Download or read book Herders Warriors And Traders written by John G Galaty and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African pastoralists have been devastated by drought, famine and dislocation, yet herding remains the most viable system of support for the inhabitants of the vast arid and semi-arid zones. Using case studies of the Tswana and the San, the interlacustrine pastoralists, the Masai and Mursi of East Africa, and the multi-ethnic regional systems of Lak

Download or read book Pre Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives.

Download or read book The Dream of Ao written by James Polus and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An imaginary historical tale set in the historic civilizations of East Asia, "The Dream of AO" depicts the challenges of a moral and ethical life, the fight for equality and the human drive for purpose. The backdrop is the clash and convergence of four vastly different peoples, each claiming cultural superiority. It is also a romantic tale of the genuine love of three couples who bridge these cultural divides. At the heart of the story is an epic mental battle of survival between two leaders of warring peoples, one led by a woman of superior intelligence and insight versus her deadly opponent, a man of extreme cunning. The fictional events and characters convey classical themes of courage and treachery, love and hate and the power of redemption and deep motivations of revenge. This story of creative and fanciful imagination is the detailed recitation of a "dream" by a young man called "AO" who lived on the south-eastern edge of the Indian subcontinent. The "dream" was told through the words of professional storytellers, itinerant preachers, and mystics with powerful memories and magical verbal skills. Audiences would sit quietly for hours, even days, absorbing every word of the tale. Epic stories memorized and recited for centuries in the oral tradition eventually appeared in writings. The narrator of this story, called Akshay, a distant descendant of AO, assumes the task to write the entire story in precise detail, faithfully reproducing into a written manuscript every word as spoken by trained storytellers for hundreds of years.

Download or read book The Atlantic World and Virginia 1550 1624 written by Peter C. Mancall and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-01-15 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood that included Africans, Native Americans, and other Europeans. With contributions from both prominent and rising scholars, this volume offers far-ranging and compelling studies of peoples, texts, places, and conditions that influenced the making of New World societies. As Jamestown marks its four-hundredth anniversary, this collection provides provocative material for teaching and launching new research. Contributors: Philip P. Boucher, University of Alabama, Huntsville Peter Cook, Nipissing University J. H. Elliott, University of Oxford Andrew Fitzmaurice, University of Sydney Joseph Hall, Bates College Linda Heywood, Boston University James Horn, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation E. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University David Northrup, Boston College Marcy Norton, The George Washington University James D. Rice, State University of New York, Plattsburgh Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania David Harris Sacks, Reed College Benjamin Schmidt, University of Washington Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University David S. Shields, University of South Carolina Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, McGill University James H. Sweet, University of Wisconsin, Madison John Thornton, Boston University

Download or read book Pastoralism in Africa written by Michael Bollig and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity, and inherent dynamics of pastoralism in Africa based on research during a twelve-year period on the southwest and northeast regions. Unraveling the complex prehistory, history, and contemporary political ecology of African pastoralism, results in insight into the ingenuity and flexibility of historical and contemporary herders.

Download or read book Crisis of the State written by Bruce Kapferer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing both historical contexts and geographical locations, this volume explores the continuous reformation of state power and its potential in situations of violent conflict. The state, otherwise understood as an abstract and transcendent concept in many works on globalization in political philosophy, is instead located and analyzed here as an embedded part of lived reality. This relationship to the state is exposed as an integral factor to the formation of the social – whether in Africa, the Middle East, South America or the United States. Through the examination of these particular empirical settings of war or war-like situations, the book further argues for the continued importance of the state in shifting social and political circumstances. In doing so, the authors provide a critical contribution to debates within a broad spectrum of fields that are concerned with the future of the state, the nature of sovereignty, and globalization.

Download or read book Fortress Conservation written by Dan Brockington and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes statistics.

Download or read book Savannas of Our Birth written by Robin Reid and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the sweeping story of the role that East African savannas played in human evolution, how people, livestock, and wildlife interact in the region today, and how these relationships might shift as the climate warms, the world globalizes, and human populations grow. Our ancient human ancestors were nurtured by African savannas, which today support pastoral peoples and the last remnants of great Pleistocene herds of large mammals. Why has this wildlife thrived best where they live side-by-side with humans? Ecologist Robin S. Reid delves into the evidence to find that herding is often compatible with wildlife, and that pastoral land use sometimes enriches savanna landscapes and encourages biodiversity. Her balanced, scientific, and accessible examination of the current state of the relationships among the region’s wildlife and people holds critical lessons for the future of conservation around the world.

Download or read book War in Human Civilization written by Azar Gat and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-03-26 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? How does war relate to the other fundamental developments in the history of human civilization? And what of war today - is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? In this truly global study of war and civilization, Azar Gat sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the 'riddle of war' throughout human history, from the early hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the twenty-first century. In the process, the book generates an astonishing wealth of original and fascinating insights on all major aspects of humankind's remarkable journey through the ages, engaging a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology and evolutionary psychology to sociology and political science. Written with remarkable verve and clarity and wholly free from jargon, it will be of interest to anyone who has ever pondered the puzzle of war.

