Common understanding of the causes of land-use and land-cover change is dominated by simplifications which, in turn, underlie many environment-development policies. This article tracks some of the major myths on driving forces of land-cover change and proposes alternative pathways of change that are better supported by case study evidence. Cases reviewed support the conclusion that neither population nor poverty alone constitute the sole and major underlying causes of land-cover change worldwide. Rather, peoples’ responses to economic opportunities, as mediated by institutional factors, drive land-cover changes. Opportunities and

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The causes of land-use and land-cover change: moving beyond the myths

How do African urban residents, who are conventionally assumed to operate within parochial, highly localized confines, operate at larger scales? How do they reach a “larger world”? The article looks at some of the overall effects on African cities and their residents of a global process of scalar recomposition and the reconfiguration of social cohesion that ensues. By examining renovations in a traditional Islamic institution, zawiyyah, an example is provided of ways in which urban Africans attempt to act effectively within larger domains.

On the Worlding of African Cities

Young Beti women in Cameroon regularly assert that because they are uncertain about what the future will bring, they cannot make any plans. But they do plan, strategize, and indeed act quite effectively. The purpose of this paper is to explain how they do so, specifically in reference to marriage and reproduction, and thereby to contribute to a general understanding of intentionality, uncertainty, and social action. Action has been commonly theorized as the fulfillment of a prior intention. But uncertainties, both the probabilistic uncertainty of events and the subjects experience of uncertainty, threaten to dissolve the link between intention and its fulfillment. This paper argues that, at least under the conditions of uncertainty applicable in contemporary Africa, effective social action is based not on the fulfillment of prior intentions but on a judicious opportunism: the actor seizes promising chances. In other words, womens negation of Weberian rational action is not a lack; by engaging in heterogen...

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When the Future Decides

https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/david.harvey/AEF806/Berry1997.pdf

Tomatoes, land and hearsay: Property and history in asante in the time of structural adjustment

Cultural artefacts, like genes and languages, reflect their history. The methodology of inference of that history, however, has been a contentious question. Recent applications of biological phylogenetic methodology to infer historical patterns of material culture are often explicitly justified on the grounds that essentially similar processes underlie evolution in both biological and material cultural realms. Conventional phylogenetic techniques, while helpful in some cases, do not provide a general theoretical and operational framewok for reconstructing material cultural history. Critical analyses of the diversity patterns of two musical instruments, the stringed psaltery and the brasswind cornet, reveal paths of information transfer and the origins of innovation unique to the cultural context that are unlike those in biological systems.

http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/449/Temkin-Eldredge.pdf

Phylogenetics and Material Cultural Evolution

The paper re-examines principles of social organization in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa, suggesting that the imagery of ‘accumulation’ of ‘wealth in people’ is not wrong, but not flexible enough to encompass the centrality of knowledge in these societies. People were singularized repositories of a differentiated and expanding repertoire of knowledge, as well as being structured kin (as in the kinship model) and generic dependents and followers (as in the wealth-in-people model). We argue that social mobilization was in part based on the mobilization of different bodies of knowledge, and leadership was the capacity to bring them together effectively, even if for a short time and specific purpose. We refer to this process as composition and distinguish it from accumulation.The paper has three parts. The first substitutes an oral epic from southern Cameroon for an ethnography of the principles by which people pursued agendas and mobilized followings in their own political worlds. Colonial rule may have institutionalized pre-colonial political hierarchies, but it completely altered the terms for political mobilization. Hence the historical record is very limited for making inferences about how ‘wealth-in-people’ operated in action, under pre-colonial conditions. The second critiques the evolutionary assumptions about simple societies that still color the models of Equatorial societies. The third revisits the ethnography to illuminate the principles of composition. The conclusion makes inferences and suggestions with respect to aspects of pre-colonial social history.

Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa

One of the guiding lodestones for social theorists and social historians across the entire theoretical spectrum has been ‘wealth’: the things people imbue with value, the caches they collect up by every means from prestation to predation, the performative displays they orchestrate, the treasures they store and eventually leave behind, and all the complex cultural constructions whereby such things are counted, praised and imagined as sources and instruments of power. Perhaps no other topic excites comparably and recurrently fresh interest, from the Marxian framework of capital to Veblen's ‘conspicuous consumption’, Schama's ‘embarrassment of riches’, Appadurai's ‘tournaments of value’ and Weiner's ‘dense objects’.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853700026980

Wealth in People, Wealth in Things – Introduction*

Berry, Sara. No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. xiv + 258 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 cloth, $22.50 paper. Netting, Robert McC. Smallholders, Householders, Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. xxi + 389 pp. including references and index. $49.50 cloth, $16.95 paper. Turner, B. L., Goran Hyden, and Robert Kates, eds. Population Growth and Agricultural Change in Africa. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993. xvii + 461 pp. including glossary and index. $49.95 cloth.

Jane I. Guyer

Papers

Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa

Wealth in People, Wealth in Things – Introduction*

Diversity and intensity in the scholarship on African agricultural change

Developmental cycles and commodity production in Africa