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"Irrigation Folklore."
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Juan the bear and the water of life = La acequia de Juan del Oso /
Although treated as outcasts, three superhuman friends, including Juan del Oso whose father was a bear, create an irrigation system for New Mexico's Mora Valley.
Book
Muslim-Jewish Sexual Liaisons Remembered and Imagined in 20th-Century Yemen
Despite mutual taboos against exogamy, memoirs and similar materials written by Jews from Yemen contain a number of anecdotes describing love affairs and sexual encounters between Muslims and Jews prior to the mass migration of the vast majority of Yemen's Jews to Israel in 1949–50. These stories associate these liaisons with vulnerability, poverty, and marginalization. In them, sex and conversion to Islam are intrinsically connected, yet this interreligious intimacy leads not to resolution but to ongoing identity crises that persist beyond the community's realignment with a majority-Jewish society. The staging of the anecdotes in rural areas where shariʿa norms held only nominal sway, in watering places and hostels where strangers might interact, and at dusk, when identity is difficult to discern, heightened their ambiguity.
Journal Article
Addressing future food demand in The Gambia: can increased crop productivity and climate change adaptation close the supply–demand gap?
With rising demand for food and the threats posed by climate change, The Gambia faces significant challenges in ensuring sufficient and nutritious food for its population. To address these challenges, there is a need to increase domestic food production while limiting deforestation and land degradation. In this study, we modified the FABLE Calculator, a food and land-use system model, to focus on The Gambia to simulate scenarios for future food demand and increasing domestic food production. We considered the impacts of climate change on crops, the adoption of climate change adaptation techniques, as well as the potential of enhanced fertiliser use and irrigation to boost crop productivity, and assessed whether these measures would be sufficient to meet the projected increase in food demand. Our results indicate that domestic food production on existing cropland will not be sufficient to meet national food demand by 2050, leading to a significant supply–demand gap. However, investments in fertiliser availability and the development of sustainable irrigation infrastructure, coupled with climate change adaptation strategies like the adoption of climate-resilient crop varieties and optimised planting dates, could halve this gap. Addressing the remaining gap will require additional strategies, such as increasing imports, expanding cropland, or prioritising the production of domestic food crops over export crops. Given the critical role imports play in The Gambia’s food supply, it is essential to ensure a robust flow of food imports by diversifying partners and addressing regional trade barriers. Our study highlights the urgent need for sustained investment and policy support to enhance domestic food production and food imports to secure sufficient and healthy food supplies amidst growing demand and climate change challenges.
Journal Article
Confronting the Food–Energy–Environment Trilemma: Global Land Use in the Long Run
Economic, agronomic, and biophysical drivers affect global land use, so all three influences need to be considered in evaluating economically optimal allocations of the world’s land resources. A dynamic, forward-looking optimization framework applied over the course of the coming century shows that although some deforestation is optimal in the near term, in the absence of climate change regulation, the desirability of further deforestation is eliminated by mid-century. Although adverse productivity shocks from climate change have a modest effect on global land use, such shocks combined with rapid growth in energy prices lead to significant deforestation and higher greenhouse gas emissions than in the baseline. Imposition of a global greenhouse gas emissions constraint further heightens the competition for land, as fertilizer use declines and land-based mitigation strategies expand. However, anticipation of the constraint largely dilutes its environmental effectiveness, as deforestation accelerates prior to imposition of the target.
Journal Article
Telling Otherwise: A Historical Anthropology of Tank Irrigation Technology in South India
A significant number of influential critiques of modernity, the modern state, or modern science and technology are premised on the assertion that the pre-modern was environmentally non-intrusive and harmoniously embedded within a culture. The way these critiques pose the substantive distinction between the modern and the pre-modern through the reading of technology and knowledge systems insufficiently engages, this essay argues, with the history of pre-modern technology and knowledge creation. This paper draws an alternative picture of the social shaping of tanks (irrigation reservoirs) in south India in pre-modern times by using folk literature as primary source. The essay ultimately challenges any fundamental ontological contrast between a pre-modern and a modern technology and demonstrates instead that values emerge from historically situated actors and not solely from the artifacts or knowledge systems themselves.
