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Diana Davis Winner of the
2008 James M. Blaut Award Resurrecting the Granary of
Rome, by Diana Davis, is a book carved directly out of the tradition of Jim Blaut. This is a book that focuses on the way our
reconstructions of historical ecologies often defy data (e.g. palynology) available to us in reconstructing the past,
specifically pointing to the institutional systems that set the conditions
for knowledge-making, and their deep roots in colonial convention. In support
of the book, I elsewhere wrote: “In carefully cataloguing the troubling and
troubled colonial past of North African ecology and ideas about that ecology,
Diana Davis takes seriously the problem that history shapes both physical
landscapes and the power-laden narratives through which we come to know
them.” This tightrope walk, between
rigorous examination of historical ecological data and discourses of
environmental change, has produced some of the most innovative recent work in
the field of Cultural and Political Ecology. This is because the key to
understanding environmental change (even prior to assessing causes, laying
blame, and pointing fingers) is the establishment of baselines, solid places
on which to stand to look forward to present conditions as a state of change
or in terms of a trajectory. A number of technical tools are of course
available to us in this effort (e.g. tree rings, lake cores, etc.) but most
of them are calibrated and interpreted with reference to the past. In this
sense, the remarkable dearth of critical attention to the historical record
in North Africa and the Near East is remarkable and dismaying. Moreover,
failure to understand contemporary claims about the state of arid lands in
these regions in their colonial, postcolonial, and orientalist
contexts undermines any meaningful research. It also makes the habitual
reproduction of certain dangerous claims very easy. Davis’ intervention here
is to interrogate these claims and intervene in debates with extremely high
stakes, including divisive discussions of who gets to do what with the land. So too, and beyond the more
recent postcolonial ambitions of the field, the book engages and demonstrates
some of the most important longstanding parts of the CAPE tradition. Firstly,
the book is diachronic – a deeply historical ecology - and based on careful
analysis of archives in multiple languages. This makes it an heir not only to
the work of Edward Said, therefore, but also that of Karl Butzer.
It celebrates our deep connections to the field of environmental history,
where the book has won another recent award. So too, it reflects a holistic
landscape vision – as a place of human action as well as ideas - one that is
in line not only with the recent work of Fairhead
and Leach, therefore, but also that of Carl Sauer. It celebrates our abiding interest
in landscape as a unity of culture, practice, and entanglement with non-human
nature. In all these ways, Davis’ book
matches perfectly Jim Blaut's vision for Cultural
and Political Ecology: to empirically and rigorously undermine unfounded and
dangerous eurocentric colonial logics that continue
to pervade how we think about the natural world and each other. If it is not
too presumptuous to say, I think Jim would have loved this book. Diana Davis’
Resurrecting the Granary of Rome is a selection for our specialty group’s
James M. Blaut Award that we can all celebrate. Paul Robbins, April 2008 |
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© CAPE |
Page last updated June 24, 2008 |
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