FROM LONG-TERM PATTERNS OF SEASONAL HUNGER TO CHANGING EXPERIENCES OF EVERYDAY POVERTY: NORTHEASTERN GHANA C. 1930–2000

2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JÉRÔME DESTOMBES
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
West African ◽  
Anthropometric Data ◽  
Poor Diet ◽  
John Hunter ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Way

This article is a West African case-study of the nutritional history of everyday poverty. It draws on unusually rich statistical evidence collected in northeastern Ghana. In the 1930s, pioneer colonial surveys revealed that seasonal poor diet was pervasive, by contrast with undernourishment. They pave the way for constructing a new set of anthropometric data in Nangodi, a savanna polity where John Hunter completed a classic study of seasonal hunger in the 1960s. A re-survey of the same sections and lineages c. 2000, during a full agricultural cycle, shows a significant improvement in nutritional statuses, notably for women.

Medina Gounass: Constructing Extra-National Space in a West African Borderland

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
David Newman Glovsky
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Law ◽  
West African ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
National Space ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
History Of ◽  
Postcolonial Africa ◽  
Postcolonial States ◽  
The Town

Abstract The historical autonomy of the religious community of Medina Gounass in Senegal represents an alternative geographic territory to that of colonial and postcolonial states. The borderland location of Medina Gounass allowed the town to detach itself from colonial and independent Senegal, creating parallel governmental structures and imposing a particular interpretation of Islamic law. While in certain facets this autonomy was limited, the community was able to distance itself through immigration, cross-border religious ties, and smuggling. Glovsky’s analysis of the history of Medina Gounass offers a case study for the multiplicity of geographical and territorial entities in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

scholarly journals Philosophy as Synchronic History

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
DANIEL STOLJAR
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Philosophical Progress ◽  
The Way

Abstract Bernard Williams argues that philosophy is in some deep way akin to history. This article is a novel exploration and defense of the Williams thesis (as I call it)—though in a way anathema to Williams himself. The key idea is to apply a central moral from what is sometimes called the analytic philosophy of history of the 1960s to the philosophy of philosophy of today, namely, the separation of explanation and laws. I suggest that an account of causal explanation offered by David Lewis may be modified to bring out the way in which this moral applies to philosophy, and so to defend the Williams thesis. I discuss in detail the consequences of the thesis for the issue of philosophical progress and note also several further implications: for the larger context of contemporary metaphilosophy, for the relation of philosophy to other subjects, and for explaining, or explaining away, the belief that success in philosophy requires a field-specific ability or brilliance.

Haunted by ‘Lenore’: The Fragment as Gothic Form, Creative Practice and Textual Evolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
Kirstin A. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Creative Practice ◽  
Critical Gap ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

This article examines the processes of fragmentation and haunting surrounding the explosion of competing translations, in 1796, of Gottfried August Bürger's German ballad ‘Lenore’. While the fragment has become known as a core narrative device of the Gothic, less attention has been paid to the ways that the fragment and fragmentation operate as dynamic, living phenomena within the Gothic's central processes of memory, inspiration, creation, dissemination and evolution. Taking ‘Lenore’ as a case study, this essay aims to redress this critical gap by illuminating the ways that fragmentation haunts the mind, the text, and the history of the Gothic as a process as much as a product. It demonstrates that fragmentation operates along lines of cannibalism, resurrection and haunting to establish a pattern of influence that paves the way for modern forms of gothic intertextuality and adaptation. Importantly, it thereby locates fragmentation as a process at the heart of the Gothic mode.

How the Desert got a Past: A History of Quaternary Research in Australia’s Deserts

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Smith
Keyword(s):  
Climate Changes ◽  
Conceptual Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

This paper examines how the past of desert landscapes has been interpreted since European explorers and scientists first encountered them. It charts the research that created the conceptual space within which archaeologists and Quaternarists now work. Studies from the 1840s–1960s created the notion of a ‘Great Australian Arid Period'. The 1960s studies of Lake Mungo and the Willandra Lakes by Jim Bowler revealed the cyclical nature of palaeolakes, that changed with climate changes in the Pleistocene, and the complexity of desert pasts. SLEADS and other researchers in the 1980s used thermoluminescence techniques that showed further complexities in desert lands beyond the Willandra particularly through new studies in the Strzelecki and Simpson Dunefields, Lake Eyre, Lake Woods and Lake Gregory. Australian deserts are varied and have very different histories. Far from ‘timeless lands', they have carried detailed information about long-term climate changes on continental scales.

scholarly journals Colonial Values and Asylum Care in Brazil: Reclaiming the Streets Through Carnival in Rio de Janeiro

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-161
Author(s):  
Julia Evangelista ◽  
William A. Fulford
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Mental Well Being ◽  
The City

AbstractThis chapter shows how carnival has been used to counter the impact of Brazil’s colonial history on its asylums and perceptions of madness. Colonisation of Brazil by Portugal in the nineteenth century led to a process of Europeanisation that was associated with dismissal of non-European customs and values as “mad” and sequestration of the poor from the streets into asylums. Bringing together the work of the two authors, the chapter describes through a case study how a carnival project, Loucura Suburbana (Suburban Madness), in which patients in both long- and short-term asylum care play leading roles, has enabled them to “reclaim the streets,” and re-establish their right to the city as valid producers of culture on their own terms. In the process, entrenched stigmas associated with having a history of mental illness in a local community are challenged, and sense of identity and self-confidence can be rebuilt, thus contributing to long-term improvements in mental well-being. Further illustrative materials are available including photographs and video clips.

