The Hadendowa Salif: Successes and failures of indigenous cultural institutions in managing the food system
The Hadendowa's customary law code, the Salif, used to regulate the social and economic behaviour of the Hadendowa, as well as their rational utilization of resources. Since the outbreak of the 1984 famine, however, the Hadendova have been depending on relief food, which has disrupted their Salif and rendered it uncapable of helping the Hadendowa to to cope with the current stress situation.
Early European Colonial Rule on the African Red Sea Littoral
This article proposes a new periodization of European colonial rule on the African Red Sea Littoral (ARSL). The ARSL is the arid and semi-arid region between the Red Sea and the Sudanese Nile and the Ethiopian/Eritrean highlands. The region is now divided among Sudan, Eritrea, and Djibouti. However, historically the ARSL was claimed by numerous pastoralist tribes and clans, including the Hadendowa, Bisharin, Amarar, Beni Amer, Habab, and Afar. This article demonstrates that the process of rendering these pastoralists into British, French, or Italian colonial subjects—i.e., of establishing European colonial rule—took decades. Though colonial officials laid their claims to the region at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1920s and 1930s that they began to exert meaningful forms of colonial control over these pastoralist communities. This article argues that this period of early colonial rule should be treated differently from the period of high colonial rule that follows. During the early period, the balance of power on the ground had not yet tipped in the favor of colonial officials. Though these officials were part of large imperial networks, they were not able to effectively mobilize these networks to get access to the resources they needed to establish effective administrations. At the same time, these officials did not command local resources, which, in general, remained in the hands of the local communities that continued to mobilize them to their advantage. These communities progressively lost access to the resources that allowed them to hold the colonial state at bay. In the case of the ARSL, this loss was only partially the result of actions taken by the emerging colonial state. Rather, the leading cause was the introduction of rinderpest, a disease that killed up to 90 percent of infected cattle in virgin herds. Following the initial epizootic impoverishment of the region, continuing poverty over time robbed pastoralists of their ability to protect themselves from adverse environmental conditions such as droughts. During the first third of the twentieth century, pastoralists were plagued by repeated famines that left them with no choice but to submit to the colonial state and gain access to the limited colonial food aid programs. This submission marks the end of early European colonial rule.
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate