Cutting the Vines of the Past

by Giles-Vernick, Tamara

• ISBN13: 9780813921037
• ISBN10: 0813921031
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr

Summary

Cutting the Vines of the Past offers a novel argument: African ways of seeing and interpreting their environments and past are not only critical to how historians write environmental history; they also have important lessons for policymakers and conservationists. Tamara Giles-Vernick demonstrates how various outsiders intervening in African land-use practices have repeatedly met failure because of their inability or unwillingness to understand how Africans see their land and their pasts.Giles-Vernick takes as her focus doli, the environmental and historical perceptions and knowledge of the Mpiemu people in the Central African Republic. She argues that Mpiemu opposition to a modern environmental conservation project -- the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park and the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve -- derives from the people's interpretations of their past experiences with environmental interventions imposed by concessionary companies, colonial officials, other Africans, Christian missionaries, and the postcolonial state. At the same time, Mpiemu people associate these contemporary conservationists with the bosses and Christian missionaries of the colonial past, viewing them as sources of jobs, consumer goods, and other support.Giles-Vernick's argument will interest conservationists and policymakers as well as environmental historians. By examining Africans' environmental and historical ways of seeing and knowing, and by revealing how these have changed, Giles-Vernick offers a fresh perspective on the writing of environmental history.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	viii
Acknowledgments	ix
Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction	1	(16)
The Sources and Contexts of Doli	17	(30)
Translating a Historical and Environmental Category	47	(22)
Peopling the Panjo and Village	69	(14)
Depleting the Panjo and Village	83	(36)
From Fields of Maize to Fields of Hunger	119	(31)
Emptying the Forest	150	(43)
Conclusion	193	(16)
Appendixes
1. Mpiemu Names for Selected Cultivated Plants	203	(2)
2. Mpiemu Names for Selected Forest Plants	205	(2)
3. Mpiemu Names for Selected Forest Mammals	207	(2)
Glossary	209	(4)
Notes	213	(44)
Bibliography	257	(30)
Index	287