Download or read book Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies written by J. Terrence McCabe and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the ecology, history, and politics of land use among the Turkana pastoral people in Northern Kenya Based on sixteen years of fieldwork among the pastoral Turkana people, McCabe examines how individuals use the land and make decisions about mobility, livestock, and the use of natural resources in an environment characterized by aridity, unpredictability, insecurity, and violence. The Turkana are one of the world's most mobile peoples, but understanding why and how they move is a complex task influenced by politics, violence, historical relations among ethnic groups, and the government, as well as by the arid land they call home. As one of the original members of the South Turkana Ecosystem Project, McCabe draws on a wealth of ecological data in his analysis. His long-standing relationship with four Turkana families personalize his insights and conclusions, inviting readers into the lives of these individuals, their families, and the way they cope with their environment and political events in daily life. J. Terrence McCabe is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Download or read book Resilience and Collapse in African Savannahs written by Michael Bollig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the causes and consequences of environmental change in East Africa, asking whether local African communities are sufficiently resilient to cope with the ecological and social challenges that confront them. It focuses on the savannahs of the Baringo-Bogoria basin, and the surrounding highlands of Kenya’s northern Rift Valley that form the social-ecological system of the specialised cattle pastoralists and niche agricultural farmers who occupy these semi-arid lands. Historical studies of resilience spanning the past two centuries are linked with analysis of current environmental challenges, and the ecological, social, economic and political responses mounted by local communities. The authors question whether the most recent challenges confronting the peoples of eastern Africa’s savannahs – intensified conflicts, mounting poverty driven by demographic pressures, and dramatic ecological changes brought by invasive species – might soon led to a collapse in essential elements of the specialised cattle pastoralism that dominates the region, requiring a re-orientation of the social-ecological system. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

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 Cow written by Hannah Velten and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2007-10-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the milk we drink in the morning, to the leather shoes we slip on for the day, to the steak we savor at dinner, our daily lives are thoroughly bound up with cows. Yet there is a far more complex story behind this seemingly benign creature, which Hannah Velten explores here, plumbing the rich trove of myth, fact, and legend surrounding these familar animals. From the plowing field to the rodeo to the temple, Velten tracks the constantly changing social relationship between man and cattle, beginning with the domestication of aurochs around 9000 BCE. From there, Cow launches into a fascinating story of religious fanaticism, scientific exploits, and the economic transformations engendered by the trade of the numerous products derived from the animal. She explores in engaging detail how despite cattle’s prominence at two ends of a wide spectrum: Hinduism venerates the cow as one of the most sacred members of the animal kingdom, while beef is a prized staple of the American diet. Thought provoking and informative, Cow restores this oft-overlooked animal to the nobility it richly deserves.

Download or read book Risk and Social Change in an African Rural Economy written by John G. McPeak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-07-21 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoralists’ role in contemporary Africa typically goes underappreciated and misunderstood by development agencies, external observers, and policymakers. Yet, arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL), which are used predominantly for extensive livestock grazing, comprise nearly half of the continent’s land mass, while a substantial proportion of national economies are based on pastoralist activities. Pastoralists use these drylands to generate income for themselves through the use of livestock and for the coffers of national trade and revenue agencies. They are frequently among the continent’s most contested and lawless regions, providing sanctuary to armed rebel groups and exposing residents to widespread insecurity and destructive violence. The continent’s millions of pastoralists thus inhabit some of Africa’s harshest and most remote, but also most ecologically, economically, and politically important regions. This study summarizes the findings of a multi-year interdisciplinary research project in pastoral areas of Kenya and Ethiopia. The cultures and ecology of these areas are described, with a particular focus on the myriad risks that confront people living in these drylands, and how these risks are often triggered by highly variable rainfall conditions. The authors examine the markets used by residents of these areas to sell livestock and livestock products and purchase consumer goods before turning to an analysis of evolving livelihood strategies. Furthermore, they focus on how well-being is conditioned upon access to livestock and access to the cash economy, gender patterns within households and the history of development activities in the area. The book concludes with a report on how these activities are assessed by people in the area and what activities they prioritize for the future. Policy in pastoral areas is often formulated on the basis of assumptions and stereotypes, without adequate empirical foundations. This book provides evidence on livelihood strategies being followed in pastoral areas, and investigates patterns in decision making and well being. It indicates the importance of livestock to the livelihoods of people in these areas, and identifies the critical and widespread importance of access to the cash economy, concluding that future development activities need to be built on the foundation of the livestock economy, instead of seeking to replace it.

