On the origin of the tree Spondias mombin in Africa

This paper examines evidence for the origin of the tree Spondias mombin in Africa, where it is generally described as introduced from the Neotropics. Based on biogeographical, ecological, and historical evidence, this paper argues that the tree reached Africa via natural, long-distance dispersal, and should be considered an African native plant. The idea that it is introduced appeared in 1868, when it was a scientifically justifiable conclusion reflecting the limitations of nineteenth-century biogeographical knowledge. By the early twentieth century, representing Spondias mombin as a human introduction in Africa was no longer scientifically justifiable because of advances in knowledge of the African flora and plant dispersal ecology. Nonetheless, most authors continued to represent the tree as introduced, in part because such representation was consonant with dominant images of the African environment: (a) that the continent had suffered extensive deforestation in the recent past, and (b) that Africa's flora was depauperate in fruit trees prior to the coming of Europeans. Recent authors continue to describe Spondias mombin as introduced because they have not sufficiently considered the historic contexts of primary and secondary sources on Neotropical plant introductions in Africa. This paper concludes that the human role in creating the African portion of the trans-Atlantic tropical flora has been overemphasized. Natural plant dispersal across the Atlantic may be more frequent than generally accepted.     

森林史研究:以菲律宾森林滥伐史研究为重点

本文主要介绍国际森林史研究的发展历程和解释菲律宾森林滥伐史的主要观点。就国际森林史研究来看, 经历了一个从重点研究温带森林史向热带森林史转变的过程。就菲律宾森林滥伐史研究来看, 提出了诸如人口增长压力说、木材生产和贸易说、林业政策鼓励说、行政不力和政治腐败说等重要解释框架。森林史研究需要超越从单因素出发进行解释的现状, 需要向综合研究转变。国别和专题的森林史研究需要从全球森林史和环境史的整体视野来关注。     

Soybeans,Development and Conservation on the Amazon Frontier

Bolivia's rate of deforestation throughout the 1990s was among the most rapid anywhere in the Amazon Basin. This drastic clearing stood in sharp contrast to the relatively slow rates of landscape change that had prevailed in previous decades. This article reviews the models used for explaining deforestation, and argues that the new context of globalization, structural adjustment, regional integration and rapid technological change contributed to accelerated forest cutting during the 1990s. The author suggests that many environmental policy approaches developed during the 1970s and 1980s no longer address the current clearing situation effectively, and that today's frontiers differ profoundly from previous ones. The widely held idea that intensive production per se reduces forest destruction may not be valid on tropical agro‐industrial frontiers, such as the soybean zones of Bolivia and Brazil.     

Consuming narratives: the political ecology of 'alternative' consumption

This paper examines how political ecology themes of tropical conservation and social justice become representational practices underpinning 'alternative' consumption in the North. The notion of commodity culture is adopted to understand the ambiguous rationalities and ethical assumptions of two sets of consumption practices. The first case considers Edenic myth-making used to assimilate concerns over tropical deforestation in the South to consumption-intensive if conservation-minded lifestyles in the North. The second case looks at fair trade and how concern about social injustice and unfair labour practices in the South is harnessed to solidarity-seeking consumption constitutive of 'radical' lifestyles. The paper suggests these contrasting commodity cultures broadly conform to divergent positions in red–green debates. It argues that both are weakened as a form of social and political 'caring at a distance' due to an uncritical acceptance of consumption as the primary basis of action.     

Translation And The Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn Orientalist

Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth–century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères , the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post–colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation–in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields."     

Resettlement,Opium and Labour Dependence: Akha–Tai Relations in Northern Laos

Forestry is a major source of revenue for the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Government’s view is that shifting cultivation in the highlands is the primary cause of deforestation and erosion; this has led it to establish a policy of eliminating shifting cultivation by the resettlement of highland people in or near the lowlands. Here, it is assumed, the highlanders will be able to lead a more sedentary existence, cultivate wet rice, and benefit from various forms of development assistance. In the district of Muang Sing in northern Laos this policy has been partly responsible for the movement of large numbers of Akha people downhill to settle on the lower slopes of the highlands, at the periphery of the lowlands. This movement has been further encouraged by the low productivity of the Akha swidden economy. This article argues that Akha expectations of a more secure livelihood have not been fulfilled due to the ravages of disease, high rates of opium addiction, and the lack of government assistance. Instead, the Akha of the lower slopes have become an impoverished labour force, exploited for the benefit of the politically and economically dominant Tai lowlanders.     

