Discordant Village Voices is a quest for a more telling narrative about what continues to happen to people and wildlife on one resource frontier located in Zambia. Survival depends on the relationships with human and other life - relationships that are fragile, unconscious, and uncertain. Sustainable practices and the ideas supporting them must be worked at and worked over continuously. Such practical resolutions are rarely found within textbooks, but in practical cultivations on the ground, and often appearing when least ...
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Discordant Village Voices is a quest for a more telling narrative about what continues to happen to people and wildlife on one resource frontier located in Zambia. Survival depends on the relationships with human and other life - relationships that are fragile, unconscious, and uncertain. Sustainable practices and the ideas supporting them must be worked at and worked over continuously. Such practical resolutions are rarely found within textbooks, but in practical cultivations on the ground, and often appearing when least expected. The central Luangwa Valley in Zambia, designated as a game management area, has been subject to profound cultural and economic changes, resulting from colonial and later government initiatives to conserve wildlife. A shift in focus to environmental and biodiversity conservation in the 1980s released a new web of myths, problems, and contradictions, without resolving earlier dilemmas from the state-dominated eras. This study, initiated in the 1960s and carried out over the subsequent six decades, examines the interface between the Munyamadzi rural communities and the wildlife institutions imposed on their homeland. Focusing on ways of effectively brokering resource regimes, the book demonstrates that local employment and assistance must effect sustainable alternatives to pre-existing and customary livelihoods. The book's research is supported throughout by a database of wildlife counts - an original and statistically viable record designed in conjunction with local resident hunters - which offers an independent perspective, differing from those intermittently collected by safaris and scouts. The book's outstanding synthesis of findings will be of great interest to researchers on wildlife management in Africa, as well as sustainability researchers, who can appreciate the essentially intertwined aspects of socio-cultural, socio-political, and socio-economic processes. (Series: SAVUSA) [Subject: Sociology, Anthropology, African Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Regional Studies, Politics, Natural History, Wildlife Management, Environmental Studies, Conservation]
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