Browsing by Author "Fairhead, J."

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  • Fashioned forest pasts, occluded histories? International environmental analysis in West African locales
    Leach, M.; Fairhead, J. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000)
    This article considers how environmental problems are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa's humid forest zone. Examining the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine-grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with 'discourse' perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and 'local' knowledges. The authors explore the day-to-day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers' alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.
  • Misreading African landscapes: Society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic
    Fairhead, J.; Leach, M. (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
    Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded by both scientists and policy-makers as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use. Through meticulous use of historical sources, and close investigation of inhabitants' technical knowledge and practices, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach question these entrenched assumptions. They show, on the contrary, that people have created forest islands around their villages, and have turned fallow vegetation more woody, so that population growth has implied more forest, not less. They also consider the origins, persistence and consequences of a century of erroneous policy. Interweaving historical, social anthropological and ecological data, this unique study advances a novel theoretical framework for ecological anthropology, forcing a radical re-examination of some central tenants in each of these disciplines. ---Series abstract