Shifting Sands
A Human History of the Sahara
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- 8,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ILSE SCHWEPCKE PRIZE FOR WOMEN'S TRAVEL WRITING
'A fascinating travelogue and history of the world's largest hot desert ... fresh, original and energising' THE TIMES
In this sweeping account, Judith Scheele reveals the rich history and complex reality of the world's largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, Scheele leads us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present - and the race for resources that will define the future. The Sahara covers parts of eleven countries, and Scheele follows in the footsteps and tyre-tracks of the many people who cross the desert, taking us into the homes, mosques, palm groves and battlefields where history is written, spoken and remade.
The result is a masterful portrait of the Sahara. Encompassing the geology, religions, peoples and politics that shape and fracture the region, Shifting Sands tells the immersive story of a place whose future holds implications for us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
That the Sahara is "empty, barren and everywhere the same" is a misperception anthropologist Scheele (The Value of Disorder) sets out to correct in this captivating study. She dates the notion partly to the impression created by medieval Europe's first "aerial view" map, which depicted North Africa, a place of little importance to European travelers, as an unpeopled expanse. Such a barren wasteland was ripe for the "orientalist" imaginings of the colonial era through today's foreign policy complex, which tends to perceive the region as "ungoverned space." To counter such perspectives, Scheele unravels common Sahara myths: only 15% of the region is covered by sand dunes, the rest being "mostly rocky hard surface or desert pavement"; the "oasis garden" is largely fictive; and reports of desert "slavery" are mostly misrepresentations of either the current migrant crisis (when sub-Saharan Africans end up stranded in North Africa due largely to Western meddling, the oft-elided subtext of articles on "Libyan people smuggling") or of a past system in which kin-less people needed to commit their labor to a new group in order to survive. Drawing on her own extensive travels, Scheele presents an invigorating alternate vision of the Sahara as a place where social life is deeply intertwined with ecology but which is just as varied and complex as anywhere. It's an immersive view of a too often oversimplified region.
