Imagining Serengeti
Subtitle: a history of landscape memory in Tanzania from earliest times to the present
By: Jan Bender Shetler
Series: New African histories series
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 378
ISBN-13: 9780821417492; 9780821417508
Subjects: Landscape assessment -- Tanzania -- Serengeti National Park; Landscape changes -- Tanzania -- Serengeti National Park; Landscape -- Social aspects -- Tanzania -- Serengeti National Park; Geographical perception -- Tanzania -- Serengeti National Park; Oral tradition -- Tanzania -- Serengeti National Park
Description: Long before the creation of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, the people of the western Serengeti had established settlements and interacted with the environment in ways that created a landscape we now misconstrue as natural. Western Serengeti peoples imagine the environment not as a pristine wilderness, but as a differentiated social landscape that embodies their history and identity. Conservationist literature has ignored these now-displaced peoples and relegated them to the margins of modern society. Their oral traditions, however, provide the means for seeing the landscape from a new perspective. "Imagining Serengeti "allows us to see the Serengeti landscape as a book of memory that preserves the ways in which western Serengeti peoples have actively transformed their environment and their societies.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 325-360) and index