An Emerging Role for Applied Anthropology

In June, 1988 I arrived in Senegal to begin my doctoral field research as a member of an interdisciplinary team of social scientists from the U.S., Senegal, and France. At the invitation of the Senegalese government, I was to undertake a multi—year research initiative assessing the projected environmental and economic impacts resulting from cessation of the natural flood on the Senegal River. The main objective of the study was to understand how the impoundment of the Senegal River would affect the socioecological and political economic dimensions of production in the middle valley. It was also to document the responses of farmers, herders, and fishers to changing conditions of the river's hydrology and flooding. The river had been drastically altered in recent years by the construction of two dams, a high dam at Manantali, Mali completed in 1987, and a salt intrusion dam at Diama, Senegal, completed in 1986

Archaeology · Conflict resolution · Environmental planning · Environmental resource management · Field research · Flood myth · Flooding (psychology · Geography · Government (linguistics · Political science · Politics · River flood · Social science · Socioeconomics · Sociology · African Studies and Geopolitics · Environmental Science