Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present

Couverture
Ohio University Press, 15 juin 2007 - 392 pages

Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists. With prose that is elegant in its simplicity and analysis that is forceful and compelling, Jan Bender Shetler brings the landscape memory of the Serengeti to life. She demonstrates how the social identities of western Serengeti peoples are embedded in specific spaces and in their collective memories of those spaces. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Shetler identifies core spatial images and reevaluates them in their historical context through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti is a lively environmental history that will ensure that we never look at images of the African landscape in quite the same way.

 

Table des matières

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction Landscapes of Memory
1 Ecological Landscapes
2 Social Landscapes
3 Sacred Landscapes
4 The Time of Disasters
5 Resistance to Colonial Incorporation
6 The Creation of Serengeti National Park
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Droits d'auteur

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À propos de l'auteur (2007)

Jan Bender Shetler is an associate professor of African and world history at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana. She is the author of Telling Our Own Stories: Local Histories from South Mara, Tanzania.

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