Colonial Authorities (colonial + authority)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


Conservation Geographies in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Politics of National Parks, Community Conservation and Peace Parks

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2010
Brian King
Sub-Saharan Africa has been the location of intense conservation planning since the colonial era. Under the auspices of wilderness protection, colonial authorities established national parks largely for the purpose of hunting and tourism while forcibly evicting indigenous populations. Concerns about the ethical and economic impacts of protected areas have generated interest in community conservation initiatives that attempt to include local participation in natural resource management. In recent years, the anticipated loss of biodiversity, coupled with the integration of ecological concepts into planning processes, has generated interest in larger-scale initiatives that maximize protected habitat. Central to this shift are transboundary conservation areas, or Peace Parks, that involve protected territory that supersedes national political borders. This study provides a review of national parks, community conservation, and Peace Parks, in order to understand the development politics and governance challenges of global conservation. Although these approaches are not mutually exclusive, the study asserts that they represent major trajectories to conservation planning in Sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world. In considering the histories of these models in Sub-Saharan Africa, I argue that conservation planners often prioritize economic and ecological factors over the political circumstances that influence the effectiveness of these approaches. The study concludes by suggesting that an analysis of these three models provides a lens to examine ongoing debates regarding the employ of conservation as an economic development strategy and the challenges to environmental governance in the 21st century. [source]


Spirit possession, power, and the absent presence of Islam: re-viewing Les maîtres fous,

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 4 2006
Paul Henley
In the history of ethnographic documentary, the late Jean Rouch's film Les maîtres fous is widely regarded as initiating a new phase in the development of the genre. It concerns the hauka spirit-possession cult of Songhay-Zerma migrants from the middle Niger river who had come to work in Accra, then the capital of the British colony of the Gold Coast, West Africa. When released in 1955, the film was both banned by the colonial authorities and simultaneously denounced by African intellectuals and leading French anthropologists. Since then it has gone through a progressive rehabilitation and today, some fifty years on, it is hailed in many sources as a remarkable counter-hegemonic representation of European colonialism in Africa. This article proposes a re-interpretation of Les maîtres fous, arguing that in order to defend the film against criticism, its counter-hegemonic features have been over-emphasized, thereby obscuring its continuity with other forms of Songhay-Zerma religious belief and practice. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the place of film in anthropology. [source]


Adaptation and Appropriation on the Colonial Frontier: Indigenous Leadership in the Colombian Chocó, 1670,1808

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2007
CAROLINE A. WILLIAMS
This article explores the consequences for the native population of the Colombian Chocó of the emergence, over the course of the eighteenth century, of an elite of caciques and indios mandones or principales whose functions of powers far exceeded those of the warrior chiefs that had traditionally acted as leaders of their people. Appointed for the purpose of facilitating the collection of tribute and the supply of labour to European settlers, caciques and mandones were almost universally rejected by native communities during the early phases of Spanish colonisation (c. 1630,1690), and they disappear from the historical record after Independence. Eighteenth-century sources, however, not only record the existence of a clearly defined elite of mandones or principales in villages across the region, but show these individuals engaging actively with the colonial authorities, on behalf of their communities, at local and audiencia levels. This article argues that, at a time of a much strengthened European presence in the region, caciques and mandones came to understand their roles in ways that were entirely different from those intended by the Spanish, and in so doing acquired the legitimacy that had eluded their seventeenth-century predecessors. Far from serving merely as intermediaries between settlers and indigenous populations, indios mandones acted as negotiators on behalf of the indigenous population, whose task was to defend and/or advance the interests of the communities they had been appointed to control. [source]


Paras, Palaces, Pathogens: frameworks for the growth of Calcutta, 1800,1850

CITY & SOCIETY, Issue 1 2000
John Archer
THE HISTORICAL FABRIC OF CALCUTTA incorporates both the perspective of indigenous knowledges and practices, as well as successive regimes of "improvements" that British colonial authorities sought to introduce in the period 1798-1850. In the face of these diverse interests the urban fabric served as a crurial medium for the negotiation of difference. Portions of the indigenous population selectively adapted their budding designs and social practices to British conventions, while protecting other patterns and practices in efforts both to accommodate and to maintain difference. [Colonial cities, urban planning, hygiene, India, Calcutta] [source]


Re-Reading Rudyard Kipling's ,English' Heroism: Narrating Nation in The Jungle Book

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 3 2001
Jopi Nyman
This essay explores the construction of colonial English national identity in a text not always read in the context of its author's imperial project. Since Kipling's The Jungle Book has been relegated to the category of children's fiction and is today usually read in its Disneyfied version, its constructions of nation, race and class in colonial space, exposed through its narrations of local inhabitants (both animals and humans), have not attracted the attention that they deserve. I will argue that the stories' racialized and interrelated images of Indian children and animals contribute to an imagining of Englishness as a site of power and racial superiority. While the stories appear to narrate an Indian space, the images and constructions of nation produced stem from an understanding of Englishness as a site of colonial authority. Thus it is argued that Kipling's colonial animals map a racialized contrastive space where national identity is inseparable from racial identity, leading Kipling finally to abandon the colonial animal in order to be able to represent proper Englishness. While Kipling constructs colonial animals as racialized Others by writing monkeys and snakes in his jungle sketches, he also promotes ,truly English' identities in the nationalist allegory of "The White Seal". Indeed, all animals are not equal but they too are represented in racialized and nationed terms, which points to the flexibility of the animal trope in colonial discourse. [source]