the local arrangements governing waste flows in a context of privatisation of door-to-door garbage collection; secondly - the emerging changes in the recycling networks; and thirdly - the logic and practices of waste treatment infrastructure through public-private partnerships. This approach opens on reflections on the transformation of the Indian city, the complex relations between the powers guiding its management, and how this affects and transforms the urban environment.
The main objective is to develop an integrated and broadly applicable methodology for landslide resilience analysis in data-poor environments in Equatorial Africa and apply this in four study areas seriously suffering from landslides in Uganda and Cameroon.
Indigenous Entrepreneurship in South Africa and Zimbabwe: Policy and Practice
In several African states, the discussion about economic empowerment of indigenous people forms an integral part of most policy discussions. With indigenous peoples economic circumstances not improving in South Africa and Zimbabwe, in particular, it would be reasonable to investigate the existing economic empowerment policies in both countries. The evolvement of economic empowerment policies is worth investigating particularly looking at how they have benefited indigenous communities entrepreneurially. It is evident that colonialism in Africa left significant wounds through skewed land and business ownership, uneven education systems and unequal opportunities in employment and business. The apartheid system in pre-independence South Africa used tailored legislation and governance systems to dispossess natives of their land, train Africans for certain forms of labour through Bantu education and ensured Afrikaner economic empowerment and racial dominance over non-whites. The same could be argued for the colonial government in Zimbabwe which relegated indigenous people to poor agricultural land (reserves), and controlled the provision of education to ensure that the missionaries would not 'over educate' the indigenous people. Policies such as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) in South Africa and Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment (IEE) in Zimbabwe have been in place for several years now. The question of this study, however is whether these policies have any impact on the designated indigenous entrepreneurship practice and if so, what impact is there? If not, where is the challenge and how can they be addressed? Qualitative research methods in a form of in-depth interviews and observations will be adopted, in a purposive sampled population of indigenous entrepreneurs in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The definition of indigenous people used in this study will follow the guidelines stipulated by the ACHPR in defining the rights of indigenous peoples in Africa.
Atlas of the ceramic traditions of Niger
The project aims at the exhaustive documentation and historical reconstitution of the ceramic traditions in Niger. It is based on systematic surveys in the pottery production centres of the country, in order to 1) caracterise the manufacturing processes and the socio-economic context in which this activity takes place, 2) to reconstitute the networks and spreading processes of the traditions and 3) to collect materials, tools and finished products. The fieldwork also offers the opportunity to link two regions where the ULB carried out researches during the past fifteen years : the occidental part of West Africa and the occidental part of Central Africa. The project further meets a demand of the scientific and political authorities of Niger to valorize the ceramic heritage of the country.
In Vietnam, the production of pottery vessels has undergone many changes over the last thirty years, due to the economic opening of the country. On the one hand, tourism and the export of goods has led to the development of new products and new manufacturing techniques. On the other hand, the democratisation of plastic and metal containers engendered a decline in the use of domestic pottery. Also, pottery production – especially cooking and storage pottery – remains largely ignored by scholars working in Vietnam, who generally focus on fine chinaware or ceramics which have long been exported throughout South East Asia. Due to a lack of demand, the production of domestic pottery is now in decline and this know-how, which was once important for the social life of communities, is now doomed to disappear. However, they do hold a lot of information that could contribute to our knowledge of the history of common people in South East Asia, which remains largely unknown. The main aim of this project is to document, through films and photographs, the entire manufacturing process and uses of domestic pottery in 8 Vietnamese villages where potters belong to 4 different ethnic groups (Kinh, Mnong Rlam, Bana and Co Tu). The comparison of the processes and the confrontation with available historical data will not only allow to approach the history of local pottery traditions but also that of historical relationships between ethnic groups in the area.
