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Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands
Journal of Historical Geography ( IF 1.031 ) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 , DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005
Connor Joseph Cavanagh

Abstract In 1929 the administration of Kenya Colony under the governorship of Edward Grigg ordered the formation of a special committee to report on what had become known as ‘the Dorobo question’ across eastern Africa. As conceived by the committee, the Dorobo question was effectively that of how to govern ‘most hunting people’ under British rule in the region – particularly those thought to be ‘pre-tribal and pre-pastoral’ – and who were often inconveniently found to be living within newly demarcated forest reserves. An examination of the committee’s recommendations grants us insight into the ways in which colonial perceptions of incipient ‘environmental’ problems were often insidiously bound up in the social Darwinism of the period. Here, European perceptions of the Dorobo as a supposedly ‘dying race’ of forest-dwellers brings the entanglement of the period’s nascent ‘racial’ and natural sciences squarely into focus. Engaging these phenomena in relation to the case of the Sengwer community in western Kenya’s Cherangani Hills, I suggest that renewed inquiries into such conjoined discourses of race and nature may assist us in further enriching our understanding of the multiple, perpetually contested dimensions of identity formation within (post)colonial East Africa. Not least, the nuances of these dynamics may help us to more fully understand how the afterlives of these diverse racialisations and tribalisations continue to impinge upon the grievances of affected communities in the present, enabling an explicitly postcolonial – rather than, necessarily, a primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist – perspective on recent articulations of ‘indigenous’ or ‘ethnic minority’ rights in eastern Africa.

中文翻译:

濒临灭绝的种族、森林砍伐和干旱:肯尼亚殖民地西部高地社会达尔文主义的政治生态

摘要 1929 年,爱德华·格里格 (Edward Grigg) 统治下的肯尼亚殖民地政府下令成立一个特别委员会,报告东非著名的“多罗博问题”。正如委员会所设想的那样,多罗博问题实际上是如何管理该地区英国统治下的“大多数狩猎人”——特别是那些被认为是“前部落和前牧民”的人——而且他们经常被发现不方便生活在新划定的森林保护区内。对委员会建议的审查使我们深入了解殖民时期对初期“环境”问题的看法往往与当时的社会达尔文主义阴险地联系在一起的方式。这里,欧洲将多罗博人视为森林居民的“濒死种族”的看法,使这一时期新生的“种族”和自然科学之间的纠葛直接成为焦点。将这些现象与肯尼亚西部 Cherangani Hills 的 Sengwer 社区的案例联系起来,我建议重新调查这种关于种族和自然的联合话语可能有助于我们进一步丰富我们对身份形成的多重、永久争议维度的理解。 (后)殖民东非。尤其重要的是,这些动态的细微差别可以帮助我们更全面地了解这些不同种族和部落化的来世如何继续影响当前受影响社区的不满,从而实现明确的后殖民——而不是,必然地,原始主义者,
更新日期:2019-10-01
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