|
|
|
Book Review
| Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rainforest. By Tamara Giles-Vernick. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. xiii + 293 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $49.50, paper $19.50.
|
| In Cutting the Vines of the Past, Tamara Giles-Vernick reconstructs a century of Central Africa's environmental history largely through the memories of the Mpiemu, an ethnic group that inhabits the Central African Republic's Upper Sangha Basin. In order to systematize the imagery of reminiscence, Giles-Vernick aggregates her informants' individual recollections into an Mpiemu collective memory that clearly marks the past's crucial elements. In this case, where indigenous livelihoods have depended largely on natural resources, the historical markers inhabit particular places like villages, fields and, of course, forests. In a very powerful sense, this Mpiemu past still lives in the present, a phenomenon evident in the current discourses over forest conservation. |
1
|
|
The Mpiemu word for the reconstructed past is doli, a extraordinarily complex concept that encompasses, according to Giles-Vernick, the way people debate and make claims about the past and present; the way they think about particular places in the forest; advice about kin and gender relations; didactic tales of mythical deities; historical narratives; knowledge about farming, trapping and hunting; a way of perceiving and knowing the forest; and a way of passing on knowledge to one's progeny in a process the Mpiemu call "leaving a person behind." Given doli's diffuse conceptual nature, it occasionally becomes an unwieldy organizing principle. Nonetheless, Cutting the Vines raises important questions about European and African perceptions of forest wealth and poverty, and the ongoing conflicts that have shaped the Sangha Basin's forest environment. |
2
|
|
Giles-Vernick sets up the clashes over resources early on by reconstructing a snapshot of the late nineteenth-century Mpiemu settlement patterns, production systems, and social relations, whose stability depended on a vast store of environmental knowledge and an accompanying set of complex social relations. When global demands for rubber and ivory brought French colonialism to the Sangha Basin, Mpiemu autonomy suffered under the state's onerous, and often brutal, labor requirements. Although the rubber boom ended in the 1920s, similar commodity boom-and-bust cycles in the production of coffee, timber, and diamonds continued to force transformations in Mpiemu agricultural and hunting practices. While environmental change undoubtedly accompanied the economic transformation, Giles-Vernick chooses to steer her analysis away from ecological landscapes in favor of the changing discourses of doli that formed the landscapes of memory. |
3
|
|
Doli's dominant motif is deprivation. Mpiemu informants recount the breakup of closely-knit villages whose youth sought employment in the mines or on plantations. Their stories recall the bereavement associated with sleeping sickness epidemics and the depopulation of the countryside. While these tragic stories demonstrate Mpiemu resentment against a long history of colonial exactions, Giles-Vernick finds a common narrative thread that also laments the progressive decline of opportunities to labor in the European plantation and logging sectors. It seems that for the Mpiemu, like the concessionaire companies and the colonial state, the forest's value always has been closely bound to its ongoing and successful exploitation. For readers who harbor romanticized visions of conservation-minded African forest dwellers, Giles-Vernick's conclusions may surprise, but as presented in Cutting the Vines, they make perfect sense. They furthermore explain the powerful antipathy the Mpiemu now harbor toward the World Wildlife Fund's forest conservation project in the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park and the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve, which dominate Mpiemu space and whose administration, informants claim, prevents them from making a decent living. |
4
|
|
Chris Conte is an associate professor of African and environmental history at Utah State University. His current research focuses on East Africa's highlands and America's Great Basin. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|