Michael Bollig - Böcker

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.

A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental sciences.

Landscape studies provide a crucial perspective into the interaction between humans and their environment. This volume's integrative approach brings all relevant disciplines into the discussion, enhanced by photographs that put the discussion in context.

The fact is that war comes in many guises and its effects continue to be felt long after peace is proclaimed. This challenges the anthropologists who write of war as participant observers. Participant observation inevitably deals with the here and now, with the highly specific. It is only over the long view that one can begin to see the commonalities that emerge from the different forms of conflict and can begin to generalize. [From the Introduction]More needs to be understood about the ways of war and its effects. What implications does war have for people, their lived-in communities and larger political systems; how do they cope and adjust in war situations and how do they deal with the changed world that they inhabit once peace is declared? Through a series of essays that move from looking at the nature of violence to the peace processes that follow it, this important book provides some answers to these questions. It also analyzes those new dimensions of social interaction, such as the internet, which now provide a bridge between local concerns and global networks and are fundamentally altering the practices of war.

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.

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.

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.

Landscape studies provide a crucial perspective into the interaction between humans and their environment. This volume's integrative approach brings all relevant disciplines into the discussion, enhanced by photographs that put the discussion in context.

A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental sciences.

"The fact is that war comes in many guises and its effects continue to be felt long after peace is proclaimed. This challenges the anthropologists who write of war as participant observers. Participant observation inevitably deals with the here and now, with the highly specific. It is only over the long view that one can begin to see the commonalities that emerge from the different forms of conflict and can begin to generalize." - from the Introduction by Elisabeth Colsen. This book offers an important contribution to a better understanding of the specific and the general in wartime. It examines how people cope and adjust to situations of war, depending upon whether these are low-intensity or high-intensity ones, on whether they are brief phases of conflict or long enduring periods of violence, with or without intermittent spells of peace. Of particular interest is the exploration of a largely new dimension of social interaction - that of the internet, thus providing a bridge between local concerns and global networks.

WINNER of the 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title AwardFocuses on a much discussed and controversial aspect of conservation: the commodification of nature. Can the successful marketization of what is generally perceived as wilderness help to provide for biodiversity conservation, economic development and social emancipation?At a time of profound anxiety about the impact of human activity on nature and the catastrophic effects of climate change, the "sixth mass extinction", invasive species and rapidly expanding zoonotic diseases, this volume engages with the practices, discourses, and materialities surrounding the commodification of "the wild". Focusing on the relationship between commodification and wilderness, the contributors pay particular attention to commodification's newer iterations in which human management plays a significant role, such as wildlife-park tourism, trophy-hunting, and trade in herbal medicines, perfumes and luxury exotic food items. Dominant neoliberal approaches have aimed to address global environmental challenges through the commodification and marketization of nature: by valorizing nature, they claim, biodiversity can be safeguarded and "wild" landscapes protected. This, it is thought, will not only open up a new frontier of sustainable, non-exploitative, participatory capitalist expansion, but invigorate rural livelihoods, reduce poverty, and add important assets to otherwise vulnerable rural economies. This important book challenges this future trajectory. Investigating a broad range of cases across southern and eastern Africa, from the illegal sandalwood trade to legal trade in devil's claw and honeybush, to trophy-hunting and wilderness safaris, the contributors reveal the pitfalls and challenges of commodification, what this means for the continent and beyond.OPEN ACCESS: This title is freely available in digital format under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND

What lies ahead for rural Africa, given a rapidly increasing population, climate change, poverty, inequality and projections of an increasing vulnerability to natural hazards and food shortages?Bringing together scholars in ecology, agriculture, economics, human geography and cultural anthropology, from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK, this book focusses on social-ecological transformation and future-making in rural Africa, especially in areas of rapid land-use change following the establishment of development corridors, conservation areas, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In Africa, discussions on the way forward are particularly conflict-ridden because people do not agree about desirable goals, because the gap between winners and losers seems to be bigger than elsewhere, and because the struggle for desirable futures is embedded in a problematic history of foreign domination and exploitation. Focussing on eastern and southern Africa, topics examined range from the history of conservation initiatives and wildlife protection to visions of green development, from the gender implications of extreme climate events on pastoral economies to the use of information and communication technologies on farms and mobile money in geographically remote territories, from large-scale energy infrastructure projects and growth corridors to local ways of managing risk. The volume opens with reflections on African utopic registers of the future and conceptual decolonization in African futurity.CONTRIBUTORS: Martin Ajei, Michael Bollig, Maxmillian Chuhila, Peter Dannenberg, Clemens Greiner, Prince K. Guma, Carolin Hulke, Linus Kalvelage, Eric Kioko, Britta Klagge, Uroš Kovač, Astrid Matejcek, Richard Mbunda, Kennedy Mkutu, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Frankline Ndi, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Rupert Neuhöfer, Anne Oketch, Dennis Ong'ech, Maggie Opondo, Gilbert Ouma, Javier Revilla Diez, Julian Rochlitz, Dorothea Schulz, Ian Scoones, Tahira Shariff Mohamed, Masresha Taye, Gideon Tups, Hauke-Peter Vehrs, Julia VernePublished in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the collaborative research center "Future Rural Africa", funding code TRR 228/3.

What lies ahead for rural Africa, given a rapidly increasing population, climate change, poverty, inequality and projections of an increasing vulnerability to natural hazards and food shortages?Bringing together scholars in ecology, agriculture, economics, human geography and cultural anthropology, from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK, this book focusses on social-ecological transformation and future-making in rural Africa, especially in areas of rapid land-use change following the establishment of development corridors, conservation areas, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In Africa, discussions on the way forward are particularly conflict-ridden because people do not agree about desirable goals, because the gap between winners and losers seems to be bigger than elsewhere, and because the struggle for desirable futures is embedded in a problematic history of foreign domination and exploitation. Focussing on eastern and southern Africa, topics examined range from the history of conservation initiatives and wildlife protection to visions of green development, from the gender implications of extreme climate events on pastoral economies to the use of information and communication technologies on farms and mobile money in geographically remote territories, from large-scale energy infrastructure projects and growth corridors to local ways of managing risk. The volume opens with reflections on African utopic registers of the future and conceptual decolonization in African futurity.CONTRIBUTORS: Martin Ajei, Michael Bollig, Maxmillian Chuhila, Peter Dannenberg, Clemens Greiner, Prince K. Guma, Carolin Hulke, Linus Kalvelage, Eric Kioko, Britta Klagge, Uroš Kovač, Astrid Matejcek, Richard Mbunda, Kennedy Mkutu, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Frankline Ndi, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Rupert Neuhöfer, Anne Oketch, Dennis Ong'ech, Maggie Opondo, Gilbert Ouma, Javier Revilla Diez, Julian Rochlitz, Dorothea Schulz, Ian Scoones, Tahira Shariff Mohamed, Masresha Taye, Gideon Tups, Hauke-Peter Vehrs, Julia VernePublished in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the collaborative research center "Future Rural Africa", funding code TRR 228/3.