4  Technology and Morality—Rituals in Iron Working among the Fipa and Pangwa Peoples in Southwestern Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the 1990s among the Pangwa and Fipa peoples in southwestern Tanzania, this discussion focuses on the locally constructed collective and individual perceptions of technological processes in iron smelting and how these are connected to imagination. Of particular interest is the largely neglected aspect of morality involved in the rituals surrounding iron working. It is argued that aspects of morality, as well as magic and witchcraft, explain the concerns of the people engaged in the complex technology of making iron far better than does fertility symbolism.

Cloaked in secrecy, magic, and taboo, traditional African iron smelting is known for symbols associated with a gendered procreative model, as discussed by Eugenia Herbert (1993; see also Childs 1991a, 1991b; Childs and Killick 1993; Haaland and Shinnie 1985; Haaland et al. 2002; Mapunda 1995; Schmidt 1996a, 1996b; Schmidt and Mapunda 1997). Herbert's procreative paradigm explicates the meaning of smelters and how they are inculcated with notions of the human life cycle as expressed through smelting rituals. Building on the procreative model so intertwined in African iron-working technology, I explore how technology and rituals are connected through ideas concerned with the individual's “well-being” and the importance of “doing the right things.”

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the 1990s among the Pangwa and Fipa peoples in southwestern Tanzania, this discussion focuses on the locally constructed collective and individual perceptions of technological processes in iron smelting and how these are connected to collective and individual imagination. Of particular interest is the largely neglected aspect of morality involved in the rituals surrounding iron working.

Technology—Some Methodological and Theoretical Considerations

With a chaîne opératoire methodological approach (i.e., Lemonnier 1976, 1992; Leroi-Gourhan 1993) to understanding technology, and in particular iron working, several reenactments of smelting practices were observed among the Pangwa (Barndon 2004) and the Fipa peoples (Barndon 1996a) during field studies carried out in the 1990s. After an initial trip to a village near Sumbawanga in Ufipa in March, the first season of fieldwork among the Fipa started in May 1990. Accompanying me in the field was a Tanzanian student from the University of Dar es Salaam; he was not Fipa, so our interviews and conversations with the local iron workers went through numerous filters of translation. I speak Norwegian, my interpreter kiChagga, and we both manage Swahili but communicate primarily in English, while the Fipa smiths spoke kiFipa and Swahili. Despite these language barriers, we managed to grasp the essence of Fipa iron working; in addition to the tight focus of our topic and multiple interviews, we were aided by the numerous travelers, missionaries, ethnographers, and Africanist archaeologists who previously carried out similar studies among the Fipa (Wembah-Rashid 1969; Willis 1966, 1989, 1991). Moreover, the dictionaries of kiFipa language provided in the work of Roy Willis (1981) and Robert Wyckaert (1914) minimized language gaps.

In addition to holding conversations and interviews with former iron workers, we documented the entire iron-working process, from the initial collection of raw materials to charcoal production, the construction of furnaces, and the creation of the final product. Some smelts that we observed (and participated in) used furnaces built for these reenactments while others were carried out as secondary smelts in old standing furnaces (Barndon 2004:334–335). Complementing our detailed observations of every aspect involved in the preparatory stages to the smelting process and smelt reenactments, we carried out numerous interviews among the participants. A second field trip among the Fipa in 1991 and two similar field trips during the course of a year among the Pangwa totaled approximately one year of fieldwork for these studies.

Inspired by Marcel Mauss (1935) and André Leroi-Gourhan (1964), Pierre Lemonnier argues that “technologies become social representations of these bigger ‘systems’ called societies” (Lemonnier 1992:9). Understanding and knowing technology, encounters with technology, and the implementation of technology has its point of departure in personal experience, in an attitude toward the world—what Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) terms “pre-objective”—and as a result technology must be resituated in people's engagement with the world, in their lived experience. I wish to illustrate how technology and knowledge is lived, localized, and embedded in biophysical and social contexts (Barndon 2004; Knudsen 2003:98) and to explore how iron smelting technology serves as a medium for morality. As Chris Tilley suggests, “material objects form a powerful metaphorical medium through which people may reflect on their world in a way simply not possible with words alone” (Tilley 2002b:28; see also Tilley 1999).

