Outlaws, Anxiety, and Disorder in Southern Africa
Outlaws, Anxiety, and Disorder in Southern Africa

Author: Rachel King

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-18

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 3030184129

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This book explores how objects, landscapes, and architecture were at the heart of how people imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, it chronicles how cattle raiders were created, pursued, and controlled, and how modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of vignettes, Rachel King uses excavated material, rock art, archival texts, and object collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes from mobility to wilderness, historiography to violence, resistance to development, King details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also critiquing scholars’ tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives on the past in Africa’s southernmost mountains, this book grapples with concepts relevant to those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers, both in Africa and the wider world.

Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho
Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho

Author: Christopher Conz

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-07-16

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1847013309

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Shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge and how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about 'progress' and 'modernization' in the Global South. Both place-based environmental history and global intellectual history, this book explores the politics of environment, agriculture, poverty, development, and science in Lesotho. Drawing on diverse experiences with this landlocked, mountainous nation, and based on bilingual archival and oral history research in Sesotho and English, the book examines how Basotho intellectuals, farmers, migrant workers, chiefs, experts, and politicians formed vernacular ideas of tsoelopele (progress) amid the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism in southern Africa. Rather than a unidirectional flow of 'enlightened' knowledge from Europe to Africa, the study shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge, from ancestral agricultural practices to colonial soil science and from African American missionaries to African nationalists in Ghana. Basotho ideas about tsoelopele, it is argued, informed the many political, social, and environmental innovations that enabled survival within a sea of white supremacy and that underpin approaches to development in independent Lesotho. Throughout, the book shows how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about 'progress' and 'modernization' in the Global South.

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage
Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage

Author: Veysel Apaydin i

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1787354849

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Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.

Growing Wild
Growing Wild

Author: Jasmin Rindlisbacher

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2020-10-30

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 3906927059

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Mary Elizabeth Barber (18181899), born in Britain, arrived in the Cape Colony in 1820 where she spent the rest of her life as a rolling stone, as she lived in and near Grahamstown, the diamond and gold fields, Pietermaritzburg, Malvern near Durban and on various farms in the eastern part of the Cape Colony. She has been perceived as the most advanced woman of her time, yet her legacy has attracted relatively little attention. She was the first woman ornithologist in South Africa, one of the first who propagated Darwins theory of evolution, an early archaeologist, keen botanist and interested lepidopterist. In her scientific writing, she propagated a new gender order; positioned herself as a feminist avant la lettre without relying on difference models and at the same time made use of genuinely racist argumentation. This is the first publication of her edited scientific correspondence. The letters transcribed by Alan Cohen, who has written a number of biographical articles on Barber and her brothers are primarily addressed to the entomologist Roland Trimen, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London. Today, the letters are housed at the Royal Entomological Society in St Albans. This book also includes a critical introduction by historian Tanja Hammel who has published a number of articles and is about to publish a monograph on Mary Elizabeth Barber.

Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies
Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies

Author: Rachel King

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1800083793

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Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies offers succinct, easily accessible analyses of the disciplinary debates, intellectual legacies, and practical innovations that have led to understandings of heritage value today. Through a diverse collection of expert voices, this volume invites readers to embark on their own journeys through appropriate methodologies for research and public engagement. Readers can draw on analyses of key problem areas and argumentative interventions to create a roadmap for the many disciplinary approaches that converge on heritage studies. Oriented specifically towards learning and teaching heritage across archaeology, anthropology, history, and geography, this textbook is designed to support critical, ethical heritage students, researchers, and practitioners. Praise for Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies 'This excellent volume fills a substantial gap for those looking for a single course book with which to teach a range of interdisciplinary methods to both undergraduate and postgraduate heritage studies students and should be seen as the ‘go to’ on heritage research methodologies for students, teachers and professionals alike. It will have a significant impact in shaping the field of critical heritage studies for years to come.' Rodney Harrison, Professor of Heritage Studies, UCL 'This textbook gathers a group of experienced specialists to discuss transformations of the field over time and present the latest trends and innovative debates, based on their own experiences in various international contexts. This volume will be of great interest for teachers, students and for the general public.' Andrés Zarankin, Professor of Archaeology, Federal University of Minas Gerais

The Archaeology of Southern Africa
The Archaeology of Southern Africa

Author: Peter Mitchell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-06-06

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 1009324764

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Some of humanity's earliest ancestors lived in southern Africa and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and the emergence of complex cognition. Building on its rich rock art heritage, archaeologists have developed theoretical work that continues to influence rock art studies worldwide, with the relationship between archaeological and anthropological data central to understanding past hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and farmer communities alike. New work on pre-colonial states contests models that previously explained their emergence via external trade, while the transformations wrought by European colonialism are being rewritten to emphasise Indigenous agency, feeding into efforts to decolonise the discipline itself. Inhabited by humans longer than almost anywhere else and with an unusually varied, complex past, southern Africa thus has much to contribute to archaeology worldwide. In this revised and updated edition, Peter Mitchell provides a comprehensive and extensively illustrated synthesis of its archaeology over more than three million years.

Anxiety in and about Africa
Anxiety in and about Africa

Author: Andrea Mariko Grant

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0821447289

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How does anxiety impact narratives about African history, culture, and society? This volume demonstrates the richness of anxiety as an analytical lens within African studies. Contributors call attention to ways of thinking about African spaces—physical, visceral, somatic, and imagined—as well as about time and temporality. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the volume also brings histories of anxiety in colonial settings into conversation with work on the so-called negative emotions in disciplines beyond history. While anxiety has long been acknowledged for its ability to unsettle colonial narratives, to reveal the vulnerability of the colonial enterprise, this volume shows it can equally complicate contemporary narratives, such as those of sustainable development, migration, sexuality, and democracy. These essays therefore highlight the need to take emotions seriously as contemporary realities with particular histories that must be carefully mapped out.

Historical Dictionary of South Africa
Historical Dictionary of South Africa

Author: Christopher Saunders

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 1538130262

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As the most influential and powerful country on the entire continent of Africa, an understanding of South Africa’s past and its present trends is crucial in appreciating where South Africans are going to, and from where they have come. South Africa changed dramatically in 1994 when apartheid was dismantled, and it became a democratic state. Since 2000, when the previous edition appeared, further big changes occurred, with the rise of new political leaders and of a new black middle class. There were also serious problems in governance, in public health, and the economy, but with a remarkable popular resilience too. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of South Africa contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about South Africa.

The Fluvial Imagination
The Fluvial Imagination

Author: Colin Hoag

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-11-08

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0520386353

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subcontinent's water-stressed economic epicenter. Hopes that receipts from water sales could improve Lesotho's fortunes, however, have clashed with fears that soil erosion from overgrazing livestock could fill its reservoirs with sediment. In this wide-ranging and deeply researched book, Colin Hoag shows how producing water commodities incites a fluvial imagination. Engineering water security for urban South Africa draws attention ever further into Lesotho's rural upstream catchments: from reservoirs to the soils and vegetation above them, and even to the social lives of herders at remote livestock posts. As we enter our planet's water-export era, Lesotho exposes the possibilities and perils ahead.

Archives of Times Past
Archives of Times Past

Author: Cynthia Kros

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2022-02

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1776147286

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This volume critically examines sources of evidence and material from the archive that historically have been used to tell southern Africa’s pre-colonial story.