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3/23/09

Event Celebrates Publication Of SLU Prof's Book On African Sacred Groves

CANTON - The Friends of Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries will hold an event celebrating the publication of African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change, edited by Professor of Anthropology Celia Nyamweru and Michael Sheridan, assistant professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, on Friday, April 3, at 4 p.m. in the Josephine Young Room of Owen D. Young Library. Nyamweru will speak at the event, which is open to the public, free of charge.

African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change was published in 2008 by Ohio University Press.

In western scholarship, Africa's so-called sacred forests are often treated as the remains of primeval forests, ethnographic curiosities or cultural relics from a static pre-colonial past. Their continuing importance in African societies, however, shows that this "relic theory" is inadequate for understanding current social and ecological dynamics. The book challenges dominant views of these landscape features by redefining the subject matter beyond the compelling yet uninformative term "sacred."

Nyamweru, on the St. Lawrence faculty since 1991, earned the Ph.D. at Cambridge University. A former academic dean at Kenyatta University in Kenya, where she worked for 25 years, she has an international reputation for her work in physical geography and is the author of five books.

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