Smashing Pots: Feats of Clay from Africa -- Nigel Barley

Illustrated with field photographs and pots from the British Museum's unsurpassed collection, this book provides the only comprehensive introduction to African pottery currently available.

In many parts of Africa marriage involves the making of new pots and funerals the smashing of old. Smashing Pots surveys the role of pottery in traditional and modern Africa, the technologies it calls into play and the extraordinary aesthetic effects it achieves. Nigel Barley shows how pottery is used in cultural thought and how it reflects, in Africa, important ways of thinking about human bodies and powers, time and change. Pottery enters into religion and medicine, the structuring of sexuality and the control of fertility and through it important differences emerge between Western and African notions of gender.