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Environmental Change and African Societies
The volume Environmental Change and African Societies contributes to current debates on global climate change from the perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities. It charts past and present environmental change in different African settings and also discusses policies and scenarios for the future. The first section, “Ideas”, enquires into local perceptions of the environment, followed by contributions on historical cases of environmental change and state regulation. The section “Present” addresses decision-making and agenda-setting processes related to current representations and/or predicted effects of climate change. The section “Prospects” is concerned with contemporary African megatrends. The authors move across different scales of investigation, from locally-grounded ethnographic analyses to discussions on continental trends and international policy. Contributors are: Daniel Callo-Concha, Joy Clancy, Manfred Denich, Sara de Wit, Ton Dietz, Irit Eguavoen, Ben Fanstone, Ingo Haltermann, Laura Jeffrey, Emmanuel Kreike, Vimbai Kwashirai, James C. McCann, Bertrand F. Nero, Jonas Ø. Nielsen, Erick G. Tambo, Julia Tischler.
Listening on the Edge
From the headlines of local newspapers to the coverage of major media outlets, scenes of war, natural disaster, political revolution and ethnic repression greet readers and viewers at every turn. What we often fail to grasp, however, despite numerous treatments of events is the deep meaning and broader significance of crisis and disaster. The complexity and texture of these situations are most evident in the broader personal stories of those whom the events impact most intimately. Oral history, with its focus on listening and collaborative creation with participants, has emerged as a forceful approach to exploring the human experience of crisis. Despite the recent growth of crisis oral histo...
Catastrophe and Catharsis
Destroying human habitat and taking human lives, disasters, be they natural, man-made, or a combination, threaten large populations, even entire nations and societies. They also disrupt the existing order and cause discontinuity in our sense of self and our perceptions of the world. To restore order, not only must human beings be rescued and affected areas rebuilt, but the reality of the catastrophe must also be transformed into narrative. The essays in this collection examine representations of disaster in literature, film, and mass media in German and international contexts, exploring the nexus between disruption and recovery through narrative from the eighteenth century to the present. To...
Scorched Earth
A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war i...
Environing Empire
Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich’s everyday violence.
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals. Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.
Middle East and North Africa
The volume Middle East and North Africa: Climate, Culture and Conflicts focuses on the intricate interrelationships between nature, culture and society in this ecologically, historically and politically fragile region. As such, it debates ideas of eco-theology from Muslim and Jewish perspectives, followed by mythological interpretations and geo-archeological resp. historical analyses of the interrelationships and impacts of climate and other environmental factors on the development of ancient civilizations and cultures. The section “Present” addresses current conflict scenarios as a result of climate change, i.e. water scarcity, droughts, desertification and similar factors. The final section is concerned with potentials of international cooperation in pursuit of developing and ensuring sustainable energy resources and moves across different scales of environmental and religious education, from awareness raising to perspectives of best practice examples. Contributors are Katajun Amirpur, Helmut Brückner, Eckart Ehlers, Max Engel, Kerstin Fritzsche, Ursula Kowanda-Yassin, Tobias von Lossow, Ephraim Meir, Rosel Pientka-Hinz, Matthias Schmidt, and Franz Trieb.
Interkulturelle Qualitative Sozialforschung
Angesichts der alltäglichen und allgegenwärtigen „Interkultur“ wird die qualitative Sozialforschung zunehmend mit Problemen konfrontiert, die mit ihren herkömmlichen Verfahren nicht mehr angemessen analysierbar sind – sei es, weil sie im eigenen Land auf das Miteinander unterschiedlicher Kulturen stößt und für deren Untersuchung über keine geeigneten Methoden verfügt, oder sei es, weil sie mit Daten arbeitet, die aus anderen Kulturkreisen stammen. Auch hier sind angemessene Methoden Mangelware. Eng damit verbunden ist ein weiteres, nicht zu unterschätzendes Problem Qualitativer Sozialforschung. Immer öfter sind die Interpretationsgruppen nicht mehr „monokulturell“ zusammengesetzt. Immer häufiger bestehen diese Gruppen aus Interpreten, die – kulturell betrachtet – divergente Interpretationshorizonte besitzen. Bei allen genannten Problemstellungen tauchen auf methodischer und methodologischer Ebene völlig neue Fragen für die Forschungspraxis auf.
Wandel (v)erkennen
Angemessene Antworten auf die Problematik von Klimawandel und Artenschwund verlangen eine gesellschaftliche Wahrnehmung von langfristigen Veränderungen in Natur und Gesellschaft. Das Buch fragt nach den Formen, Grenzen und Konsequenzen der individuellen und kollektiven Wahrnehmung von Wandel und eröffnet ein wissenssoziologisch fundiertes Verständnis der (Nicht-)Wahrnehmung vergangener wie auch zukünftiger Veränderungsprozesse. Dies erfolgt zunächst in einer theoretischen Perspektive durch die Zusammenführung von relevanten Gesichtspunkten aus der Erinnerungs-, Generationen- und Zeitforschung. Das Konzept der „Shifting Baselines“ liefert hierfür einen Ausgangspunkt. Daran anschließend blickt das Buch anhand von Aufschlüssen aus qualitativen Interviews auf die Wahrnehmung von Wandlungsprozessen unterschiedlicher Dynamik – von langsamem, rapidem und krassem (d.h. katastrophischem) Wandel –, um schließlich die Frage der Varianz und historischen Veränderung der Wahrnehmung von Wandel zu diskutieren.
Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change
Global news on anthropogenic climate change is shaped by international politics, scientific reports and voices from transnational protest movements. This timely volume asks how local communities engage with these transnational discourses. The chapters in this volume present a range of compelling case studies drawn from a broad cross-section of local communities around the world, reflecting diverse cultural and geographical contexts. From Greenland to northern Tanzania, it illuminates how different understandings evolve in diverse cultural and geographical contexts while also revealing some common patterns of how people make sense of climate change. Global Warming in Local Discourses constitu...