Multidisciplinary doctoral research on the environmental anthropology that studies the significance of adaptation in the context of multifactorial and multidimensional process pastoralism in mountainous areas. The field research , occupies a prominent place in all the research , will be developed through the case study of Gaddis ( agro-pastoral herders ) semi- nomadic Bharmour Himalayas (Himachal Pradesh , North India)
From Seeds to Rags: Textile Production in Dendi and Borgou (North Benin)
The project aims primarily at documenting cotton cloth production in North Benin, from cotton growing activities to thread production (ginning, carding, spinning), weaving on a vertical loom, indigo dyeing, and sewing. One of the target areas is the Dendi (along the southern bank of the Niger River) where technical knowledge is especially endangered. For documentary and comparative purposes, fieldwork will also be carried out further south, in Borgou –the second target area–, where parts of the whole textile production sequence still survive.
The project focuses on the history of women in the southern part of Dendi (Niger Valley, Northern Benin). Absent traditional and official narratives, the place and the voice of women in the socio-economic upheavals in the region between the late 19th and 20th centuries (Islamization, colonization, independence, Marxist revolution) remain unknown. The project objective is to develop a method suitable for the reconstruction of the recent history of a group ''target'' marginalized. Based on the achievements of the cultural technology, my approach is to use the material culture and techniques as alternative historical sources in two observational contexts. The first deals with daily activities (domestic, commercial, agricultural), the second covers the ceremonial activities (initiation, marriage, possession). For each of these spheres, the constituent technical processes of the various activities will be identified: the actors and social relations, materials, tools and objects, gestures, and mobilized representations. Such analysis allows then multiscalar a comparative study. To enter the diachronic, this analytical and comparative perspective will be related with the life trajectory of informants. While helping to fill the gaps documentaries on history, still poorly understood, in this region of West Africa, the project involved the renewal of objects and methods of historical research on marginalized groups.
From Seeds to Rags: Textile Production in Dendi and Borgou (North Benin).
Direction : Olivier Gosselain en collaboration avec Lucie Smolderen, Barpougouni Mardjoua et Florian Vallée. Commanditaire : British Museum Le projet vise principalement à documenter la production de tissus de coton au Nord Bénin, des activités de culture du coton à la production de fil (égrenage, cardage, filature), en passant par le tissage sur métier à tisser vertical, la teinture à l'indigo et la couture. L'une des zones cibles est le Dendi (le long de la rive sud du fleuve Niger) où les connaissances techniques sont particulièrement menacées. À des fins documentaires et comparatives, des travaux de terrain seront également menés plus au sud, à Borgou - la deuxième zone cible -, où survivent encore des parties de l'ensemble de la séquence de production textile.
Thesis carried out under the supervision of Prof. DV Joiris , Faculty of Social and Political Sciences , Social Sciences Division, Cultural Anthropology Center , ULB, Brussels and Prof. Yves Mandjem , University of Yaounde II , Cameroon.
This doctoral research contributes to reflection on the feasibility and on monitoring new environmental policies related to sustainable management of tropical forests and the fight against climate change. REDD + (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) in the center of this reflection was the subject of many studies, but researchers are rarely interested in the observation of in situ practices in both national administrations and the rural areas concerned. The objective of this doctoral research is to increase knowledge about the mechanism through a multiscale analysis of REDD + in the DRC, specifically on set Batéké in the administrative region of Kwamouth territory. The study focused on both the strategic position of the DRC vis-à-vis REDD + in international negotiations, the institutionalization of politics at the national level and its operationalization at the local level. The question of the social construction of REDD + is thus considered from the point of view of the relationship between these three scales. The studied policy is understood as a process historically and socially constructed, through an original approach combining theoretical development anthropology, political ecology and ethnoecology. Feedback-monitoring tools for REDD + will be developed from the understanding of international mechanisms, national and local ownership of the policy. - Collaboration: ERAIFT: Regional Postgraduate School of Planning and Integrated Management of Tropical Forests and Territories, University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (joint supervision). Disciplines: Political Ecology, Development Anthropology, Ethnoecology.