In this chapter, I illustrate how, as Lemonnier argues, “technology and technological systems are integrated into the bigger systems we call societies and become representations of these” (Lemonnier 1992:9). In the attempt to move beyond symbolism in technology as mere representations of something else, we can better understand technologies through people's engagement with them. By situating the smelting furnaces in the life, experiences, religions, politics, and cultural modes of the people studied, we can hope to understand the logic in Pangwa and Fipa iron smelting. In this chapter, attention is drawn to morals and how morality is connected to technology and rituals.

I focus my theoretical concern toward phenomenology, metaphorical imagination and embodiment (Johnson 1987, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Tilley 1994, 1999, 2002a, 2002b), and structuralism, in line with Stefan Bekaert's suggested combination of phenomenology and structuralism (Bekaert 1998).

Ethnographic data show that we are drawing at various levels not only on lived experiences but more so on metonyms and metaphors, and even binary, codic oppositions (Bekaert 1998:7, 25; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999:97; Merleau-Ponty 1962:67).

In his study of Sakata smiths in Congo, Bekaert draws upon phenomenology and structuralism, viewing these two perspectives as the two ends of a line that has six distinguished or separated but integrated levels in the experienced and symbolized repertoire used by the smiths. Thus, in between what Bekaert calls the phenomenological “type” and structural “codic opposition” a host of other semantic operations are at work (Bekaert 1998:16–17). What Bekaert calls “typified experience” is what would be “normal” for the Fipa or Pangwa smiths or iron workers, exemplified by, for instance, the exclusion of women from the smelting camp.

African Iron Working

Philosophers, social anthropologists, and archaeologists build upon the observation that technological activities and techniques are not merely mundane or trivial but loaded with cultural messages (Bugliarello and Doner 1979; Ingold 1990; Pfaffenberger 1988, 1992). Through the intimate linkage of the smelting process to social, ritual, religious, and mythical aspects of life, African iron working is an outstanding example of how technology is much more than a collection of techniques. Walter Cline'sMining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa (1937), François Kense's Traditional African Iron Working (1983), Eugenia Herbert's Iron, Gender and Power (1993), and Peter Schmidt's Iron Technology in East Africa (1997) all address African metallurgy within a cultural framework. Evidence for the close link between ritual and technology is abundant in African iron smelting, and the various iron-working practices were symbolically linked to religious rites oriented around beliefs concerning human fertility, procreation, and childbirth. Thus,

the smelters were the husbands of their furnace wife who transformed ores to iron and gave birth to the iron blooms. The furnace's husband was the master smelter and taboos against sexual intercourse (seen as adulterous behavior) were mandated for the participants in a smelt. Women were not allowed entry at the smelting sites because they could disturb the transformative process. [Brelsford 1949:28]

Taking a semiotic approach, David Collett (1985:179) argues for a conceptual and linguistic link between smelting, cooking, and procreation and explains East African iron smelting symbolism in terms of a semantic principle in which women, pots, and furnaces are linked because they all transform substances into an irreversible state. The fetus in the woman's womb and the iron ore in the furnace are linked because both involve a transformation of one substance into another and this transformation is mediated by heat. In many Bantu-speaking communities we find a notion of heat as the transformative agent and the idea that sexual intercourse makes a couple “hot” (Heusch 1956, 1980; Marwick 1965:66; Richards 1982; Weiss 1998). Collett argues that the heat-mediated transformation is basic to the symbolic triad of cooking, procreation, and iron smelting and that these transformations produce irreversible results (Collett 1985:505). Collett's observations are in essence what are known as the procreative model (Herbert 1993). Although the resulting explanatory power of the procreative model is compelling, this concentration perhaps distracts from other essential components in the rituals in iron working. Apart from studies conducted by Pierre de Maret (1980, 1985), Nicholas van der Merwe and David Avery (1987), and more recently Mike Rowlands and Jean Pierre Warnier (1993, 1996), the use of magic and medicines in iron production is largely unexamined.

