Suchergebnisse

This thesis is based on a grazing and land dispute which took place in the semi-arid Kaoko, north-western Namibia, between 2014 to 2016. I draw on a situational analysis approach and engage with the dispute both as a diagnostic and emergent event. The dispute involved the in-migration of several Himba households and their livestock from northern into southern Kaoko where many in turn enact their belonging to a larger pan-Herero society. These in-migrations were coupled with an increase in drought-related mobilities since 2012. In focusing on the dispute this thesis asks how culturally-informed and historically-constituted colonial and post-colonial institutions of land governance were being locally refashioned and struggled over. Secondly, this thesis explores how persons navigated this legally pluralistic context and how this was shaping and being shaped by social practices of pastoral mobility. And lastly, this thesis critically explores the politics of belonging generated by the dispute. In doing so, I show how the post-independent legal power vested in 'customary' authorities and law in the governing of 'communal' lands was based on an assumed ethnographic fact of exclusive territories. Given the existence of plural authorities and overlapping territories in Kaoko, this generated a renewed competition for territorial reach, further fueled by the embeddedness of these struggles in long-standing factional and national party politics. These struggles opened up new avenues for mobility as competing authorities tried to amass followers and strengthen their claims. However, many of these pastoral mobilities were politically and socially contested. This thesis then details how residents, land-use communities and particular networked political groups navigated between 'customary' and 'state' law and authority in co-producing and contesting 'communal' tenure from the ground-up, and in a context where overlapping colonial and post-colonial rule and tenure had generated an institutional vacuum. Moreover, I illustrate ...

This dissertation is based on research conducted at a small state-managed conservancy called the Edith Stephens Nature Reserve (ESNR) situated in the low-lying flatlands of the Cape Town metropolis. By tracing some of the complex and varied ways in which different ways of knowing and valuing urban "natures" and practices of conservation co-constitute each other, this dissertation critically engages with the social power relations at work in the continual making and unmaking of Cape Town's "natural" heritages. In doing so, I argue for recognizing the ways in which Cape Town's urban "natures" remain entangled with the epistemological, ecological and spatial legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Moreover, by focusing on the ESNR, I explore the current material and discursive practices by the state in relation to urban "nature" conservation. In recent years, the discursive framework of biodiversity conservation was mapped onto ESNR through the state apparatus. At the same time, ESNR was identified as pilot site for an experimental partnership project that was called Cape Flats Nature (CFN), a project that ran from 2002 till 2010 which explored what biodiversity conservation would mean within marginalized, poverty-stricken and highly unequal urban landscapes. By engaging with ESNR's historically constituted material-discursivity, this dissertation argues that, during this time, a particular relational knowledge emerged which, in turn, co-crafted and configured the emerging poetics, politics and practices at ESNR. In doing so, I foreground my main argument – that urban "nature" conservation, far from only being about conserving and caring for nonhuman lifeworlds, is rather simultaneously about conserving a particular relation to the world, to others and to oneself.

This dissertation is based on research conducted at a small state-managed conservancy called the Edith Stephens Nature Reserve (ESNR) situated in the low-lying flatlands of the Cape Town metropolis. By tracing some of the complex and varied ways in which different ways of knowing and valuing urban "natures" and practices of conservation co-constitute each other, this dissertation critically engages with the social power relations at work in the continual making and unmaking of Cape Town's "natural" heritages. In doing so, I argue for recognizing the ways in which Cape Town's urban "natures" remain entangled with the epistemological, ecological and spatial legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Moreover, by focusing on the ESNR, I explore the current material and discursive practices by the state in relation to urban "nature" conservation. In recent years, the discursive framework of biodiversity conservation was mapped onto ESNR through the state apparatus. At the same time, ESNR was identified as pilot site for an experimental partnership project that was called Cape Flats Nature (CFN), a project that ran from 2002 till 2010 which explored what biodiversity conservation would mean within marginalized, poverty-stricken and highly unequal urban landscapes. By engaging with ESNR's historically constituted material- discursivity, this dissertation argues that, during this time, a particular relational knowledge emerged which, in turn, co-crafted and configured the emerging poetics, politics and practices at ESNR. In doing so, I foreground my main argument - that urban "nature"conservation, far from only being about conserving and caring for nonhuman life worlds, is rather simultaneously about conserving a particular relation to the world, to others and to oneself.

Throughout the past 120 years, hunting has linked the semi-arid Kaokoveld (northwestern Namibia) to global trade networks simultaneously embedding it within global aspirations to preserve African fauna untrammelled. The hunting of elephants for ivory, of endemic species for scientific inventories, of large game for the leisurely hunt, and clandestine poaching by South African officials and military, as well as contemporary forms of legalised hunting for trophies and saleable game meat, have continuously connected local pastoral communities, the environment, the state, and external globally operating actors. Flows of trophies, commodities, services, knowledge, and weapons between hunters, carriers and scouts, scientists and translators, intermediary traders and operators, state officials, and experts of international organisations have contributed not only to the dynamic development of a specific local-global interface, but also to the continuous re-shaping of biocultural frontiers between game species and humans. These flows have been strongly driven by the shifting tides of commodification of game, its state-enforced de-commodification, and its recent recommodification. This paper first addresses the elephant hunts of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and the hunting for scientific purposes in the first half of the twentieth century. It then proceeds to look at 'subsistence' hunting, and leisure hunting by colonial officials, and finally deals with modern trophy-hunting in the context of community-based natural resource management.