This chapter analyses a life-history interview with an African climate change researcher, Mbow, to explore the conditions for scientific knowledge production in Africa. Mbow’s history points to three important and intertwined issues that played out differently through the different phases of his life: an inherited or colonial curriculum; universality of knowledge, namely the transfer of methods and theories from the Global North; and the cultural production of African researchers. The chapter shows how the post-colonial school system in Senegal was modelled over the French system and thus how difficult it was for Mbow to become independent of the colonial heritage. Through a capacity building programme, Mbow gained the competences necessary to question the transfer of theories and methods from the Global North and become an African emancipated researcher producing knowledge of relevance for Africa. The discussion draws on these analyses in order to discuss issues related to producing climate change research in Africa today. The chapter is concluded by arguing that it is necessary to take local experience-based knowledge into account in climate change research; therefore, researchers need to problematize climatic knowledge, particularise climatic experience, and pluralise climatic meaning by integrating local experience-based knowledge.
Tag: anthropology
Indigenous transformations in the comunidad nativa: rethinking kinship and its limitations in an expanding resource frontier
In Of Mixed Blood, Peter Gow sets out an account of the transformations of kinship and the construction of social relations among Indigenous, mainly Yine (Piro), people of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the early 1980s, when Peru’s “Comunidades Nativas” (“Native Communities”) were receiving their new official titles. We revisit Peter’s proposition by comparing it our more recent ethnographic engagements with Indigenous Asháninka/Ashéninka communities in the region. While tracing continuities from his observations, we also show how social relations now play out in different ways, as certain important resources have become scarcer and the need for money is increasingly central for people’s wellbeing. This new context is framed by the expansion of the extractive frontier, a different legal regime of access to land and resources in Comunidades Nativas, and expanding Indigenous groups living in smaller and increasingly degraded areas. In this context, we see not the embracing of new forms of overarching solidarity linked to Comunidades, but rather the shrinking of familial units within these titled territories. The article reflects on Peter’s propositions through vignettes that show how processes of making and unmaking social relations and creating new identities play out in different settings while still maintaining an internal coherence.
War by other means at the extractive frontier: the violence of reconstruction in ‘post-war’ Peru
This article examines the meeting of local and national reconstruction priorities in the wake of Peru’s internal war (officially, 1980-2000). I focus on the impact of the state’s extractivism-led agenda on indigenous Asháninka people’s projects of remaking themselves into Asháninka sanori (‘real Asháninka people’). Taking an Asháninka sanori-centred analysis of their experience of war and post-war violence, I propose an approach to understanding the impact of mainstream reconstruction efforts on survivors that centres on the latter’s articulations of personhood. This approach, possible through ethnographic engagement, sets anthropology at the forefront of the necessary rethinking of mainstream reconstruction interventions to foster approaches that are supportive of survivors’ priorities. The article explores a continuum of violence through war and extractivism that is undoing the networks of relations through which a group of survivors constitute themselves as people and communities and set their aspirations for the future.