Download or read book Who Do the Ngimurok Say That They Are written by Kevin P. Lines and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do missiologists describe the cosmologies of those that Christianity encounters around the world? Our descriptions often end up filtered through our own Western religious categories. Furthermore, indigenous Christians adopt these Western religious categories. This presents the problem of local Christianities, described by Kwame Bediako as those that "have not known how to relate to their traditional culture in terms other than those of denunciation or of separateness." Kevin Lines's phenomenological study of local religious specialists in Turkana, Kenya, not only challenges our Western categories by revealing a more authentic complexity of the issues for local Christians and Western missionaries, but also provides a model for continued use of phenomenology as a valued research method in larger missiological studies. Additionally, this study points to the ways that local Christians and traditional religious practitioners interpret Western missionaries through local religious categories. Clearly, missionaries, missiologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars need to do a much more careful job of studying and describing the contextually specific phenomena of traditional religious specialists before relying on meta-categories that come out of our Western theology or older overly simplified ethnographies. The research from this current study of Turkana religious specialists begins that process in the Turkana context and offers a model for future studies in contexts where traditional religion and Christianity intersect.

Download or read book Driving the Samburu Bride written by Diane C. Perlov and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2020-11-11 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driving the Samburu Bride is a vivid account of a young anthropologist working in northern Kenya, revealing insights into the Samburu culture and the culture of doing anthropology. With engaging irony and a storyteller’s gift, the author takes the reader through the frustrating, productive, and occasionally euphoric stages of fieldwork. Along the way, Perlov connects theory and practice, and recounts the evolution of her Samburu friendships, forged over decades, including the discovery of her unwitting impact on Samburu girls.

Download or read book Pastoralist Resilience to Environmental Collapse in East Africa since 1500 written by Gufu Oba and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Generations Past written by Andrew Burton and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Africa is demographically characterized above all else by its youthfulness. In East Africa the median age of the population is now a striking 17.5 years, and more than 65 percent of the population is age 24 or under. This situation has attracted growing scholarly attention, resulting in an important and rapidly expanding literature on the position of youth in African societies. While the scholarship examining the contemporary role of youth in African societies is rich and growing, the historical dimension has been largely neglected in the literature thus far. Generations Past seeks to address this gap through a wide-ranging selection of essays that covers an array of youth-related themes in historical perspective. Thirteen chapters explore the historical dimensions of youth in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first–century Ugandan, Tanzanian, and Kenyan societies. Key themes running through the book include the analytical utility of youth as a social category; intergenerational relations and the passage of time; youth as a social and political problem; sex and gender roles among East African youth; and youth as historical agents of change. The strong list of contributors includes prominent scholars of the region, and the collection encompasses a good geographical spread of all three East African countries.

Download or read book The Governance of Rangelands written by Pedro M. Herrera and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rangelands are large natural landscapes that can include grasslands, shrublands, savannahs and woodlands. They are greatly influenced by, and often dependent on, the action of herbivores. In the majority of rangelands the dominant herbivores are found in domestic herds that are managed by mobile pastoralists. Most pastoralists manage their rangelands communally, benefitting from the greater flexibility and seasonal resource access that common property regimes can offer. As this book shows, this creates a major challenge for governance and institutions. This work improves our understanding of the importance of governance, how it can be strengthened and the principles that underpin good governance, in order to prevent degradation of rangelands and ensure their sustainability. It describes the nature of governance at different levels: community governance, state governance, international governance, and the unique features of rangelands that demand collective action (issues of scale, ecological disequilibrium and seasonality). A series of country case studies is presented, drawn from a wide spectrum of examples from Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and North America. These provide contrasting lessons which are summarised to promote improved governance of rangelands and pastoralist livelihoods.

Download or read book Gender Violence and Human Security written by Aili Mari Tripp and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A powerful argument... successfully challenges both security to address gender and feminist analysis to address security." - Sylvia Walby, author of New Agendas for Women

Download or read book Pastoralism and Development in Africa written by Andy Catley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A view of 'development at the margins' in the pastoral areas of the Horn of Africa highlights innovation and entrepreneurialism, cooperation and networking and diverse approaches rarely in line with standard development prescriptions. Through twenty detailed empirical chapters, the book highlights diverse pathways of development, going beyond the standard 'aid' and 'disaster' narratives.