Turning to magic and religion, study of iron smelting symbolism does not mean ignoring body metaphors. Numerous social anthropologists have demonstrated how people in non-Western cultures live by body symbolism and in symbolic universes based on concepts of the body wherein separation, differentiation, and classifications of body-related symbols have been fundamental (Douglas 1966, 1973; Lambek and Strathern 1998; Solheim 1998:67; Strathern 1996; Turner 1967, 1969; Weiss 1998; Willis 1981). In the following, I demonstrate that in the iron smelting contexts described, morality, or the well-being of one's self, is an embodied and disembodied value of which one should take account. I believe that aspects of morality, as well as magic and witchcraft, explain the concerns of the people engaged in the complex technology of making iron far better than does fertility symbolism.

Morality

Morality, from the Latin moralities, refers to character, manner, and proper behavior and is generally defined as a system of virtuous conduct and ethics. Morality therefore, in its “descriptive” sense, refers to cultural and personal values, codes of conduct, or social mores that distinguish between right and wrong in human society. Morality in this sense is not about what is right or wrong but refers to what is considered right or wrong by people. Behavior is classified as correct or wrong because the act is thought to cause benefit or harm. Morality may also refer to normative behavior and ethics. Thomas Beidelman (1993:2) defines morality as related both to society and to the individual within the person and notes that the word moral derives from mos, a way of comporting one's self. Social life is both rewarding and constricting, our benefits secured at the cost of accepting and even embracing limitations (Beidelman 1993:2).

In the following I consider a series of interconnected questions about how models of the body and its physiology are used in Pangwa and Fipa iron working and their connections to morality and religion. How does the practical logic of Pangwa physiology work? Was this logic transferable to the logic in iron working, “the physiology of the smelting furnace”? Does this way of thinking—about both body and furnace—include a notion of morality and moral imagination? How does the master smelter use notions of morality to mobilize a labor force, and in particular to exclude some men, all women, and other intruders? How did the master smelters connect technology to religion and belief, that is, the gods and ancestors? In summation, I suggest that morality does not necessarily refer to or directly connect to religion or worldviews but exists as something lived, experienced, and only through this experiential aspect does it connect to other codes in society, that is, religion.

Case Studies of Iron Smelting

During the field research in Tanzania, several reenactments of smelting practices were observed among the Pangwa and the Fipa peoples, and the entire iron-making process was documented from initial collection of raw materials and charcoal production to construction of furnaces, smelting, and eventual forging of the produced iron. Interviews were carried out among the participants of the smelts and among former iron workers in both regions; women and non-smiths were interviewed as well. Group interviews and more private interviews were conducted among the different crews of iron workers. We gathered for conversations and interviews before, during, and after each reenactment. In these interviews, informants would normally describe the entire smelting process and comment upon aspects of the smelting procedures. In each interview lexicostatic or indigenous terms used for various material parts of the smelting furnaces as well as different terms for the procedures in the smelting process were recorded because of the valuable information inherent to the lexical terms. These lexical and local terms were checked both against available dictionaries of Fipa and Pangwa vocabulary (Stirnimann 1976, 1983; Wembah-Rashid 1973; Willis 1981) and with other informants.

In addition to these four field seasons of observations, Roy Willis’ (1981) extensive anthropological work among the Fipa during the 1960s and up to the 1980s and Hans Stirnimann's (1976) ethnographic studies of the Pangwa in the early 1960s (see references below) informed this study. Willis’ and Stirnimann's detailed ethnographic research, concerned with social relations, worldview, structures in politics, and cosmologies, relates to the cultural contents and “symbolic repertoires” (after Bekaert 1998) that my informants used in iron making.