Download or read book On Trans Saharan Trails written by Ghislaine Lydon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-02 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the history and organization of trans-Saharan trade in western Africa using original source material.

Download or read book Sorcery or Science written by Ariela Marcus-Sells and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their understanding of “the realm of the unseen”—a vast, invisible world that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible world—Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices “the sciences of the unseen.” While they acknowledged that some Muslims—particularly self-identified “white” Muslim elites—might consider these practices to be “sorcery,” the Kunta scholars argued that these were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds. Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies, Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.

Download or read book Nomads and Nation Building in the Western Sahara written by Konstantina Isidoros and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fabled for more than three thousand years as fierce warrior-nomads and cameleers dominating the western Trans-Saharan caravan trade, today the Sahrawi are admired as soldier-statesmen and refugee-diplomats. This is a proud nomadic people uniquely championing human rights and international law for self-determination of their ancient heartlands: the western Sahara Desert in North Africa. Konstantina Isidoros provides a rich ethnographic portrait of this unique desert society's life in one of Earth's most extreme ecosystems. Her extensive anthropological research, conducted over nine years, illuminates an Arab-Berber Muslim society in which men wear full face veils and are matrifocused toward women, who are the property-holders of tent households forming powerful matrilocal coalitions. Isidoros offers new analytical insights on gender relations, strategic tribe-to-state symbiosis and the tactical formation of 'tent-cities'. The book sheds light on the indigenous principles of social organisation - the centrality of women, male veiling and milk-kinship - bringing positive feminist perspectives on how the Sahrawi have innovatively reconfigured their tribal nomadic pastoral society into globalising citizen-nomads constructing their nascent nation-state. This is essential reading for those interested in anthropology, politics, war and nationalism, gender relations, postcolonialism, international development, humanitarian regimes, refugee studies and the experience of nomadic communities.

Download or read book Desert Frontier written by James L. A. Webb and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the increasing aridity of the transitional zone between the full desert of the Sahara and the open grassland of western Africa, the border moving 200-300 kilometers south during a brief two and half centuries; and the political and economic changes as pastoral nomads of the desert edge followed the shift south, and the agricultural communities in their way had to abandon their villages or face subjugation. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Pastoralism in the New Millenium written by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and published by Food & Agriculture Org.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoralism refers to the type of farming system which uses extensive grazing on grasslands for livestock production. This type of farming covers 25 per cent of the world's land area and supports 20 million households. It makes substantial contributions to the economies of developing countries, although agricultural encroachment, conflict and drought continue to erode this way of life. This publication considers key policy issues and trends involved in attempts to improve the livelihoods of pastoralist families and communities.

Download or read book Pokot Pastoralism written by Hauke-Peter Vehrs and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how pastoral peoples imagine, or even design, their futures under the pressure of changing environments and large-scale government projects.

Download or read book Captives and Cousins written by James F. Brooks and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping, richly evocative study examines the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. Indigenous and colonial traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed in the borderlands, forming a "slave system" in which victims symbolized social wealth, performed services for their masters, and produced material goods under the threat of violence. Slave and livestock raiding and trading among Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards provided labor resources, redistributed wealth, and fostered kin connections that integrated disparate and antagonistic groups even as these practices renewed cycles of violence and warfare. Always attentive to the corrosive effects of the "slave trade" on Indian and colonial societies, the book also explores slavery's centrality in intercultural trade, alliances, and "communities of interest" among groups often antagonistic to Spanish, Mexican, and American modernizing strategies. The extension of the moral and military campaigns of the American Civil War to the Southwest in a regional "war against slavery" brought differing forms of social stability but cost local communities much of their economic vitality and cultural flexibility.

Download or read book Stono written by Mark M. Smith and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sourcebook for understanding an uprising that continues to incite historical debate In the fall of 1739, as many as one hundred enslaved African and African Americans living within twenty miles of Charleston joined forces to strike down their white owners and march en masse toward Spanish Florida and freedom. More than sixty whites and thirty slaves died in the violence that followed. Among the most important slave revolts in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion also ranks as South Carolina's largest slave insurrection and one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. Significant for the fear it cast among lowcountry slaveholders and for the repressive slave laws enacted in its wake, Stono continues to attract scholarly attention as a historical event worthy of study and reinterpretation. Edited by Mark M. Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt introduces readers to the documents needed to understand both the revolt and the ongoing discussion among scholars about the legacy of the insurrection. Smith has assembled a compendium of materials necessary for an informed examination of the revolt. Primary documents-including some works previously unpublished and largely unknown even to specialists-offer accounts of the violence, discussions of Stono's impact on white sensibilities, and public records relating incidents of the uprising. To these primary sources Smith adds three divergent interpretations that expand on Peter H. Wood's pioneering study Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Excerpts from works by John K. Thornton, Edward A. Pearson, and Smith himself reveal how historians have used some of the same documents to construct radically different interpretations of the revolt's causes, meaning, and effects.