Imagining Serengeti

Imagining Serengeti PDF Author: Jan Bender Shetler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Long before the creation of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, the people of the western Serengeti had established settlements and interacted with the environment in ways that created a landscape we now misconstrue as natural. Western Serengeti peoples imagine the environment not as a pristine wilderness, but as a differentiated social landscape that embodies their history and identity. Conservationist literature has ignored these now-displaced peoples and relegated them to the margins of modern society. Their oral traditions, however, provide the means for seeing the landscape from a new perspective. Imagining Serengeti allows us to see the Serengeti landscape as a book of memory that preserves the ways in which western Serengeti peoples have actively transformed their environment and their societies. Moreover, it strengthens the case for involving local communities in conservation efforts that will preserve African environments for the future. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Jan Shetler identifies core spatial images, which are then recontextualized into historical time periods through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti reconstructs a socioenvironmental history of landscape memory of the western Serengeti spanning the last eighteen hundred years.

Imagining Serengeti

Imagining Serengeti PDF Author: Jan Bender Shetler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Long before the creation of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, the people of the western Serengeti had established settlements and interacted with the environment in ways that created a landscape we now misconstrue as natural. Western Serengeti peoples imagine the environment not as a pristine wilderness, but as a differentiated social landscape that embodies their history and identity. Conservationist literature has ignored these now-displaced peoples and relegated them to the margins of modern society. Their oral traditions, however, provide the means for seeing the landscape from a new perspective. Imagining Serengeti allows us to see the Serengeti landscape as a book of memory that preserves the ways in which western Serengeti peoples have actively transformed their environment and their societies. Moreover, it strengthens the case for involving local communities in conservation efforts that will preserve African environments for the future. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Jan Shetler identifies core spatial images, which are then recontextualized into historical time periods through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti reconstructs a socioenvironmental history of landscape memory of the western Serengeti spanning the last eighteen hundred years.

Imagining Serengeti

Imagining Serengeti PDF Author: Jan Bender Shetler
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821442430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists. With prose that is elegant in its simplicity and analysis that is forceful and compelling, Jan Bender Shetler brings the landscape memory of the Serengeti to life. She demonstrates how the social identities of western Serengeti peoples are embedded in specific spaces and in their collective memories of those spaces. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Shetler identifies core spatial images and reevaluates them in their historical context through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti is a lively environmental history that will ensure that we never look at images of the African landscape in quite the same way.

Envisioning Eden

Envisioning Eden PDF Author: Noel B. Salazar
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845456610
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
As tourism service standards become more homogeneous, travel destinations worldwide are conforming yet still trying to maintain, or even increase, their distinctiveness. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Arusha, Tanzania, this book offers an in-depth investigation of the local-to-global dynamics of contemporary tourism. Each destination offers examples that illustrate how tour guide narratives and practices are informed by widely circulating imaginaries of the past as well as personal imaginings of the future.

A Guide to Spatial History

A Guide to Spatial History PDF Author: Konrad Lawson
Publisher: Olsokhagen
ISBN: 1737136813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Get Book Here

Book Description
This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.

Claiming Civic Virtue

Claiming Civic Virtue PDF Author: Jan Bender Shetler
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299322904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
Among communities in the Mara region of Tanzania, it is considered men’s responsibility to maintain “history.” But when Jan Bender Shetler’s questions turned to specific familial connections within the village, she discovered her male informants had to occasionally leave the room—to ask their wives for clarification. The result is an original and wide-ranging investigation of the gendered nature of historical memory and its influence on the development of the region over the past 150 years. Shetler’s exploration of these oral traditions and histories opens exciting new vistas for understanding how women and men in this culture tell their stories and assert their roles as public intellectuals—with important implications for research in African and gender studies, and the history of ethnicity and nationalism.

Civilizing Nature

Civilizing Nature PDF Author: Bernhard Gissibl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.