The major stages in the Pangwa and the Fipa smelting process include the selection of a smelting camp outside the villages, construction of furnaces, making charcoal and collecting raw materials (bog ores and herbal and homeopathic medicines), sacrifices and use of magical substances, bellows working, and final extraction of blooms; this occurs within a coherent technological milieu and tradition that has been described in detail with a chaîne opératoire approach (Barndon 2004). As described below, taboos, rituals, and the use of magic are a critical part of smelting procedures. Of major importance for my argument here is that both Fipa and Pangwa smelters exclude women from participation in iron working and mandate taboos against sexual intercourse for the participants in smelts.

Among the most significant of the preliminary rites in Pangwa iron smelting was the use of magic, which by definition includes offerings and certain prohibitions such as food taboos and taboos against human sexual intercourse and violence. Some practices are not exclusive to smelting. For example, washing in kiwalasha (ritual water) is essential in order for a Pangwa person, male or female, to remain awalele (cold and clean) in most daily activities. Before most activities, people would wash in kiwalasha, which is a white liquid made from a local tree. The juice or milk is mixed with water and incorporated in many purification rituals prior to marriage ceremonies, birth celebrations, death rituals, offerings and sacrifices, and rain-making rituals (Stirnimann 1976:402). In addition, washing in kiwalasha was used before pottery making, hunting, gardening, and iron smelting (Barndon 2004). When charcoal preparations for a smelt were carried out in the bush, all participants washed in kiwalasha. In addition, prohibitions against sexual intercourse were mandated and while at the smelting camp, smelters were not allowed to clean themselves, cut their hair, get angry, or become violent because these activities could change the balance of the body.

Below I will describe the first smelt that I observed among the Pangwa in 1995. At the smelting site in Upangwa, I observed that a medical but also poisonous plant was hung from a stick to warn off intruders. The use of this plant in this context made everybody passing by aware of the dangers and caused people to stay away from the smelting site. I was told that if someone entered the site without permission, the plant's odor would come out and cause stomach pains. Moreover, the informants said that during smelting, these odors could mix with the smoke from the furnace and cause sickness for a “hot” smelter while the bellows were blowing (Barndon 1996b:765). His fingers would become weak because his body contained too much heat and hot blood.

The Pangwa master smelter carefully decorated the furnace with clay-made representations of female breasts. When asked why, he replied, not surprisingly, that the furnace was like a woman ready to give birth. The smelters washed the furnace with water, like purifying a pregnant woman in kiwalasha before delivery.

The mixture of two ores (hematite and magnetite) was also washed, in their words, “in order to make them be as one, like a man and a woman” and to give the furnace “the power of the gender combination.” The ore was washed in water before it could be used. Then the smelters prepared the magical substances that they would use in the medicine pot, on the bellows, and in the furnace. They boiled oil in a pot at the smelting site and collected the medicines, which included various herbs and barks. Their purpose and effect was discussed and examined as part of the regular smelting procedure.

Finally, a goat was sacrificed and offerings were made to the ancestors, gods, and spirits. The importance of the act drew strength from the actual bleeding of the goat, otherwise it was a mundane act and therefore not all of the smelters cared to observe. Some of the meat and liver was taken over to the furnace. One of the old masters said, “Come toward me, you my forefathers, all of you! I greet you and beg you stand by me when I make my iron. Stay with me, all of you that have died!” The following night the aged smelters slept around the furnace in order to protect it against strangers and evil spirits. Special care and quietness was prescribed in order for the master to enter into his role as a magician.

The actual smelting started the following morning when a special pot (ing’anjo) was filled with medicines (Figure 4.1). Leaves from the cleansing plant, kiwalasha, leaves from a scrub plant, yellow flowers used for making fire, leaves from a female fertility medicine, and long soft creepers used as a male fertility medicine were mixed with the oil the Pangwa smelters had prepared. The medicines were sprinkled on the furnace shaft, the breasts, the tuyeres (clay pipes), the bellow drums, and the tubes. The pot was placed inside the furnace chamber. The pot was covered with a lid that had eight holes that allowed the magical ingredients to escape into the furnace chamber. The power of the pot and its contents was the force that divided the impurity of the ores: the slag from the iron. When the furnace was filled with charcoal, all of the smelters dressed in grass skirts and placed themselves in front of a set of drum bellows. The master smelter started blowing the bellows and the men then walked around the furnace but stopped at each door to blow the others’ bellows; this was repeated three times before the actual blowing started and ore was added to the furnace.

