Rainforest Relations: Gender & Resource Use by the Mende of Gola, Sierra Leone: No. 13 (International African Library) - Hardcover

Leach, Melissa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0748604936 ISBN 13: 9780748604937

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 1994

Synopsis

With environmental change and conservation in West Africa's tropical rainforests becoming topics of increasing political and academic interest, this book brings a fresh set of perspectives to the debate - those of the forest dwellers themselves. Based on her detailed field research in the Mende communities around Gola North Forest reserve, and surveying the recent debates and literature concerning forest conservations and current analytical approaches to gender and the environment, Melissa Leach examines the importance of rainforest resources to the local economy and social relations and shows that neither an understanding of forest use and change, nor adequate conservation policies can be achieved without a concern for gender.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Centering on the Mende-speaking people living around the Gola forest reserves in Sierra Leone, Rainforest Relations shows how local communities and individuals in rainforest regions use and view forest resources amid international environmental scrutiny and changing socioeconomic conditions. Leach argues that if both the rainforests and their human inhabitants are to survive, conservation policies must refocus to address local interests in general and women's interests in particular. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Mende communities, Leach details day-to-day interaction with the environment, examining labor and tenure arrangements, gathered products and their markets, hunting and fishing practices, and crop types. She focuses on different women's and men's experiences and their access to, use, and control of the land. She shows how links between local women and their environment depend on dynamic gender relations in agriculture, forest resource use, and social life. This gender study is placed in the context of both an overview of West African conservation agendas over the past century and an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of ecofeminism and other currently popular approaches to women and the environment.

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0748604936
• ISBN 13: 9780748604937
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304