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| Title: | Myths, memories and metaphors: recollecting landscape change in the Eritrean highlands |
| Author: | Boerma, Pauline |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Periodical: | Journal of Eastern African Studies (ISSN 1753-1063) |
| Volume: | 6 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 246-269 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Eritrea |
| Subjects: | memory environmental history oral history deforestation |
| External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17531055.2012.669573 |
| Abstract: | Using the case of Eritrea, this article investigates why people's visual recollections and oral accounts of past landscapes can be an unreliable source of accurate information on environmental change. In Eritrea, a longstanding narrative exists that claims that forest cover throughout the country has decreased from 30 percent of land cover in the late nineteenth century to less than 1 percent today. Yet popular recollections are contradicted by available archival and photographic evidence, all of which indicates that the landscape has changed less dramatically than generally imagined. This article explores why a disjunction between the historical evidence regarding the extent and pattern of deforestation in the central Eritrean highlands and people's memories and beliefs about this process should have evolved. Drawing on recent findings in social psychology, and placing this within prevailing debates on landscape and memory, it seeks to explain why visual recollections may be strongly influenced by the metaphoric and symbolic meaning that landscapes hold for individuals and communities. In particular, it looks at how memories about the process of deforestation may be shaped less by actual observation of a physical event than by the nature of people's interaction with past authorities, and by individual experiences of economic hardship and scarcity. The article also looks at how the popular myth of a supposedly once prosperous landscape in Eritrea has been employed and encouraged by those in power - either as a justification for various colonial policies or, in the case of the present government, as a powerful impetus to nationbuilding. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |
