Imagining future agricultural landscapes in a new Sudan

Entitled expertise, cultural intransience and fine warm rain in the English wilds

Bibliographic Data

ID2156567
AuthorsJohanna Zetterstrom-Sharp (0000-0002-3230-002X, Universidad de Londres, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume31
Issue3
Pages293-313
Publication date2020-05-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0275-7206 • E-ISSN: 1477-2612
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02757206.2019.1669591
OpenAlexW2976492596
LanguageEN
References cited23

This article responds to work on development-centred technical and scientific expertise at the decline of the British empire in Africa. It focuses on the imagining of future agricultural landscapes in Sudan, exploring how such imagining was framed by the social and colonial worlds in which scientific knowledge about agricultural capacity in the north and south was produced. It draws on a private archive of letters, photographs and objects compiled by Roger Brain, an agricultural scientist engaged in research and census work for the University of Khartoum in Sudan between 1953 and 1959. His archive reveals the underlying assumptions, conventions and anxieties that framed the ways in which he viewed and understood the landscapes in which he worked. I argue that this framing shaped regionalized notions of inevitable technological transformation in the north, and notions of a fragile cultural distinctiveness coupled with a deep nostalgia for rural intransience in the south

Agriculture · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Framing (construction · Optimal distinctiveness theory · Social science · Social worlds · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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