The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History

The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History PDF Author: Hilda Kean
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429889240
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 720

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History provides an up-to-date guide for the historian working within the growing field of animal-human history. Giving a sense of the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the field, cutting-edge contributions explore the practices of and challenges posed by historical studies of animals and animal-human relationships. Divided into three parts, the Companion takes both a theoretical and practical approach to a field that is emerging as a prominent area of study. Animals and the Practice of History considers established practices of history, such as political history, public history and cultural memory, and how animal-human history can contribute to them. Problems and Paradigms identifies key historiographical issues to the field with contributors considering the challenges posed by topics such as agency, literature, art and emotional attachment. The final section, Themes and Provocations, looks at larger themes within the history of animal-human relationships in more depth, with contributions covering topics that include breeding, war, hunting and eating. As it is increasingly recognised that nonhuman actors have contributed to the making of history, The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History provides a timely and important contribution to the scholarship on animal-human history and surrounding debates.

Oral History and the Environment

Oral History and the Environment PDF Author: Stephen M. Sloan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190684968
Category : Environmental degradation
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
"As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deep and long-standing human connections with the earth are changing. Understanding these shifting relationships is essential to framing our responses to issues of industrial development, population growth, and climate change. The use of oral history methodology in environmental research acknowledges and subjectively defines these human connections to the natural world enriching our understanding of both what the earth means to us as well as what the earth needs from us to find balance once again. Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe is the first book to provide a global perspective on the use of oral history in environmental research. It presents excerpts from interviews with environmental activists, victims of environmental catastrophe, and those whose life experience gives them special insights into the natural world; combined with commentary by oral historians who have been exploring how these commentaries can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. In this anthology, oral histories with farmers, wildlife rescue volunteers, activists, environmental disaster survivors, elders, water system managers, indigenous voices, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, fishers, and foresters, help readers understand a wide range of issues related to our relationship with the environment. These stories and expert analysis touch on a wide range of topics including drought, chemical leaks, oil spills, nuclear disaster, indigenous control of resources, natural resource management, wilderness, and environmental protest"--

Julius Nyerere

Julius Nyerere PDF Author: Paul Bjerk
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445960
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
With vision, hard-nosed judgment, and biting humor, Julius Nyerere confronted the challenges of nation building in modern Africa. Constructing Tanzania out of a controversial Cold War union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Nyerere emerged as one of independent Africa’s most influential leaders. He pursued his own brand of African socialism, called Ujamaa, with unquestioned integrity, and saw it profoundly influence movements to end white minority rule in Southern Africa. Yet his efforts to build a peaceful nation created a police state, economic crisis, and a war with Idi Amin’s Uganda. Eventually—unlike most of his contemporaries—Nyerere retired voluntarily from power, paving the way for peaceful electoral transitions in Tanzania that continue today. Based on multinational archival research, extensive reading, and interviews with Nyerere’s family and colleagues, as well as some who suffered under his rule, Paul Bjerk provides an incisive and accessible biography of this African leader of global importance. Recognizing Nyerere’s commitment to participatory government and social equality while also confronting his authoritarian turns and policy failures, Bjerk offers a portrait of principled leadership under the difficult circumstances of postcolonial Africa.

The Nature of the Path

The Nature of the Path PDF Author: Marcus Filippello
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452952159
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Nature of the Path reveals how a single road has shaped the collective identity of a community that has existed on the margins of larger societies for centuries. Marcus Filippello shows how a road running through the Lama Valley in Southeastern Benin has become a mnemonic device that has allowed residents to counter prevailing histories. Built by the French colonial government, and following a traditional pathway, the road serves as a site where the Ọhọri people narrate their changing relationship to the environment and assert their independence in the political milieus of colonial and postcolonial Africa. Filippello first visited the Yorùbá-speaking Ọhọri community in Benin knowing only the history in archival records. Over several years, he interviewed more than 100 people with family roots in the valley and discovered that their personal identities were closely tied to the community, which in turn was inextricably linked to the history of the road that snakes through the region’s seasonal wetlands. The road—contested, welcomed, and obstructed over many years—passes through fertile farmlands and sacred forests, both rich in meaning for residents. Filippello’s research seeks to counter prevailing notions of Africa as an “exotic” and pristine, yet contrarily war-torn, disease-ridden, environmentally challenged, and impoverished continent. His informants’ vivid construction of history through the prism of the road, coupled with his own archival research, offers new insights into Africans’ complex understandings of autonomy, identity, and engagement in the slow process we call modernization.