Figure 4.1. Pangwa preparations for a smelt (photo Randi Barndon).

When, five hours later, the smelters decided to stop blowing the bellows and opened the front tuyere inlet, slag had not been properly removed through the main opening. One big lump of iron was attached to a tuyere and contained several smaller pieces of iron, slag, and charcoal. In accounts of African iron working, rarely are we informed about how smelters confront failures, but in this case the Pangwa smelters had not managed to produce forgeable iron. Disappointed, the smelters declared it a failure. They thought this was because they had not added enough ore and that the clay furnace should have been drier before starting the smelt. But they also said that persons “hot” from sexual intercourse were at the smelting camp and perhaps even participated in the smelt. Since they were “hot” the medicines overheated and did not work properly. There was an imbalance in hot and cold substances. Finally, the young men in the crew were accused of breaking the sexual intercourse taboo. The elders complained and threatened them, resulting in a very hostile atmosphere. The older men were magicians and medicine men; one in particular was feared in the village. The old master gave the young men a very hard time.

Eventually we agreed to try smelting again the following day. The young men were not allowed to participate in the smelting procedures. Although they were not told to leave the site, they were made inactive and sat on the outskirts of the camp the entire day. They were not allowed to assist. The masters were convinced the reason behind the failure was that the young men had assisted them in blowing the bellows. This had never been the custom in the past. Again the masters said at least one of them had slept with one of his wives or mistresses.

For practical reasons Pangwa furnaces are located out in the bush (e.g., proximity to raw materials), but evidently the furnaces are associated with ideas about morally correct behavior similar to what women in delivery are concerned with. In order to avoid illness, iseke, women (like furnaces) should not come in contact with “hotness.” Thus, there is a link between morality and the “heat code” in everyday life and how iron smelting furnaces were conceptualized and how the smelting process was explained. This was most elaborate when the smelters decorated the furnace (and made material metaphorical constructions) and when they washed in kiwalasha.

Like the Pangwa, the Fipa say that men and women contribute equally to the formation of a child and draw an analogy between smelting and procreation, but the tall natural draft furnace of the Fipa has no visible materialized sex markers like the female attributes (e.g., breasts) of the Pangwa furnace. Yet, when a Fipa furnace is decorated with flowers and sprinkled with flour, the furnace becomes a nawiinga (a bride). The Fipa smelters dance, sing, and actually move their bodies as if having sexual intercourse with the furnace. The master smelter physically enters the furnace, the furnace chamber and the furnace “womb,” through the western tuyere port called palinyina (mother door). From the inside of the furnace he arranges the tuyeres at their inlets and finally “feeds” the furnace with fuel and ores. The smelters say the furnace bride is mature. Spells are uttered in front of each tuyere inlet and around the furnace base to ensure that all the doors are closed and are then repeated in order to make sure that all orifices are closed and the furnace protected from malevolent forces. A cockerel is sacrificed and its blood sprinkled around the tuyere inlets; the smelters move through the main door and into the body of the furnace as if emphasizing its bodily openness and vulnerability. Then ifingila (magical substances) are placed in the trench and at the furnace base in order to secure what went into the furnace from harming its inside. Medicines are applied to strengthen fertility and cure sickness (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2. Fipa preparations for a smelt (photo Randi Barndon).

The Pangwa acknowledge a close procreative force between breast milk and semen. They claim that their conception originates from the combination of semen and the milk of their mother's breasts (Stirnimann 1967:403, 1979:181). A woman's breasts are both male and female; the milk in the right breast contains semen and will later provide her with sons, while the milk in the left breast will bring her daughters. The Pangwa also say that the fetus in the mother's womb needs semen as nutrition until the seventh month of pregnancy, something which is common throughout sub-Saharan Africa (i.e., Barley 1994; Turner 1967), and therefore, one instance of intercourse is not enough to conceive. A part of the father's semen from the multiple intercourses remains in the mother's breasts during her pregnancy. Women often smear their breasts with the husband's semen after sexual activity (Stirnimann 1967:404). But from the seventh month onward sexual abstinence is mandated and intercourse at this stage would harm the fetus.

