Shifting Sands
A Human History of the Sahara
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- ¥2,800
発行者による作品情報
A “detailed, often gritty, picture of a fragile world” (The Wall Street Journal) that tells the history of the Sahara from prehistory to the present, showing how Saharans have navigated scarcity, conquest, and the relentless challenges of the desert environment
What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people who call it home.
Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy clichés and exposing fascinating truths along the way. From the geology of the region to the religions, languages, and cultural and political forces that shape and fracture it, this landmark book tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and 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.
