Driven by population pressures on natural resources, peri-urban pastoralists in the Far North Province of Cameroon have recently intensified livestock production in their traditional pastoral system by feeding their cattle cottonseed cakes and other agricultural byproducts to cope with the disappearance of rangelands typically available through the dry season. Although the crop–livestock intera...

The Technosystem intensive grazing system, now called TechnoGrazing™, was developed by Rangitikei farmer, Harry Wier, during the past 25 years and is being adopted successfully on New Zealand pastoral farms. The TechnoGrazing concept is a most effective advance in subdivision and grazing management, achieving very intensive and efficient pasture utilisation, with a quantum leap in animal produc...

The neuroscience literature supports the idea that spiritual transformation is a powerful behavioral and cognitive change process involving fundamental alterations in the sense of self. Brain regions that are known to mediate the sense of self are activated during religious experiences that in turn underwrite spiritual transformation. Because religious experiences are fundamental to spiritual t...

* Department of Anthropology, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR 97361, USA. Email: [email protected] Geography Research Forum • Vol. 25 • 2005: 83-104. I argue in this paper that studies of African pastoral societies should consider the informal politics of the neo-patrimonial state in their analyses of pastoralists’ relations with the state, rather than focus on the official laws and polic...

Africa are increasingly vulnerable to food and livelihood crises. Many reasons have been cited for this, including climate change and increased climatic shocks such as droughts and floods, man-made forces such as the ban on meat exports to the Gulf region and rapid population expansion overtaxing a finite natural resource base. However, no other reason is more central to the problem than the pe...

A study has been conducted over an agro-pastoral area in Niger, characterised by large land use heterogeneity, using low resolution Wind Scatterometer (WSC) data. 9-year WSC data time series are analysed over the study site with the help of a backscattering model. 8 ERS Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images were also analysed in order to quantify the different land use contributions to the WSC ...

This metaphysical and pastoral reflection focuses on a question that over several decades has been posed to me by many family caregivers for deeply forgetful people (persons with dementia). The question may take different forms: Is my loved one still there underneath all of this confusion? Is my loved one's soul still present? Will she come to rest fully intact in the arms of a Supreme Being? C...