Author: Michael Bollig
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387786821
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
Landscape studies provide a crucial perspective into the interaction between humans and their environment, shedding insight on social, cultural, and economic topics. The research explores both the way that natural processes have affected the development of culture and society, as well as the ways that natural landscapes themselves are the product of historical and cultural processes. Most previous studies of the landscape selectively focused on either the natural sciences or the social sciences, but the research presented in African Landscapes bridges that gap. This work is unique in its interdisciplinary scope. Over the past twelve years, the contributors to this volume have participated in the collaborative research center ACACIA (Arid Climate Adaptation and Cultural Innovation in Africa), which deals with the relationship between cultural processes and ecological dynamics in Africa’s arid areas. The case studies presented here come from mainly Sahara/Sahel and southwestern Africa, and are all linked to broader discussions on the concept of landscape, and themes of cultural, anthropological, geographical, botanical, sociological, and archaeological interest. The contributions in this work are enhanced by full color photographs that put the discussion in context visually.
Author: Lydia Wilson Marshall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000334953
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Slavery was a large-scale process that put its mark on the African landscape in tangible ways—for example, through the capture, transfer, and imprisonment of captives and through the avoidance strategies that vulnerable communities used against slaving. Certainly, the expansion of trade routes, the depopulation of slaved regions, and an increased reliance on defensive architecture and places of concealment can all be linked to slaving and slavery in Africa. But how do we view these landscapes of slavery today? And can archaeology help us? Encompassing studies from Senegal, Ghana, Mauritius, Tanzania, and Kenya, this volume grapples with such essential questions. The authors advocate for the power of archaeology as a tool to disentangle often lengthy and complex landscape histories that both begin before slavery and continue after abolition. They also argue for archaeologists’ central role in reimagining how we might remember and commemorate slavery in places where its history has been forgotten, obscured by European colonialism, or sanitized and simplified for tourist consumption. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage.
Author: James Fairhead
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521564991
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
An intriguing 1996 study showing how Africans enrich their land, while scientists believe they damage it.
Author: Peter J. Holmes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134972393
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
This volume provides a textbook and reference work on the physical and biotic landscapes of Southern Africa. It examines the links between these environments and the ways in which they have been, are and will likely be subject to change. It covers the geomorphology, soils, vegetation and land use across a range of landscapes, including mountains, coasts, savannah, drylands and wetlands, and identifies the impacts of current and potential climate change and other factors on these environments. The geographical focus is on the region defined by Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland. Illustrated throughout in full colour, the book will serve as a reference volume for researchers and environmental professionals internationally, as well as a textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate-level students of geography, ecology and environmental studies in Southern Africa.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004380183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 537
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Book Description
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past outlines new directions in the historiography of West Africa. Its chapters explore new trends across regional and disciplinary fields with a focus on how political conjunctures influence source production and circulation.
Author: Stefan Grab
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319035606
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
This book presents a beautifully illustrated overview of the most prominent landscapes of South Africa and the distinctive landforms associated with them. It describes the processes, origins and the environmental significance of those landscapes, including their relationships to human activity of the past and present. The sites described in this book include, amongst others, the Blyde River Canyon, Augrabies Falls, Kruger National Park, Kalahari desert landscapes, the Great Escarpment, Sterkfontein caves and karst system, Table Mountain, Cape winelands, coastal dunes, rocky coasts, Boer War battlefield sites, and Vredefort impact structure. Landscapes and Landforms of South Africa provides a new perspective on South Africa’s scenic landscapes by considering their diversity, long and short term histories, and importance for geoconservation and geotourism. This book will be relevant to those interested in the geology, physical geography and history of South Africa, climate change and landscape tourism.
Author: Ogaga Okuyade
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 0979085888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapescritically examines the representations, constructions, and imaginings of the relationship between the human and non-human worlds in contemporary African literature and culture. It offers innovative, incisive, and critical perspectives on the importance of sustaining a symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment. The book thus carries African scholarship beyond the mere analysis of themes and style to ethical and activist roles of literature having an impact on readers and the public. It is a scholarship geared towards rectifying ecological imbalance that is prevalent in many parts of the continent that forms the setting, context, and thematic discourse of the works or authors studied in this book. Besides sensitizing the African readership to the need for the restoration of harmony between man and the environment, this book equally aims to further familiarize scholars and students working on African literature and culture with the theoretical concerns of eco-criticism.
Author: Melissa Leach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317579984
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Amidst the pressing challenges of global climate change, the last decade has seen a wave of forest carbon projects across the world, designed to conserve and enhance forest carbon stocks in order to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and offset emissions elsewhere. Exploring a set of new empirical case studies, Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa examines how these projects are unfolding, their effects, and who is gaining and losing. Situating forest carbon approaches as part of more general moves to address environmental problems by attaching market values to nature and ecosystems, it examines how new projects interact with forest landscapes and their longer histories of intervention. The book asks: what difference does carbon make? What political and ecological dynamics are unleashed by these new commodified, marketized approaches, and how are local forest users experiencing and responding to them? The book’s case studies cover a wide range of African ecologies, project types and national political-economic contexts. By examining these cases in a comparative framework and within an understanding of the national, regional and global institutional arrangements shaping forest carbon commoditisation, the book provides a rich and compelling account of how and why carbon conflicts are emerging, and how they might be avoided in future. This book will be of interest to students of development studies, environmental sciences, geography, economics, development studies and anthropology, as well as practitioners and policy makers.
Author: Harry Wels
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004290966
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Private wildlife conservation is booming business in South Africa! Nick Steele stood at the cradle of this development in the politically turbulent 1970s and 1980s, by stimulating farmers in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) to pool resources in order to restore wilderness landscapes, but at the same time improve their security situation in cooperative conservancy structures. His involvement in Operation Rhino in the 1960s and subsequent networks to save the rhino from extinction, brought him into controversial military (oriented) networks around the Western world. The author’s unique access to his private diaries paints a personal picture of this controversial conservationist.
Author: Walter Hood
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813944872
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places—ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit—exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America’s past and future cannot be understood.