历史时期河西走廊农业开发及其对生态环境的影响

通过查阅历史文献和实地考察,对历史时期河西走廊农业开发及其对生态环境的 影响进行了研究。重点分析了历史时间由于对河西地区不合理的开垦、利用以及对森林的滥伐,造 成当地土壤沙漠化的严重后果。为了汲取这一历史教训,在当今大西北开发中,应遵循河西地区生 态环境的自然规律,有效地保护生态环境。     

Development Discourses and Peasant–Forest Relations: Natural Resource Utilization as Social Process

This article analyses the changing role of forests and the practices of peasants toward them in a Costa Rican rural community, drawing on an analytical perspective of political ecology, combined with cultural interpretations. The study underlines the complex articulation of local processes and global forces in tropical forest struggles. Deforestation is seen as a process of development and power involving multiple social actors, from politicians and development experts to a heterogeneous group of local peasants. The local people are not passive victims of global challenges, but are instead directly involved in the changes concerning their production systems and livelihood strategies. In the light of historical changes in natural resource utilization, the article underlines the multiplicity of the causes of tropical deforestation, and the intricate links between global discourses on environment and development and local forest relations.     

THE FRONTIER REMIX

In The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts, Premesh Lalu claims to offer a critique of apartheid's colonial past. Emblematic of this colonial past is the 1835 killing and mutilation of the Xhosa king Hintsa. Lalu uses this violent event to argue against the evidence provided by the colonial archives. He argues that the killing of Hintsa was not an empirical fact but a product of the colonial imagination. The review argues that although the critique of apartheid's colonial past is timely, the book is not about Hintsa and does not therefore offer an alternative narrative of the death of the Xhosa king.     

Fashioned Forest Pasts,Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales

This article considers how environmental problematics are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa’s humid forest zone. Examing the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine‐grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with ‘discourse’ perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and ‘local’ knowledges. The authors explore the day‐to‐day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers’ alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.     

Distribution of tropospheric ozone in the tropics from satellite and ozonesonde measurements

Measurements from two independent satellite data sets have been used to derive the climatology of the integrated amount of ozone in the troposphere. These data have led to the finding that large amounts of ozone pollution are generated by anthropogenic activity originating from both the industrialized regions of the Northern Hemisphere and from the southern tropical regions of Africa. To verify the existence of this ozone anomaly over this region of the world, an ozonesonde capability has been established at Ascension Island (8 S, 15 W) since July 1990. According to the satellite analyses. Ascension Island is located downwind of the primary source region of this ozone pollution, which likely results from the photochemical oxidation of emissions emanating from the widespread burning of savannas and other biomass in central and southern Africa. These in-situ measurements confirm the existence of large amounts of ozone in the lower atmosphere. These first ozonesonde profiles suggest that much of the ozone generated over Africa during the ‘burning season’ (primarily July-October) reaches Ascension Island. These high levels of ozone in the lower troposphere become much lower by December. Elevated ozone concentrations in the middle troposphere are once again evident in February, which may be the result of biomass burning emissions being transported from western and northern Africa.     

Analyzing the Spatial Dynamics of Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon

Historically, development in Brazilian Amazon was promoted by permits of deforestation under soft territory control or supervision. However, due to the importance of this biome for biodiversity and ecosystem balance in a global perspective, Brazilian's government has tightened deforestation control. This work investigates the spatial pattern of deforestation in a cross‐section and time perspective using global and local spatial data analysis. Global results indicate the existence of high spatial correlation and that deforestation holds concentrated across space, despite the efficacy of policy mechanisms adopted for controlling and reducing the level of deforestation in Legal Amazon. Furthermore, local results support the hypothesis of high spillover effects. Considering the spatial analysis results, we highlight some implications for policy design aiming deforestation control.     

Dealing with the past: Museums and heritage in northern ireland and Cape Town,South Africa

The experiences of post‐apartheid South Africa have often been used to open dialogue about Northern Ireland and the possible approaches to dealing with the legacy of the conflict. People in Northern Ireland have, for example, looked towards the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and policing in South Africa for further insights. This comparison of South Africa and Northern Ireland has now moved beyond being concerned predominantly with conflict resolution and has come to bear in the consideration of how we should present the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland’s museums and the value of preserving the built heritage of the Troubles. This paper uses the example of the ‘transformation’ in the South African heritage sector that came with the end of apartheid as a means to raise areas of concern that have resonance for Northern Ireland. It shows that for both Northern Ireland and South Africa it is important to think further about the impact of display, the power dynamics embedded in the construction of heritage, and the complexity of building a shared narrative from a contested past.     

Liberal,Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy

Indian historiography has largely overlooked the contribution of Indian Liberals in the pre-independence era. It is worse in Indian diplomatic history where studies on pre-independence are few and far between. Responding to this double excision, this article traces the emergence of a new Indian narrative of foreign policy around the issues of equality and justice in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Anchoring their argumentativeness in diplomatic finesse, Indian Liberals such as Satyendra Prasanno Sinha, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and Tej Bahadur Sapru relentlessly campaigned for racial equality and predominance of the rights of people over the rights of states at the Imperial Conferences. In the articulation of these views, South Africa, a country where ideas about the status of Indians and Indian civilisation were most contested, emerged as the singular foreign policy ‘other’ around which India’s foreign policy narrative was constructed.     

Sensitivity of bulk sedimentary stable carbon isotopes to prehistoric forest clearance and maize agriculture

The stable carbon isotope compositions (δ¹³C) of tropical lake sediments and soils have been used to reconstruct the occurrence of prehistoric maize cultivation and its relative importance through time. This study assesses some of the possible variables affecting the response of lake sediment bulk organic carbon isotope (δ¹³C_TOC) values to variations in the scale of prehistoric maize cultivation and the potential of this proxy to yield quantitative estimates of the scale of prehistoric maize agriculture in small tropical watersheds. High resolution analyses of δ¹³C_TOC values, maize pollen concentrations, and mineral influx were conducted on sediments deposited during a ∼220 year period of prehistoric maize agriculture in the watershed of Laguna Castilla, a small lake in the mid-elevations of the Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic. Close correspondence between δ¹³C_TOC values and maize pollen concentrations in the Laguna Castilla sediment record indicates a close relationship between the isotopic values and the scale of prehistoric maize cultivation. Correlations between the δ¹³C_TOC signature and mineral influx indicate that the isotope record is also sensitive to variations in allochthonous carbon delivery. This study establishes that sedimentary δ¹³C_TOC values can provide a highly sensitive proxy of the spatial scale of prehistoric maize agriculture in small tropical watersheds, but emphasizes the need for a better understanding of sediment dynamics and carbon cycling in anthropogenically modified landscapes before this proxy can be widely employed in diverse archaeological settings.     

A short note on banana (Musa) phytoliths in Lapita,immediately post-Lapita and modern period archaeological deposits from Vanuatu

We present results of phytolith analysis of deposits from three prehistoric settlement sites in Vanuatu: the small islands of Vao and Uripiv off the north east coast of the main island of Malekula and at Mafilau on the west coast of Epi Island. Samples from Vao Island coarsely encompass the period from Lapita times (c. 3000 BP) to the present. The data from this site suggest deforestation by people, with a decrease in palms and increase in grasses. The data from the three sites show evidence of an introduced cultigen during different prehistoric periods. Banana (Musa) phytoliths were found in one recent Vao layer (500 BP-present) and in Mafilau layers, the latter representing the immediate post-Lapita period (c. 2800–2500 BP). This phytolith type was also found at Uripiv in Lapita layers (c. 3000–2700 BP). Banana phytoliths are diagnostic so their presence in archaeological deposits in Remote Oceania, outside their natural distribution, provides secure evidence of cultivation. This demonstrates the potential of this line of evidence for identifying both the cultigens transported by early colonists and subsequent plant introductions. The data provide the first direct evidence of banana cultivation at a Lapita site in Remote Oceania and support the contention that horticulture was an integral part of the Lapita Cultural Complex.     

Trafficking in Liquor,Trafficking in Heritage: Beer Branding as Heritage in Post‐apartheid South Africa

A burgeoning literature on post‐apartheid heritage configuration has largely overlooked the use of branding in the creation of heritage discourses in South Africa and the significance of liquor for national identity. This article brings these two concerns together through an examination of two heritage‐scapes—the SAB World of Beer and the SAB Newlands Brewery Heritage Centre—constructed by South African Breweries (SAB) in 1995. It suggests that the commercial construction of heritage as branding provided a vehicle for a powerful corporate capitalist narrative in the post‐apartheid rhetorical contestation over a desired path for the future. It also suggests that dissonance within and between these corporate visitors’ centres mirrored a wider uncertainty over the meaning of national identity in early post‐apartheid South Africa.     

Cotton,climate and colonialism in Dharwar,western India, 1840–1880

Focussing on the cotton improvement projects in Dharwar, western India, that exemplified the modernising aims of colonial agriculture in nineteenth-century India, this article interrogates the architecture of cotton imperialism in the colonised world through the conceptual lens of political ecology. In particular, it brings to the fore the crucial dimension of climate both as an element in colonial thinking and planning, and as a dynamic force impacting on the cultivation of transplanted American cotton. The climate of Dharwar was not quite what the cotton authorities had constructed it to be, and it was, moreover, undergoing change due to the impact of regional deforestation. Furthermore, the article shows how this failure to come to terms with local climate conditions and changes was symptomatic of a broader failure to consider the overall agricultural livelihoods of peasant cultivators. Apart from a brief period when prices were artificially high, peasants much preferred growing the accustomed indigenous cotton rather than the new exotic variety. In turn, cotton was less of a priority than the production of millet food crops. By exploring the ways in which climatic conditions interacted with the economic, social and technological processes of cotton production in Dharwar, this article highlights why American cotton cultivation failed to meet colonial expectations during this period while also revealing the fragile architectural edifice of colonial power.     

The African Queen? Republicanism and Defensive Decolonization in British Tropical Africa, 1958-64

This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the transfer ofpower in British tropical Africa from 1958 to 1964. It suggeststhat, from around 1962, the British government actively encouragedAfrican states to move straight to republican status on independence,rather than retaining the Queen as their head of state. Ministersand officials feared that the subsequent adoption of republicanconstitutions by states that had initially retained the monarchymight prove an embarrassment to the Queen. This determinationto shield the monarch from embarrassment appears to have beenthe overriding factor in British calculations. In this respectthe monarchy was, perhaps, an excessively fragile instrumentfor the promotion of Britain's relations with its former colonies.