In North Africa, hundreds of rock art sites located in desert areas testify to the occupation of the so-called ‘Green Sahara’, when palaeoenvironmental conditions were more favourable to human settlement and activities. Despite a long tradition of research, most striking is that nobody has investigated the potential of this rock art corpus to tell us about social and anthropological considerations. The aim of NARA-PalSoc research project is to investigate representations of human groups with questions about (1) human relations, (2) social organizations and (3) subsistence activities and worldviews. The project proposes to use this underused body of data in order to elaborate what might be termed as a "Palaeosociology" of both the last hunter-gatherers and the first pastoralists groups in North Africa and for a better understanding of the social dynamics at a time of major shifts in the ways of life.
The project brings together a team of archaeologists, historians and anthropologists studying the Niger Valley where it borders Niger and Bénin (West Africa). We are hoping to shed more light on the people that inhabited the area in the past 1500 years and to understand how population movements and craft techniques shaped the area's past.
History from Things and Techniques: Crossing the Present and the Past in Central Africa (2021-2031)
Projet FED-tWIN Prf-2019-056 -HisTech Promoteurs : Olivier Gosselain, Alexandre Livingstone Smith; Chercheur : Nicolas Nikis À l’Interface de l’anthropologie des techniques, de l’archéologie et de l’histoire, le projet HisTech aborde l’histoire de l’Afrique centrale à travers l’étude des techniques céramiques et métallurgiques. Si de nombreuses sources sont disponibles pour reconstituer l’histoire des périodes récentes en Afrique centrale – documents écrits, objets, photographie, histoire orale -, seule la culture matérielle permet de documenter les périodes plus anciennes et d’investiguer les dynamiques sociohistoriques sur le temps long. La poterie, omniprésente comme élément de la vie quotidienne, et les objets en cuivre et fer, métaux dont l’importance sociopolitique et économique a été depuis longtemps soulignée, sont les principaux éléments présents dans les assemblages archéologiques dans et autour du bassin du Congo et forment le cœur du projet. Celui-ci tente d’identifier des traditions techniques à partir de la comparaison et la cartographie de chaines opératoires actuelles ou du passé récent (fin 19e siècle – 20e siècle) reconstituées grâce à des interviews avec des artisans, des documents d’archives ou des collections muséales. Ces dernières permettent ensuite d’explorer la manière dont les artisans interagissent entre eux, mais elles peuvent également révéler des liens plus profonds avec différents types d’identités sociales. Dans un second temps, l’identification de traditions techniques sur base des données archéologiques, dont l’interprétation bénéficie du référentiel technique constitué par les données récentes, permet de détecter les continuités et ruptures de leur distribution spatiale dans le temps. Grâce à cette approche diachronique, il est possible d’identifier les changements à long terme de la culture matérielle et d’explorer les transformations sociohistoriques plus globales en Afrique centrale.
Collaborative Research Project, Fondation Philippe Wiener – Maurice Anspach Olivier Gosselain (Promoteur) et Nicolas Nikis (Co-promoteur), ULB Marcos Martinón-Torres (Promoteur) & Carmen Ting (Co-promotrice), University of Cambridge Le projet vise à mieux comprendre la relation entre les différentes communautés productrices de poterie décorée de motifs inspirés du tissage en Afrique centrale de l’ouest entre le 11e et le 18e s. CE et leur lien avec des traditions céramiques plus anciennes. En utilisant la méthode de la technologie comparée, les processus de fabrication seront reconstitués et comparés afin de déterminer si la ressemblance stylistique reflète seulement le goût pour le tissage parmi les royaumes et les communautés de la région ou des interaction plus étroite dans le temps et l'espace, comme des communautés de pratique. En outre, l'utilisation de talc dans la pâte présente des similitudes avec des productions datées des 1e millénaires BCE et CE. L'identification de caractéristiques techniques communes pourrait contribuer à mieux comprendre la transition - mal connue en raison d’un manque de données - entre deux périodes clés de l'histoire de l'Afrique centrale : les premiers villages liés à l'expansion bantoue et le développement des royaumes au cours du 2e millénaire CE.
