The African Husbandman

ISBN-13: 9783825830878 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 568 str.

William Allan; Helen Tilley

Opis

Upon its initial publication in 1965, The African Husbandman helped a generation of scholars and officials appreciate that Africans' agricultural practices were both more complex and more malleable than was often thought. Allan's work also pioneered research methods that wedded ethnographic and ecological fieldwork in ways that demonstrated the inextricable links between social arrangements, environmental conditions, and land use patterns. If certain facets of Allan's analysis have now come under scrutiny, such as his concept of carrying capacity and his belief in the positive consequences of colonialism, his general tenet that to improve agricultural prospects in Africa one first has to understand it from the cultivators' point of view has only been strengthened with time. As long as there are individuals struggling to make sense of African agricultural productivity.