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Series

Volume 33

Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology

Reviews

“The book is very well documented, showing a deep knowledge of several social and ecological aspects of Sahrawi lives, and their dynamics of recent transformation. It is written in a fluent and evocative style which is pleasant for the reader.” • Barbara Casciarri, University of Paris 8, France

“I thoroughly enjoyed this book …Volpato has clearly spent a lot of time working in the region and it shows. The Western Sahara and Sahrawi have seen very little engagement with ethnographers and this book fills a huge gap in the anthropological and ethnobiological literature. Volpato masterfully combines research in ethnobiology within a broader context of colonial history, war, politics, and human-nature relations.” • John Richard Stepp, University of Florida

Description

The word “desert” comes from the Latin desertus, which means forsaken, empty. To this view, the Sahrawi camel pastoralists of Western Sahara contrapose the Arabic term badiya to describe an animated landscape. After five decades of exile as refugees in southwestern Algeria, the Sahrawi have struggled to reconfigure the badiya, recovering camel husbandry and access to part of the former rangeland, and weaving it back as seasonal nomadism. Desert Entanglements analyzes this process as an act of place-making focused on refugees’ agency. Drawing from approaches in environmental and multispecies anthropology, ethnobiology, and political ecology, it contributes to the exploration of human-nature relationships in these unraveling times.

Subject: Anthropology (General)Environmental Studies (General)Refugee and Migration Studies

Area: Africa

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Of Related Interest

Grazing Communities

Pastoralism on the Move and Biocultural Heritage Frictions

Fig Trees and Humans

Ficus Ecology and Mutualisms across Cultures

Spaces of Solidarity

Karen Activism in the Thailand-Burma Borderlands