Environmental Infrastructure in African History

Abstract

Environmental Infrastructure in African History offers a new approach for analyzing and narrating environmental change. Environmental change conventionally is understood as occurring in a linear fashion, moving from a state of more nature to a state of less nature and more culture. In this model, non-Western and pre-modern societies live off natural resources, whereas more modern societies rely on artifact, or nature that is transformed and domesticated through science and technology into culture. In contrast, Emmanuel Kreike argues that both non-Western and pre-modern societies inhabit a dynamic middle ground between nature and culture. He asserts that humans - in collaboration with plants, animals, and other animate and inanimate forces - create environmental infrastructure that constantly is remade and re-imagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.

Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology

“…Explicitly employing the environing framework is the recent scholarship by environmental historians working in colonial Africa. Particularly influential has been Kreike's (2013Kreike's ( , 2021 notion of 'environmental infrastructure', that is, 'a coproduction of human ingenuity and labor on the one hand and non-human actors (animals, insects, microbes, and plants) and forces (physical, chemical) on the other' (Kreike, 2021: 2). Kreike's own usage of the environing framework thus speaks to the multiple and messy agencies involved in infrastructure development and the role of non-human in social and technological processes.…”