- Title Pages
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
-
1 * From Fragmentation to Forest Resurgence - Rethinking Social Lives and Forest Transitions
-
2 * False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis -
3 * Stories of Nature’s Hybridity in Europe -
4 * Adam Smith in the Forest -
5 * Jungles, Forests, and the Theatre of Wars -
6 * Mutant Ecologies -
7 * Pan-Tropical Perspectives on Forest Resurgence -
8 * The Social Lives of Forest Transitions and Successions -
9 * Paradigms Lost -
10 * Effects of Human Activities on Successional Pathways - Human-Forest Relationships and the Erasure of History
-
11 * Constructing Nature -
12 * Culturing the Rainforest -
13 * Residual Effects of Agroforestry Activities at Dos Hombres, a Classic Period Maya Site in Belize -
14 * Forest as Faunal Enclave: Endangerment, Ecology, and Exclusion in India -
15 * Amazonia - Market Dynamics and Regional Change
-
16 * The Fate of the Branded Forest -
17 * Gendered Knowledge and the African Shea-Nut Tree -
18 * Ancient Forest Tea -
19 * The Production of Forests -
20 * From Swidden to Rubber - Institutions
-
21 * A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana) -
22 * The Invisible Map -
23 * Re-Greening the Sahel - Urban Ecologies
-
24 * Amazonia 1492 -
25 * Urban Residence, Rural Employment, and the Future of Amazonian Forests -
26 * From Fallow Timber to Urban Housing -
27 * Forest Resources, City Services -
28 * Chicago Wilderness - References
- Contributors
- Index
* A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana)
* A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana)
- Chapter:
- (p.279) 21 * A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana)
- Source:
- The Social Lives of Forests
- Author(s):
Sara Berry
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
This chapter presents a case study in Asante exploring the tension over land and the place of “traditional authority” in contemporary social life and land use, as well as the shifting power dynamic between centralizing states and decentralized chiefly power. Reinforced during the colonial era and partially dismantled as part of an attempt by Ghana's first president to undo the colonial legacy, chiefly influence has re-emerged more recently when debates over the status and future of Asante's shrinking forests intersected with the neoliberal agenda. Plans for sustainable development, including forest recovery, often rest on imaginaries of bygone forests and implicit ideas about the relevance of knowledge about the past for present and future practice. Over the course of the 20th century, the social life of Asante forests reflected not only the power of market forces to remake natural environments, but also the ways in which market transactions, political contests and bureaucratic practices intersect with historical imagination. By raising the stakes in making claims of “original ownership,” recent efforts to rehabilitate Ghana's forests by privatizing them run the risk of increasing opportunities for rent-seeking and social exclusion, at the expense of equitable access and sustainable management.
Keywords: Centralizing states, decentralized power, chiefly authority, Ghana, Asante, Cacao, tropical timbers, deforestation, forest rent, tenurial conflict
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- Title Pages
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
-
1 * From Fragmentation to Forest Resurgence - Rethinking Social Lives and Forest Transitions
-
2 * False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis -
3 * Stories of Nature’s Hybridity in Europe -
4 * Adam Smith in the Forest -
5 * Jungles, Forests, and the Theatre of Wars -
6 * Mutant Ecologies -
7 * Pan-Tropical Perspectives on Forest Resurgence -
8 * The Social Lives of Forest Transitions and Successions -
9 * Paradigms Lost -
10 * Effects of Human Activities on Successional Pathways - Human-Forest Relationships and the Erasure of History
-
11 * Constructing Nature -
12 * Culturing the Rainforest -
13 * Residual Effects of Agroforestry Activities at Dos Hombres, a Classic Period Maya Site in Belize -
14 * Forest as Faunal Enclave: Endangerment, Ecology, and Exclusion in India -
15 * Amazonia - Market Dynamics and Regional Change
-
16 * The Fate of the Branded Forest -
17 * Gendered Knowledge and the African Shea-Nut Tree -
18 * Ancient Forest Tea -
19 * The Production of Forests -
20 * From Swidden to Rubber - Institutions
-
21 * A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana) -
22 * The Invisible Map -
23 * Re-Greening the Sahel - Urban Ecologies
-
24 * Amazonia 1492 -
25 * Urban Residence, Rural Employment, and the Future of Amazonian Forests -
26 * From Fallow Timber to Urban Housing -
27 * Forest Resources, City Services -
28 * Chicago Wilderness - References
- Contributors
- Index
