James Fairhead
Biographic Data
| ID | 113168 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Fairhead |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Fairhead |
| SIGNATURE | FAIRHEAD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1367 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Environmental and structural risk factors for mycetoma in the White Nile State, Sudan: An ethnographic study
For decades, poor Sudanese communities in rural areas have silently battled mycetoma, a stigmatizing, disabling, neglected tropical disease. Its linkage to specific, ecology-dependent livelihoods such as farming, woodcutting and collecting and animal herding has obscured its cause and environmental and structural dimensions at both the local and global levels. This ethnographic study challenges the prevailing singular focus on the injuries that h…
Mobilising Papua New Guinea’s Conservation Humanities: Research, Teaching, Capacity Building, Future Directions
We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and …
Defining the Anthropocene tropical forest: Moving beyond 'disturbance' and 'landscape domestication' with concepts from African worldviews
How natural and cultural forces shaping tropical forested landscapes are conceptualised is of vital importance to Anthropocene debates. We examine two concepts: disturbance and landscape domestication. From the perspective of disturbance, humans - whether ancient or modern - are a priori negative for tropical forests, outside of and alien to nature. From this view, the Anthropocene is a planetary scale aggregation of disturbance. A more just visi…
Evidence, Ethos and Experiment: The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa
Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local conce…
Transformation of Farmer Resistance in Conservation Areas: Land Occupation by Farmers in Mount Halimun-Salak National Park, West Java
A number of studies have shown various agrarian conflicts as a response by local farmers against the policy of national parks that prohibits them from accessing conservation forest areas. However, previous studies had not explained the dynamics of power relations between park authorities and farmers who stand in opposition to these policies. This study employs a qualitative research approach complemented by secondary data to explain the transform…
Representatives of the Past: Trees in Historical Dispute and Socialised Ecology in the Forest Zone of the Republic of Guinea, West Africa
Since foresters and botanists first saw the forest patches that surround the villages in Kissidougou prefecture of the Republic of Guinea, they have considered them quite literally as ‘nature’: the last vestiges of the Upper Guinean forest block’s northern extension. Most of Kissidougou’s 800 or more villages lie in open clearings in the middle of dense, semi-deciduous forest patches. These patches are small relative to the area of the surroundin…
Spillover or endemic? Reconsidering the origins of Ebola virus disease outbreaks by revisiting local accounts in light of new evidence from Guinea
(Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) No abstract provided
The Captain and "the Cannibal": An Epic Story of Exploration, Kidnapping, and the Broadway Stage
The astounding saga of an American sea captain and the New Guinean nobleman who became his stunned captive, then ally, and eventual friend Sailing in uncharted waters of the Pacific in 1830, Captain Benjamin Morrell of Connecticut became the first outsider to encounter the inhabitants of a small island off New Guinea. The contact quickly turned violent, fatal cannons were fired, and Morrell abducted young Dako, a hostage so shocked by the white c…
The Mande Creation Myth, by Germaine Dieterlen, as a Historical Source for the Mali Empire
This article proposes a new reading for Germaine Dieterlen’s classic text “The Mande Creation Myth,” and presents it as evidence for Kangaba’s prominent military role as ruler of the Niger and defender of the gold mines that for centuries provided the wealth of the Mali Empire. It is demonstrated that, although Dieterlen was in search of a unified cosmology, her informants in Kangaba provided answers that voiced Kangaba’s military concerns and cl…
Webs of Power and the Construction of Environmental Policy Problems: Forest Loss in Guinea
This chapter examines the contrast between the formulation of problems in development policy and the perspectives of villagers whose views have been subjugated, and everyday activities criminalized, within this formulation. It identifies the conditions in which certain demonstrably false ideas about environmental change have come to acquire validity in policy circles, while others, more correct and espoused by inhabitants, have been excluded from…
Rationale, experience and ethical considerations underpinning integrated actions to further global goals for health and land biodiversity in Papua New Guinea
The SURFACES project is integrating action on good health and wellbeing [Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3] and conservation of life on land (SDG 15) in the threatened rainforests of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and mapping evidence of similar projects worldwide. Our approach is framed by Planetary Health, aiming to safeguard both human health and the natural systems that underpin it. Our rationale is demonstrated through a summary of health needs …
Deciphering African tropical forest dynamics in the Anthropocene: How social and historical sciences can elucidate forest cover change and inform forest management
Preliminary Material
Green Grabbing: A new appropriation of nature?
Across the world, 'green grabbing'the appropriation of land and resources for environmental endsis an emerging process of deep and growing significance.The vigorous debate on 'land grabbing' already highlights instances where 'green' credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel -as where large tracts of land are acquired not just for 'more efficient farming' or 'food security', but also to 'alleviate pressure on …
Supplementary Material
Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy
Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple winsfor climate change, food security, bioenergy and healthnot least for African farmers.This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations.Carbon market logics are not only threatening large…
Forestry and Deforestation
Anthropologists have visited forests for as long as they have been studying people but what has been the place of “the forest” in their analysis? In many studies, the forest is simply a venue for human social relations, yet to what extent are forests more dialectically engaged with social worlds? This is the stuff of historical ecology and political ecology perspectives in the discipline. These find forests to be more agentive in social relations…
Ebola in Meliandou: Tropes of ‘Sustainability’ at Ground Zero
This chapter considers how epochal events such as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa that are the antithesis of sustainability nevertheless attract narrative explanations that render them predictable and systemically avoidable. Euro-American narratives emerged suggesting that the so-called spillover of Ebola then presumed to be from a cryptic host in the natural world would have been avoided if more sustainable relations with forests had been adop…
The Spirit and the Gifts: Dako, Benjamin Morrell and Cargo in the Vitiaz Trading area, New Guinea
In 1830 an American trader, Benjamin Morrell, abducted Dako, the son of a prominent leader from Uneapa Island in the Bismarck Sea, took him to New York and, four years later, returned him to Uneapa. Dako's encounter with America and his return provides insight into the region half a century before colonization, and in particular into local mytho-practical knowledge at that time. This enables us to discern subsequent transformations. Myths concern…
Comparison of social resistance to Ebola response in Sierra Leone and Guinea suggests explanations lie in political configurations not culture
Sierra Leone and Guinea share broadly similar cultural worlds, straddling the societies of the Upper Guinea Coast with Islamic West Africa. There was, however, a notable difference in their reactions to the Ebola epidemic. As the epidemic spread in Guinea, acts of violent or everyday resistance to outbreak control measures repeatedly followed, undermining public health attempts to contain the crisis. In Sierra Leone, defiant resistance was rarer.…
Changing Perspectives on Forests: Science/Policy Processes in Wider Society
This Bulletin attempts to link two sets of pressing contemporary concerns. On the one hand, it addresses changing relationships between science, policy and society in the context of internationalisation and public challenges to formal expertise; concerns currently under hot debate in European settings as much as in developing countries. On the other hand, it engages with issues around rural landscape and livelihoods in low‐income countries, parti…
Understanding Social Resistance to the Ebola Response in the Forest Region of the Republic of Guinea: An Anthropological Perspective
Why did Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea Forest Region regularly encounter resistance, occasionally violent? Extending existing explanations concerning local and humanitarian “culture” and “structural violence,” and drawing on previous anthropological fieldwork and historical and documentary research, this article argues that Ebola disrupted four intersecting but precarious social accommodations that had hitherto enabled radically d…
Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature
“God Made the Soil, but We Made It Fertile”: Gender, Knowledge, and Practice in the Formation and Use of African Dark Earths in Liberia and Sierra Leone
Anthropogenic Dark Earths in the Landscapes of Upper Guinea, West Africa: Intentional or Inevitable
Drawing on the recent identification of anthropogenic dark earths (ADEs) in West Africa's Upper Guinea forest region, this article engages with Amazonian debates concerning whether such enriched soils were produced intentionally or not. We present a case study of a Loma settlement in Northwest Liberia in which ethnography, oral history, and landscape mapping reveal subsistence practices and habitus that lead African dark earths (AfDEs) to form in…
Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature
Across the world, 'green grabbing' - the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends - is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. The vigorous debate on 'land grabbing' already highlights instances where 'green' credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel - as where large tracts of land are acquired not just for 'more efficient farming' or 'food security', but also to 'alleviate pres…
The Militarisation and Marketisation of Nature: An Alternative Lens to 'Climate-Conflict
Policies addressing climate change are driving major transformations in access to global land, forests and water as they create new 'green' markets that reinforce, and attracts the financial grid and its speculators. This leads us to examine the rise of state violence and subsequent environmental policies in forests, transferring into both 'fortress' and 'participatory' conservation, enhancing this relationship with new environmental commodity ma…
False forest history, complicit social analysis: Rethinking some West African environmental narratives
Where techno-science meets poverty: Medical research and the economy of blood in The Gambia, West Africa
Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy
Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins - for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health - not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations. Carbon market logics are not only threateni…
MMR talk' and vaccination choices: An ethnographic study in Brighton
Paths of Authority: Roads, the State and the Market in Eastern Zaire
Understanding Social Resistance to the Ebola Response in the Forest Region of the Republic of Guinea: An Anthropological Perspective
Why did Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea Forest Region regularly encounter resistance, occasionally violent? Extending existing explanations concerning local and humanitarian “culture” and “structural violence,” and drawing on previous anthropological fieldwork and historical and documentary research, this article argues that Ebola disrupted four intersecting but precarious social accommodations that had hitherto enabled radically d…
Challenging Neo-Malthusian Deforestation Analyses in West Africa's Dynamic Forest Landscapes
Many influential analyses of West Africa take it for granted that 'original' forest cover has progressively been converted and savannized during the twentieth century by growing populations. By testing these assumptions against historical evidence, exemplified for Ghana and Ivory Coast, this article shows that these neo-Malthusian deforestation narratives badly misrepresent people-forest relationships. They obscure important nonlinear dynamics, a…
Anthropogenic Dark Earths in the Landscapes of Upper Guinea, West Africa: Intentional or Inevitable
Drawing on the recent identification of anthropogenic dark earths (ADEs) in West Africa's Upper Guinea forest region, this article engages with Amazonian debates concerning whether such enriched soils were produced intentionally or not. We present a case study of a Loma settlement in Northwest Liberia in which ethnography, oral history, and landscape mapping reveal subsistence practices and habitus that lead African dark earths (AfDEs) to form in…
Fashioned Forest Pasts, Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales
This article considers how environmental problematics are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa's humid forest zone. Examing the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and…
Desiccation and Domination: Science and Struggles Over Environment and Development in Colonial Guinea
Concern about desiccation – the effects of deforestation on climate and soils – was an early and pervasive theme in colonial science, present at the onset of West Africa's colonial era and with roots in previous centuries. As a set of scientists' ideas linked to soil and forest conservation policy, the impact of desiccationism was initially muted, struggling unsuccessfully in nascent administrations with more pressing political and administrative…
New therapeutic landscapes in Africa: Parental categories and practices in seeking infant health in the Republic of Guinea
Enriching the landscape: Social history and the management of transition ecology in the forest-savanna mosaic of the Republic of Guinea
The mosaic of forest and savanna vegetation found along the northern margin of West Africa's moist forest zone has generally been understood in policy circles as a degraded and degrading forest landscape, following savannisation by its farming populations. Some ecologists have suggested that the vegetation mosaic may, however, be more stable, determined by soil differences, and others still that forest may be encroaching on savanna as a result of…
Local knowledge and the social shaping of soil investments: Critical perspectives on the assessment of soil degradation in Africa
Contested Forests: Modern Conservation and Historical Land Use in Guinea's Ziama Reserve
Journal Article CONTESTED FORESTS: MODERN CONSERVATION AND HISTORICAL LAND USE IN GUINEA'S ZIAMA RESERVE Get access JAMES FAIRHEAD, JAMES FAIRHEAD Dr James Fairhead is the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELISSA LEACH MELISSA LEACH Dr Melissa Leach is at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Search for other works by this au…
Reading Forest History Backwards: The Interaction of Policy and Local Land Use in Guinea's Forest-Savanna Mosaic, 1893-1993
Sophisticated local agricultural and forest management techniques have underlain the creation and maintenance of the main landscape features in Kissidougou Prefecture of Guinea's forest-savanna transition zone. Social anthropological, oral historical, archival and aerial photographic evidence shows how over long periods, peri-village forest islands have been created from savannas, productive rice swamps from inland valleys, and productive upland …
Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaicAfrican Studies Series 90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 354 pp., £50.00, ISBN 0 521 56353 4 hard covers, £17.95, ISBN 0 521 56499 9 paperback. - Volume 71 Issue 1
African-American Exploration in West Africa: Four Nineteenth-Century Diaries
The Liberia of the Journeys 2. Journeys in the Interior 3. James L. Sims, 1858 4. George L. Seymour, 1858 5. Benjamin J. K. Anderson, 1868-1869 6. Benjamin J. K. Anderson, 1874 7. The Journeys and the Interior Notes Bibliography Index
Manners of contestation: Citizen science" and "indigenous knowledge" in West Africa and the Caribbean
Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
Ruined Settlements and New Gardens: Gender and Soil-Ripening Among Kuranko Farmers in the Forest-Savanna Transition Zone
Focusing on a particular field?soil?vegetation complex ( tombondu ), this article considers how changing patterns of gendered resource use ? changing routines and sites of women's and men's work, and shifts in responsibilities and control over production ? impact on its prevalence within overall land use patterns, and hence on the environment. Ruined settlements, offering improved land productivity on ‘ripened’ soils, provide Kuranko farmers in G…
Post-famine recovery in highland Bwisha, Zaire: 1984 In Its Context
The 1984 drought affected vast areas of East, Southern and Central Africa, including Zaire's Kivu Province. Within North Kivu, areas of the collectivité Bwisha, of the zone of Rutshuru, were known to have been particularly hard hit. Within this collectivite , two administrative units (groupements) were singled out for famine relief: Jomba and Gisigari. Although few people died of the direct effects of the drought there was widespread impoverishme…
The Centrality of the Social in African Farming
Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities
Post-famine recovery in highland Bwisha, Zaire: 1984 In Its Context
The 1984 drought affected vast areas of East, Southern and Central Africa, including Zaire's Kivu Province. Within North Kivu, areas of the collectivité Bwisha, of the zone of Rutshuru, were known to have been particularly hard hit. Within this collectivite , two administrative units (groupements) were singled out for famine relief: Jomba and Gisigari. Although few people died of the direct effects of the drought there was widespread impoverishme…
Paths of Authority: Roads, the State and the Market in Eastern Zaire
Natural Resource Management: The Reproduction and Use of Environmental Misinformation in Guinea's Forest-Savanna Transition Zone
An erroneous analysis of environmental change has informed environmental policy in part of Guinea, West Africa for almost a hundred years. In examining how such error has persisted, in this case concerning ongoing savannization of tropical forest which is not in fact taking place, one is forced to examine critically the relationship between the information produced about environmental problems, and the external institutions which have assumed res…
Contested Forests: Modern Conservation and Historical Land Use in Guinea's Ziama Reserve
Journal Article CONTESTED FORESTS: MODERN CONSERVATION AND HISTORICAL LAND USE IN GUINEA'S ZIAMA RESERVE Get access JAMES FAIRHEAD, JAMES FAIRHEAD Dr James Fairhead is the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELISSA LEACH MELISSA LEACH Dr Melissa Leach is at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Search for other works by this au…
Représentations culturelles africaines et gestion de l'environnement
African cultural representations and environment management. The unavoidable link between the preservation of natural ressources and participatory development requires the aknowledgement of local know-how and of the representations men have of their relationship to natural environment. The analysis of technical concepts used to act upon ecological processes shows how man is the actor of his environment as well as the one who adapts to it. Human a…
Reading Forest History Backwards: The Interaction of Policy and Local Land Use in Guinea's Forest-Savanna Mosaic, 1893-1993
Sophisticated local agricultural and forest management techniques have underlain the creation and maintenance of the main landscape features in Kissidougou Prefecture of Guinea's forest-savanna transition zone. Social anthropological, oral historical, archival and aerial photographic evidence shows how over long periods, peri-village forest islands have been created from savannas, productive rice swamps from inland valleys, and productive upland …
False forest history, complicit social analysis: Rethinking some West African environmental narratives
Ruined Settlements and New Gardens: Gender and Soil-Ripening Among Kuranko Farmers in the Forest-Savanna Transition Zone
Focusing on a particular field?soil?vegetation complex ( tombondu ), this article considers how changing patterns of gendered resource use ? changing routines and sites of women's and men's work, and shifts in responsibilities and control over production ? impact on its prevalence within overall land use patterns, and hence on the environment. Ruined settlements, offering improved land productivity on ‘ripened’ soils, provide Kuranko farmers in G…
Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded both by scientists and policy-makers as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use. In this 1996 text, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach question these entrenched assumptions. They show, on the contrary, how people have created forest islands around their villages, and how they have turned fallo…
Local knowledge and farmer perceptions of bean diseases in the central African highlands
Enriching the landscape: Social history and the management of transition ecology in the forest-savanna mosaic of the Republic of Guinea
The mosaic of forest and savanna vegetation found along the northern margin of West Africa's moist forest zone has generally been understood in policy circles as a degraded and degrading forest landscape, following savannisation by its farming populations. Some ecologists have suggested that the vegetation mosaic may, however, be more stable, determined by soil differences, and others still that forest may be encroaching on savanna as a result of…
Misreading the African Landscape; Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
Desiccation and Domination: Science and Struggles Over Environment and Development in Colonial Guinea
Concern about desiccation – the effects of deforestation on climate and soils – was an early and pervasive theme in colonial science, present at the onset of West Africa's colonial era and with roots in previous centuries. As a set of scientists' ideas linked to soil and forest conservation policy, the impact of desiccationism was initially muted, struggling unsuccessfully in nascent administrations with more pressing political and administrative…
Challenging Neo-Malthusian Deforestation Analyses in West Africa's Dynamic Forest Landscapes
Many influential analyses of West Africa take it for granted that 'original' forest cover has progressively been converted and savannized during the twentieth century by growing populations. By testing these assumptions against historical evidence, exemplified for Ghana and Ivory Coast, this article shows that these neo-Malthusian deforestation narratives badly misrepresent people-forest relationships. They obscure important nonlinear dynamics, a…
Fashioned Forest Pasts, Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales
This article considers how environmental problematics are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa's humid forest zone. Examing the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and…
Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities
Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaicAfrican Studies Series 90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 354 pp., £50.00, ISBN 0 521 56353 4 hard covers, £17.95, ISBN 0 521 56499 9 paperback. - Volume 71 Issue 1
Changing Perspectives on Forests: Science/Policy Processes in Wider Society
This Bulletin attempts to link two sets of pressing contemporary concerns. On the one hand, it addresses changing relationships between science, policy and society in the context of internationalisation and public challenges to formal expertise; concerns currently under hot debate in European settings as much as in developing countries. On the other hand, it engages with issues around rural landscape and livelihoods in low‐income countries, parti…
Sustainable’ Timber Production and Science/Policy Processes in Trinidad
Practising ‘Biodiversity’
Modes de contestation: Le « savoir indigène » et la « science des citoyens » en Afrique de l'Ouest et dans les Caraïbes
Le « savoir indigene » et la « science des citoyens » s’expriment dans des discours paralleles apparus respectivement dans les societes du Sud et dans celles du Nord. Les auteurs de cet article comparent la facon dont ces deux traditions de recherche ont represente les divers types de savoir et les relations de la science moderne avec des points de vue differents. D’un cote, les debats sur le « savoir indigene » mettent en evidence les discordanc…
Manners of contestation: Citizen science" and "indigenous knowledge" in West Africa and the Caribbean
African-American Exploration in West Africa: Four Nineteenth-Century Diaries
As its title suggests, this book reproduces James L. Sims and George L. Seymour's diaries of their voyages into the interior of Liberia in 1858, and Benjamin J.K. Anderson's assessment of the Liberian and Guinean hinterland in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The sketchy historical introduction makes the volume unsuitable for most undergraduates, but those with some knowledge of the area will find the carefully annotated diaries fascinating. Seymo…
African-American Exploration in West Africa: Four Nineteenth-Century Diaries
The Liberia of the Journeys 2. Journeys in the Interior 3. James L. Sims, 1858 4. George L. Seymour, 1858 5. Benjamin J. K. Anderson, 1868-1869 6. Benjamin J. K. Anderson, 1874 7. The Journeys and the Interior Notes Bibliography Index
Geography (36 works) · Political science (34 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (24 works) · Ecology (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Archaeology (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Biology (14 works) · Ethnology (13 works)