Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa

Edited by John Beardsley

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the longest occupied and least studied landscapes on earth. While scholarship has been attentive to images of nature made by the region’s explorers and settlers and to landscapes of the colonial era—public parks and game preserves, botanical gardens and urban plans—surprisingly little attention has been paid to spaces created by and for Africans themselves, from the precolonial era to the present. This book is a contribution to a small but growing effort to address this oversight. Its essays present a range of landscapes: pathways and cairns used by nomadic peoples to navigate through and mark significant places; anthropogenic or managed forests consecrated to ritual purposes of various kinds; tombs or palaces with significant landscape orientations and components; even monumental ceremonial and urban spaces, as at Great Zimbabwe or Djenne. They explore what we know of precolonial and later indigenous designed landscapes, how these landscapes were understood in the colonial era, and how they are being recuperated today for nation building, identity formation, and cultural affirmation. Contributors engage with the most critical issues in preservation today, from the conflicts between cultural heritage and biodiversity protection to the competition between local and international heritage agendas.

CONTENT

1. Introduction:
 Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa John Beardsley

2. Design on the World: 
Blackness and the Exclusion of Sub-Saharan Africa from the “Global” History of Garden and Landscape Design 
Grey Gundaker


MONUMENT AND ENVIRONMENT
3. Cultural Landscapes in Mali:
 Historical Antecedents and Future Trajectories 
Charlotte Joy

4. Great Zimbabwe as Power-Scape: How the Past Locates Itself in Contemporary Southern Africa 
Innocent Pikirayi

5. Landscape and Architecture in the Central Highlands of Madagascar 
Randall Bird

6. Stories of Stone:
Transformation and Reinvention of Swahili Coast Pillar Tombs 
Sandy Prita Meier

7. Gardener Kings:
 Formality of Politics and Palace Forests among the Gbe Kingdoms of West Africa Neil L. Norman


PATHWAY AND GROVE
8. Places and Paths of Memory:
 Archaeologies of East African Pastoralist Landscapes Paul J. Lane

9. Cultural Capital and Structural Power in African Landscapes: Social Dynamics of Sacred Groves 
Michael Sheridan
10. Good Bush, Bad Bush:
 Representing Our Natures in Historical Southern Nigerian Landscapes 
Ikem Stanley Okoye

11. A Multiplex Landscape:
 Explorations of Place and Practice in Osun Grove, Nigeria Akinwumi Ogundiran


RETHINKING LANDSCAPE
12. Rain, Power, Sovereignty, and the Materiality of Signs in Southern Zimbabwe Joost Fontein

13. “Nature’s Regions”:
 Mobilization of Cultural Landscapes for Conservation Maano Ramutsindela

14. From Table Mountain to Hoerikwaggo: Re-imagining Africa’s “First Landscape” 
Jeremy Foster


source : http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780884024101



Citer ce billet
nicolai (2017, 27 août). Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa. Les bois sacrés en Afrique. Consulté le 19 mars 2024, à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/m4fm

Laisser un commentaire

Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas publiée. Les champs obligatoires sont indiqués avec *

Ce site utilise Akismet pour réduire les indésirables. En savoir plus sur comment les données de vos commentaires sont utilisées.