The sand swallows our land: overexploitation of productive resources and the problem of household viability in the Kheiran, a Sudanese oasis

bibliographic database
Line

Book

Title:	The sand swallows our land: overexploitation of productive resources and the problem of household viability in the Kheiran, a Sudanese oasis
Author:	Manger, Leif O.
Year:	1981
Issue:	24
Pages:	137
Language:	English
Series:	Occasional papers from the Bergen department of social anthropology (ISSN 0332-8147)
City of publisher:	Bergen
Publisher:	Department of Social Anhropology; Univ. of Bergen
Geographic term:	Sudan
Subjects:	droughts oases soil fertility
Abstract:	What is viable adaptation within one environment may not be viable within other environments. The Kheiran, where the author carried out fieldwork in 1976, provides an example of such a contradiction. What was a viable adaptation on a political level favoured certain economic forms, which eventually proved to have negative effects on the natural environment. The existence of possibilities for cash crop production in irrigated gardens has made people less vulnerable to negative developments within rainfed cultivation. They have therefore not been forced to terminate practices that are bound to destroy the environment. This book aims to show how this process has developed empirically, thereby presenting a perspective that can be useful in the study of desertification and the causes behind it.