According to Stirnimann (1979:254), a Pangwa woman who has just delivered is called umunyalisitu (a woman in the bush) because women in Upangwa used to go out in the bush to deliver. When a boy reaches about age six months he is taken with his mother out in the bush again. Along with her comes her mother-in-law, who brings two calabashes of water, one with “female water” and one with “male water.” The mother washes her hands and breasts in this water and afterwards presses as much breast milk as possible on the boy's urethra. This rite is practiced morning and evening as long as the mother is breastfeeding her boy. The more milk she can “feed” her son, the more children he will have as an adult (Stirnimann 1967:404). There is a taboo against intercourse with a breastfeeding wife because semen from the husband can poison the milk. Therefore, until an infant can feed himself, husband and wife remain apart (Stirnimann 1967:399).

According to the Pangwa and Fipa, women's bodies have more heat than men's bodies because they have breast milk. Their heat leads directly to blood loss in the form of menstrual flow, which is held to be the hottest of all blood. The thermodynamics in one person's body may affect those who come in contact with this person. During cooking and other production tasks, sexual taboos and the fear of hotness or loss of energy in male and female powers are stressed equally, as they are in the fields and vegetable gardens, during salt making, hunting expeditions, and pottery making. This is also true of iron smelting and in particular during sexual intercourse and pregnancy (discussed below). Fire was a transformative agent and sexual taboos, if not maintained, could influence persons and objects coming in contact with fire or hotness. A familiar example is the idea that menstruating women are prohibited from cooking (Collett 1983; Heusch 1980; Herbert 1993; Weiss 1998), and sickness caused by adultery is also believed to pass from one person to another by fire (Barndon 1992, 2004; Willis 1981). Hence, by fire a “hot” woman preparing food may transfer her hotness to the food, which then becomes dangerous for those served the food.

To many intralacustrine peoples (Beidelman 1980; Richards 1982; Sanders 1997; Turner 1967; Weiss 1998; Willis 1981), as with the Pangwa or Fipa, the body is experienced as constituting various substances and forces, vital for living. The state of the body is commonly referred to as hot or cold. Blood is the most crucial but the character of blood is ambiguous and ambivalent; although it is a life-giving force, too little blood or too much overheated blood (such as after sexual intercourse) may be dangerous. When a change in temperature occurs, body fluids change and the body is transformed (see Heusch 1980; Weiss 1998). Too much coolness may turn a person weak or a woman infertile while too much heat or overheating as after sexual intercourse weakens a man and harms the fetus in the female womb. The blood and the temperatures of the blood running through the body are vital for living and warding off sickness or death. This may be called a “thermodynamic conception of the body” (after Weiss 1998; cf. Barndon 2004) and it refers to the well-being of a person and thus morality.

The physiology of the human body is transferable to the iron smelting furnaces. Fipa and Pangwa moral imagination is linked to the furnaces because the furnaces possess the properties and functions of the female body; its maturity and potential fertility, its menstruation and menopause were properties transferred to the smelting context. The thermodynamic principle of the human body is not confined to the female body, or the furnace as a female, but extends to the well-being and balance of substances of the master smelter and his assistants. The hotness and coolness of men is equally important. Among the Haya in northern Tanzania, Weiss (1998:180) demonstrates how thermodynamic qualities of hotness and coolness lie at the base of conceptualizations of the equilibrium of the body. A similar division of the physiology of the body into “hot” and “cold” dichotomies was recognized in numerous Bantu-speaking societies, as well as in other societies (Barley 1994; Beidelman 1968; Berglund 1991; Heald 1995; Lambek and Strathern 1998; Sanders 1997; Schmidt 1997).

In conclusion then, reproduction and production are equated (Davison 1993:37). The identification of the furnace with a woman and the process of smelting with fertility-related elements are widely recorded. Like the Pangwa and the Fipa (Barndon 1992, 1996a; Wembah-Rashid 1973; Willis 1981; Wyckaert 1914), the Chisinga smelters in Zambia said the furnace is “pregnant with iron” (Brelsford 1949:28).

Morality and Magic in Technology

There are two ideas that interpenetrate rituals and magic in traditional African iron smelting: ideas of fertility and reproduction and ideas of protection against evil and malevolent forces. In general, both are viewed as crucial for the well-being of the body. The forces, good or bad, affect the thermodynamics of the body and hot and cold substances, if out of balance, could cause a person to be sick. These forces are interrelated in such a manner, however, that distinguishing the boundaries between them is often difficult. External factors, spirits, and malevolent forces could also cause a person to become sick or die.

In African iron smelting many things are at stake and one can easily acknowledge the use of magic, of medicines and sacrifices. Is it then the case that magic begins where technology ends (Tambiah 1993:72)? Is it only when something is really at stake that magic comes into play? Bronislaw Malinowski argued that this is not the case. With Coral Gardens and Their Magic,Malinowski (1935) was the first anthropologist to empirically demonstrate how “symbolic” activities like ritual and magic are linked to and interact with activities of a practical or pragmatic character (Tambiah 1993:68). Magic is not primitive science or a confusion of natural and supernatural. Magic works with and is additional to practical knowledge and technique. In his study of the Trobrianders, Malinowski found that magic played a central role in fishing in the ocean but not fishing in lagoons and that it was central to yam cultivation but not coconut cultivation. From a general perspective, these two types of fishing or cultivation are similar. Is then, for instance, the use of magic, elaborated rituals, sacrifices, and use of medicines only in yam production related to the fact that Trobriand yams were bound up with prestige? Was the performance of magic connected to prestige in possessing magical knowledge and performing magic? One is tempted to compare this with African iron smelting magical practices described above in my empirical examples and the fact that knowledge is, as Malinowski (1935) argued, an expression of power.

I believe that in East African iron working, smelting, and forging, announcing and establishing power and prestige relations is essential. In iron working the magician, as a technician, uses his experience as a metallurgist when he looks into the furnace to control the temperature. But he uses aspects of his repertoire as a magician and his close relations to the gods when he speaks to his ancestors, sacrifices a goat (Pangwa) or a cockerel (Fipa), or uses various herbs and medicines. Furthermore, he uses his power as the ruler over morality and his position as the socially defined master smelter when he excludes men from his crew because of failures to make forgeable iron.

In his classic study, Malinowski (1935) relates how the Trobriand gardener said “the belly of my garden swells” and by this transferred the scheme of pregnancy in the human body to the scheme of garden fertility, thereby setting up a correspondence that recognizes both contexts (Strathern 1996:28). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) give the body preeminence in meaning constructions and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) demonstrates how our construction of meaning is constrained by our bodily experiences.

According to Strathern, Marcel Mauss argued that things may themselves be seen as “agents” and thus as “beings, in a way comparable to the being of people” (Strathern 1996:200), and Malinowski (1948) pointed out that magic serves both personal and social functions. This is evident in the linkage of female fertility and iron smelting. Vital forces in the smelting process are conceptualized in terms of body fluids and hot and cold substances that must be kept in balance; if not, the body will become sick, a woman will experience miscarriage, and the furnace will not produce a bloom. The use of magic and medicines becomes central in these and numerous other contexts. Magic, as linked to moral imagination, operates at both an individual level and a collective, social level and lies within the core of metaphorical imagination. In the specific context discussed above, magic treats both the human body and the anthropomorphic furnace. The question is, then, how do we describe and interpret the interlacing of magical and technical acts that form the amalgam of total activity that we label technology, or more specifically iron working?

The furnace decoration is a symbolic performance grounded in metaphorical and moral imagination. The smelting context transfers moral imagination from individual and bodily experience toward the folk model of morality because a moral space is created at the smelting site. For the masters, this implies using their individual bodily experiences and collectively shared moral standards on more general social, political, and religious levels. Prohibitions and prescriptions of all kinds make members of the crew aware of the importance of morally correct behavior during times of smelting. It was a time for performances of social status, magical skills, and the establishment of prestige. The social level of magic (Malinowski 1935:73; Tambiah 1993) indicates how, by conducting imperative ceremonies or preliminary rituals, the ritual expert mobilized manpower and resources. The rites serve as triggering mechanisms for the sustained conduct of practical operations (Tambiah 1993).

The master smelters demonstrate their preeminence as masters and control access to the craftsmanship; looking closer at morality and magic rather than fertility symbolism and the procreative paradigm of iron smelting opens the way to an examination of the individual and social dimension of smelting symbolism and its relation to technology.

Toward Conclusions

I have illustrated how the logic behind Fipa and Pangwa understandings of bodily physiology transfers to the logic of iron smelting technology. Morality and technology in this sense are linked and the use of the procreative model makes sense. But my description above demonstrates also that in the non-Western premodern Fipa and Pangwa iron-working contexts, conceptions of the body and furnaces are based on ideas about thermodynamics, well-being, and morality. This is especially apparent in the use of medicines and magic. Elaborate bodily based metaphors are part of iron working and, as in everyday life, people are guided in their actions on how to keep their own and others’ bodies in balance through the specific locally constructed ideas and concern for well-being. What does this tell us? African material transformative technologies and iron-working rituals use the human body as an omnipresent tool or anchor bridging the inexplicable with embodied experiences. Moreover, this connects central concepts of social norms defined by morality and religion, a more far-reaching and deeply embedded notion than simply the fertility symbolism.

According to Bruno Latour (1993), the ontological distinction between objects and people is an illusion because our entire existence is based on combinations or mixtures in which the relation between humans and nonhumans—hybrids in Latour's terms—is a constitution of both. I argue that the treatment of furnaces and bodies was similar because of equivalent perceptions of thermodynamics in the two domains. Metallurgy and magic are not separate, or external to the local perceptions of technology, as these aspects of iron smelting would be if our point of departure were our Western-based “standard perspective” (after Pfaffenberger 1988) notion of technology. On the contrary, furnaces are treated like bodies because they are no different from humans. In this sense, morality and technology are linked because technology and humans work by the same rules of avoidance, separations, and seclusion, a point particularly evident in the parallel taboos against sexual intercourse. Therefore, furnaces and bodies are treated with the same set of homeopathic medicines and magic.

In the Pangwa and Fipa cases, iron working provides a context in which technology and morality merge, a context in which both materials (the material world) and metaphors (based on bodily experience) are constructed around moral imagination. In this context technology cum technological agency creates a “microcosm,” a social, ritual, and technological space where iron is made and wherein metaphors about life, and its moral content, are staged (see Bourdieu 1973:104).

I have tried to illustrate how, as Lemonnier argues, “technology and technological systems are integrated into the bigger systems we call societies and become representations of these” (Lemonnier 1992:9). For this reason I attempt to move beyond symbolism in technology as mere representations of something else, because we can only understand technologies through people's engagement with them. The logic in Pangwa and Fipa iron smelting becomes more transparent by situating the study of the smelting furnaces in the life, experiences, politics, and cultural modes of the people studied (Knudsen 2003:120). Moral concerns are part of the idea about the vulnerable boundedness and openness of bodies conceptualized and made meaningful in the smelting context.

Returning to Bekaert's (1998:16) demonstration that the smiths draw on both lived experience (phenomenology) and codic oppositions (structuralism), we may add that morality is part of both, the well-being of the human body or furnace, and, at the other end of the line, about hot or cold, male and female, and right or wrong, in practicing technology. This comparative research indicates that the Fipa as well as their neighbors to the south, the Pangwa, conceptualized subjects, men and women and spirits and ancestors, in direct interrelation with the material world.