Section 3: Significant (mis)identifications : Forging identities in an uncertain world: changing notions of self and other in early colonial natal / Sandra Klopper --
"A paralysis of perspective": image and text in the creation of an African chief / Jeff Guy --
Auxiliary modes of collecting: circulation and curation of photographs from the Mariannhill Mission in KwaZulu-Natal, 1880s to 1914 / Christoph Rippe --
Ethnologised pasts and their archival futures: construing the archive of Southern KwaZulu-Natal pertinent to the period before 1910 / Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer --
The Natal government railways and their productions of "the Zulu" / André Croucamp. Section 4: Archival biographies : "The name of Zulu is now given": provenancing objects from colonial Natal in the British Museum's Christy collection / Catherine Elliott Weinberg --
Curiosity and aesthetic delight: the snuff spoon as synecdoche in some nineteenth-century collections from Natal and the Zulu kingdom / Anitra Nettleton --
"Knobkerrie": some preliminary notes on the transformation of a weapon into a swagger stick, or sometimes a stick is not just a stick / Hlonipha Mokoena --
Using Zulu and losing Zulu: how the Clem Webb collection was undone / Sara Byala and Ann Wanless. Epilogue : We need new names too / Mbongiseni Buthelezi. Contributors --
select bibliography --
List of illustrations --
Index.

The pernicious combination of tribe and tradition continues to tether modern South Africans to ideas about the region's remote past as primitive, timeless, and unchanging. Any hunger for knowledge or understanding of the past before European colonialism remains to a significant degree unsated in the face of a narrowly prescribed archive and repugnant, but insidiously resilient, stereotypes. These volumes track how the domain of the tribal and traditional came to be sharply distinguished from modernity, how it was denied a changing history and an archive, and was endowed instead with a timeless culture. They also offer strategies for engaging with the materials differently-from the interventions effected in contemporary artworks to the inserting of nameless, timeless objects of material culture into histories of individualized and politicized experience. The two volume set make this archive of material culture visible as an archival resource. They also seek to spring the identity trap, releasing the material from pre-assigned identity positions as tribal into settings that enable them to be used as resources for thinking critically about identity.