Journal Article
Revolutionary Shadows: Borderlands Identity in the Fiction of Américo Paredes
According to David Montejano, the rebellion was a violent reaction against the agricultural modernization that, beginning around 1900, dispossessed Texas-Mexicans of their lands, imposing a new farm order and turning former vaqueros and rancheros into an army of landless migrant farmworkers.18 Seditionist attacks specifically targeted the modern installations in the border landscape that formed the material basis of commercial farming, including “train derailments, bridge burnings, and sabotage of irrigation pumping plants” (Anglos and Mexicans, 117). [...]Paredes’s spatial palimpsests mirror the psychological palimpsests in his borderlands fiction: just as physical, external space is depicted as a repository of residual and dominant formations, so is the inner psyche of his borderlands protagonists a world where archaic and suppressed layers coexist and conflict with recent and dominant tendencies. [...]at a meta-textual level—although Paredes himself has dismissed the idea—George Washington Gómez might be read as a kind of dystopian “shadow” autobiography of the author, which speculates about the future before it arrives, imagining a worst-case scenario of the person he might become.34 Paredes was born in the same year as his modern antihero (1915); the novel was written in the late 1930s, before Paredes had ever left the Valley. Forward-looking and rational, Cuitla dreams of a “tractor, had seen himself enthroned upon it, driving up and down the fields” (91). Because the post-revolutionary ejido is a “modern version of the traditional Indian communal land holding” beholden to modern principles of commercial agriculture rather than traditional subsistence farming, Cuitla finds himself slipping into the role of patrón to the ejidatarios (Williamson, Penguin History, 397).
Journal Article
Comparaison entre la herranza, la « fête de l’eau » et la zafa-casa dans les Andes
Le but de cet article est de comparer le rituel andin qui entoure le marquage du bétail (herranza) avec d’autres rites essentiels du cycle annuel de la région. L’auteur compare tout d’abord la herranza avec les rituels liés au nettoyage des canaux d’irrigation, puis il la confronte avec les cérémonies relatives au recouvrement des chaumières. La première comparaison est géographiquement limitée à une seule région – celle de la sierra de Lima –, tandis que la seconde considère les ethnographies d’autres régions de langue quechua afin de pallier le manque de données existantes sur le sujet. Lorsqu’elle est intégrée de cette façon au cycle rituel annuel, la herranza se révèle être une forme de rite de passage dont les multiples dimensions symboliques sont ici explorées.
Journal Article
M.H. Panhwar as a Historian
The scope of this article is to find out the strengths and weaknesses of M.H. Panhwar's historical work and to compare it with other scholars of Sindh. He is the initiator of scientific history writing of Sindh and the only historian who tried to uncover the face behind the social organisation of Sindh. According to him, 'History is the history of production, control over the means of production and production to its final distribution'. The history is more about people than that of the ruling class as people are makers of history. He had vision to analyze things in their correct historical perspective and, in this context, he took support of archeology, as it is the source of scientific truth. Writing history with data acquired through carbon testing is a new phenomenon in Sindh, which was locally introduced by M. H Panhwar. M. H. Panhwar, therefore, was one of the pioneers in giving a new meaning to history by including both ruling elites and the common folk, progressive science, crop technology, forest, wildlife, etc. He was the first to throw light on areas which were ignored by other historians. According to him, history written before him is full of the accounts of the rulers' role in relation to their nobles and foes, battles they fought, attacks, palace plotting, mausoleums, folklore, fiction and so on. Accounts regarding contemporary climate, environments, diversion of rivers, courses and the resultant ruination of irrigation systems, migrations, shifting of people, occupations, social life of the populace etc. found little room in written histories. For instance changes in production and its means, administration and justice, agriculture, land, animal husbandry, irrigation sources and methods of mining, metallurgy, industry and industrial goods, matrimonial institutions, family and children, houses and interiors, art, architecture, archaeology, personal appearance, dresses, ornaments, foods and drinks, taxes, coins and currency, science and technology, foreign contacts, international trades and traders, routes of trades, religious beliefs, philosophy, hygiene, medicine and doctors, superstitions, common citizens, economic conditions, historical geography of bygone ages, classes of work and their relation with one another, household life, customs, entertainments, pastimes, leisure, attitude of man to nature, languages, literature, literary contacts with outside word, learning and thoughts, status of women and children in affluence and extreme poverty. Hence, in real sense M.H Panhwar was scholar of Haig's Raverty's and Lambrick's calibre.
Journal Article
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