Download or read book Research Handbook on the Economics of Property Law written by Kenneth Ayotte and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars in the field of law and economics contribute their original theoretical and empirical research to this major Handbook. Each chapter analyzes the basic architecture and important features of the institutions of property law from an economic point of view, while also providing an introduction to the issues and literature. Property rights and property systems vary along a large number of dimensions, and economics has proven very conducive to analyzing these patterns and even the nature of property itself. The contributions found here lend fresh perspectives to the current body of literature, examining topics including: initial acquisition; the commons, anticommons, and semicommons; intellectual property; public rights; abandonment and destruction; standardization of property; property and firms; marital property; bankruptcy as property; titling systems; land surveying; covenants; nuisance; the political economy of property; and takings. The contributors employ a variety of methods and perspectives, demonstrating the fruitfulness of economic modeling, empirical methods, and institutional analysis for the study of both new and familiar problems in property. Legal scholars, economists, and other social scientists interested in property will find this Handbook an often-referenced addition to their libraries.

Download or read book Building Resilience of Human Natural Systems of Pastoralism in the Developing World written by Shikui Dong and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume summarizes information about the situational context, threats, problems, challenges and solutions for sustainable pastoralism at a global scale. The book has four goals. The first goal is to summarize the information about the history, distribution and patterns of pastoralism and to identify the importance of pastoralism from social, economic and environmental perspectives. The results of an empirical investigation of the environmental and socio-economic implications of pastoralism in representative pastoral regions in the world are also incorporated. The second goal is to argue that breaking coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism leads to degradation of pastoral ecosystems and to create an analysis framework to assess the vulnerability of worldwide pastoralism. Our analysis framework provides approaches to help comprehensively understand the transitions and the impacts of human-natural systems in the pastoral regions in the world. The third goal is to identify the successful models in promoting coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism, and to learn lessons of breaking coupled human-cultural pastoralism systems through examining the representative cases in regions including Central Asia, Southern and Eastern Asia, Northern and Eastern Africa, the European Alps and South America. The fourth goal is to identify the strategies to build the resilience of the coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism worldwide. We hope that our book can facilitate the further examination of sustainable development of coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism by providing the summaries of existing data and information related to the pastoralism development, and by offering a framework for better understanding and analysis of their social, economic and environmental implications.

Download or read book The Ending of Tribal Wars written by Jürg Helbling and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-24 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All over the world and throughout millennia, states have attempted to subjugate, control and dominate non-state populations and to end their wars. This book compares such processes of pacification leading to the end of tribal warfare in seven societies from all over the world between the 19th and 21st centuries. It shows that pacification cannot be understood solely as a unilateral imposition of state control but needs to be approached as the result of specific interactions between state actors and non-state local groups. Indigenous groups usually had options in deciding between accepting and resisting state control. State actors often had to make concessions or form alliances with indigenous groups in order to pursue their goals. Incentives given to local groups sometimes played a more important role in ending warfare than repression. In this way, indigenous groups, in interaction with state actors, strongly shaped the character of the process of pacification. This volume’s comparison finds that pacification is more successful and more durable where state actors mainly focus on selective incentives for local groups to renounce warfare, offer protection, and only as a last resort use moderate repression, combined with the quick establishment of effective institutions for peaceful conflict settlement.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa written by Jean-Nicolas Bach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary survey of contemporary research related to the Horn of Africa. Situated at the junction of the Sahel-Saharan strip and the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa is growing in global importance due to demographic growth and the strategic importance of the Suez Canal. Divided into sections on authoritarianism and resistance, religion and politics, migration, economic integration, the military, and regimes and liberation, the contributors provide up-to-date, authoritative knowledge on the region in light of contemporary strategic concerns. The handbook investigates how political, economic, and security innovations have been implemented, sometimes with violence, by use of force or by negotiation – including ‘ethnic federalism’ in Ethiopia, independence in Eritrea and South Sudan, integration of the traditional authorities in the (neo)patrimonial administrations, Somalian Islamic Courts, the Sudanese Islamist regime, people’s movements, multilateral operations, and the construction of an architecture for regional peace and security. Accessibly written, this handbook is an essential read for scholars, students, and policy professionals interested in the contemporary politics in the Horn of Africa.