Who Owns the Fish in the Sea?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Rahn Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Bluefin Tuna ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Population Pressure ◽  
Thunnus Thynnus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Spain

From the fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the ducal house of Medina Sidonia held exclusive rights to fish for Bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in south-western Spain. Framed by recent theories about the privatization of access to natural resources, this essay explores the history of successive royal grants to the house of Medina Sidonia. It then examines statistical evidence for the tuna catch over the long term, especially in the late sixteenth century, when the annual catch reached a peak and then suddenly declined. The ducal house may have contributed to that decline by overfishing. During the long term, however, ducal control may unintentionally have aided in the conservation of tuna stocks in times of population pressure, both by not fully exploiting their exclusive rights to fish, and by preventing all others from doing so.

Henry Mathison Pelling 1920–1997

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Labour Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
The Way

Henry Pelling enjoyed the deep respect of his professional colleagues, primarily in Britain and the anglophone world and also notably in Japan. His oeuvre secured him a reputation as the foremost empirical labour historian of his generation. Between 1954 and 1963 he published no fewer than nine substantial books, despite his complaints at the way that Oxford teaching duties ate into his time as a writing scholar. Having made himself the unrivalled authority on the history of the labour movement, Pelling had branched out in the 1960s into the new field of electoral history.

Archaeology and Environmental Anthropology: Collaborations in Historical and Political Ecology

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fairhead
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
West African ◽  
Environmental Anthropology ◽  
Environmental Archaeology ◽  
Humid Forest ◽  
Transition Zones ◽  
Faunal Assemblages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the importance of integrating archaeological perspectives within contemporary environmental anthropology. It does this through exposing key questions raised by environmental anthropologists concerning West African relations with soil and forests that can only be addressed through collaboration with archaeological investigation (see also Balée, Chapter 3 this volume). Environmental anthropological research has been particularly important in revealing the ecological knowledge and environmental practices of land users and how these practices interplay with ecological and economic processes in the shaping of landscapes. This research has systematically undermined a paradigm of environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’, ‘equilibrial’, or ‘pristine’ environments (whether of soils, forests, or faunal assemblages). Whilst equilibrial ecology is apparently no longer upheld in ecological sciences either, in its shift to non-equilibrium ecology and recognition of path dependency, and whilst nature is no longer so easily configured simply as the absence of people, assumptions rooted in such simplistic ideas of nature still strongly inform and mislead the way West African environments are understood and problematized. Anthropologically derived critiques of the way landscapes are understood have been associated with a rereading of the history of those landscapes. Yet given how oral historical and anthropologically derived historical evidence can so easily be delegitimized and dismissed by apparently ‘harder’ sciences, environmental archaeology becomes a crucial player in these debates. In this brief chapter I shall focus on two key debates which can only be resolved (or reconceptualized) through environmental archaeology. The first of these concerns the degradation (or otherwise) of soils and vegetation linked to farming in West Africa’s Guinea savannah and forest-savannah transition zones. The second concerns the legacy of past land use on current ‘old growth’ forest in the Central and West African humid forest zones. These are not only interesting debates, but are at the heart of sustainable development policy deliberation in West Africa. The continued power of the paradigm in environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’ environments is visible in the way that landscape features are often interpreted uncritically as ‘relicts’ of that nature.

Addressing ecology and sustainability in mega-sporting events: The 2006 football World Cup in Germany

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Dolles ◽  
Sten Söderman
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
World Cup ◽  
Sporting Event ◽  
History Of ◽  
Waste Energy ◽  
First Time ◽  
Water Waste

AbstractFor the first time in the history of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the football (soccer) World Cup held in Germany 2006 specifically addressed environmental concerns. By doing so, the German Organizing Committee did not have the objective of creating a short-term vision, but rather of making a long-term and lasting contribution to the improvement of environmental protection in hosting a mega-sporting event. By taking the football world cup in Germany as a case study, we will provide insights into the so-called ‘Green Goal’ programme and its four main areas: water, waste, energy, and transportation. From a global point of view, climate protection was added by the Organizing Committee as the fifth area of action and was recognised as a cross-sectorial task. Finally, questions are addressed on how to apply those measurements in the planning and organisation of other mega (-sporting) events.

Reshaping Public Intellectual Life: Frank Moorhouse and His Milieu

2015 ◽  
Vol 156 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-141
Author(s):  
Catharine Lumby
Keyword(s):  
Moral Values ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fiction Writer ◽  
The Way

This article uses Frank Moorhouse as a study of the formation of a public intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s. Moorhouse was a key figure in the Sydney Push, a loose Libertarian-anarchist network of artists, writers, intellectuals and party people who rejected the dominant moral values of the 1950s and 1960s. A journalist, Moorhouse later became a well-known fiction writer who was part of a similarly bohemian and activist milieu centred in Sydney's Balmain. Taking Frank Moorhouse as a case study, I will argue that there is something particular about the way public intellectuals have historically been formed and given voice in Australian life, which is characterised by a permeability between art and writing practices and between academic and activist milieux.

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