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This chapter studies malaria in the countryside around Rome, the Roman Campagna. It considers the interaction between malaria and the agricultural system of Latium in the past, in which animal husbandry was largely separated from agriculture by the practice of seasonal transhumance, which removed the animals (possible alternate prey for mosquitoes) from the lowlands in summer, the peak season for malaria. The relationship to malaria of the system of large estates, latifundia, is also discussed, as well as the effects of malaria on the distribution of viticulture and on other crops. The evidence of field surveys for depopulation in the Roman Campagna in antiquity is mentioned, and the increasing use of slave labour in the villa-based agricultural economy of the Roman Campagna is related to the diffusion of malaria, particularly in the vicinity of Setia.

This chapter discusses the following: Irish kingship; complexities of politics and warfare; central government and colonists on the defensive; political accommodations; the economy; transhumance; dwellings; the church inter Hibernicos; the church and the two nations; archbishops as peacemakers; the stirrings of Irish nationalism; and the pressures of political reality.

This chapter discusses the following: Ireland in European eyes: the problems of evidence; settlement patterns; forts, tower-houses, and castles; land units; population; land utilization and agricultural methods; cattle and society: transhumance and war; sheep and horses; hunting and fishing; industry, trade, and craftsmen; merchants; the gaelicized lordships; tanistry and primogeniture; fiscal systems; law and arbitration; land tenure; church lands and tithes; and religious houses.

Chapter 4 investigates the fundamentally mobile relationship of Tamang villagers to their landscape, the historically shifting geographical ranges of their transhumance cycles, the effects mobility has on their patterns of everyday life, and the kinds of productive affordances and animate presences they talk about in their engagements with the diversity of places in the Himalayan environment. The Tamang standpoint of self-placement is intermediary to the cultural and ecological poles of the Tibetans and the Nepalis. Their realm is the ‘middle ground’ from which they ascend and descend to extremes, and in the range of which the diversity of life forms is a creationary process of fertility, giving sustenance to human domestic ecology. While a distinctively local and practice-oriented knowledge of verticality operates within the village terrain, the occasion of pilgrimage to Gosainkund provides a more expanded and extra-local symbolic frame to the ontology of living in the middle ground.

This chapter examines how indigenous notions of space and place are structured by focusing on the people living in the village of Shimshal. It studies how the Shimshali act and perceive their geographical remoteness. The Shimshali seasonal migration of yaks creates zones of remoteness within their own cosmologies. Here remote space is constructed through internal mobility that is a function of the location of grazing areas and migration routes and the behavior of the yaks. From this, the Shimshalis construct an indigenous sense of remoteness through discourses of separation and integration in the socio-spatial domain of transhumance migration and pastoralism, which forms the basis of their subsistence and hunting practices. The chapter describes what the Shimshalis feel that despite the lack of connectivity from the outside world, they have become increasingly vulnerable to the flow of ideas and material from the outside.

This is an ethnographic chapter that begins with a description of the fieldwork and then describes the ecology, resource use, and location of the three Jad locations covered in their transhumant movements concentrating on the main village where their village god resides and which is the focus of their social, ritual, and economic life. The internal and external relations of the Jads are discussed with all those with whom they have social links, both within and outside the village. The hierarchies, interactions, and mutual identity constructions are described along with Jad cognitive constructions of space, and its link with hierarchy and gender with cross referencing with other similar people. An overview of Jad sacred cosmology and its interface with social life and identity construction that emphasizes praxis forms a core aspect of this chapter.

This chapter examines the theme of travel in Spanish films, with particular emphasis on how Spanish cinema emerged as a venue for offering trips and destinations. It considers the itineraries of choice in this burgeoning tripping enterprise in Spanish cinema, such as the domestic ‘inter-autonomic’ trip between the different geographical and cultural territories of Spain; the Western outing, or ‘inning,’ mainly sold as a return to Europe and the West after so many years of absence; the African visit, with the distant traveller often showing up at home in a sort of reversed, stationary voyage; and the Transatlantic journey to and from Latin America. In order to theorize all these cinematic odysseys of sorts, the chapter looks at the old and historically Spanish practice of ‘transhumance’ and shows that this travelling philosophy permeates Spanish cinematic voyages in the post-modern and post-national periods.

This chapter considers post-Roman rural England as an economy in ‘abatement’, with a shift in emphasis from cereal cultivation to livestock. A wide range of pasture, particularly wood-pasture, was abundant. Moving the stock off the farm protected growing crops and meadowland. The chapter explores how transhumance influenced both landscape and social organisation, as resource areas, linking settlements to their pastures, shaped territories and, in some regions, hundreds.

For most of the twentieth century migration and invasion were the default explanation of material culture change in archaeology. This model was largely derived from the record of documentary history, which not only recorded the Gaulish diaspora of later prehistory but the migrations that resulted in the breakup of the Roman Empire. The equation of archaeological distributions—the formula ‘pots = people’—was a model adopted and promoted by Gordon Childe, and remained fundamental to archaeological interpretation into the 1960s. Thereafter diffusionism was discredited among British prehistorians, though less so among European archaeologists and classical or historical archaeologists. Even the Beaker phenomenon became a ‘cult package’ rather than the product of settlers, and it is only as a result of more recent isotopic and DNA analyses that the scale of settlement from the continent introducing Beakers has begun to be demonstrated. Other factors in culture contact including long-distance trade have long been evident, for example, from the distribution of finds of Baltic amber from Northern and North-Western Europe to the Mediterranean, or the distribution of continental pottery and glass via the western seaways in the post-Roman period.

There exists an ecological issue in the livestock activities. Feed and fodder availability is vital. Nomadic herders are important in social as well as economic context. Livestock population is a part of the developing economy through its complementarity to crop cultivation. For example, India holds livestock resources of vast genetic diversity with 55 percent of the world buffalo population. Both drafting and dairying are important components within the primary sector. Cowdung, meat and residuals of fallen cattle also adds to the economy. Hence, a number of new areas of research have emerged. There exists identifiable culture related to livestock rearing. Emphasis is given to nutrition, animal diseases and veterinary services. Consequently, livestock is vital for rural development.

This chapter examines the ground-level debates over pastoral land rights that lay outside the aerial camera’s frame in Serengeti Shall Not Die. When the British gazetted Serengeti National Park in 1951, Tanganyika’s colonial government had guaranteed the Maasai rights of occupancy because they did not traditionally hunt and were deemed part of the natural landscape. Yet a prolonged drought brought increasing numbers of Maasai into the parklands in search of better-watered highland grazing, causing conflict with park officials. Such movements, coupled with scientific and administrative misunderstanding of transhumance and savanna resilience, led the British to propose excising the Ngorongoro region from the park to accommodate local land use. The Grzimeks and a “green network” of international allies asserted that cattle herding and wildlife conservation were incompatible due to livestock’s overgrazing. They buttressed this ecological claim with fears of racial degeneration, claiming that there were no more “true-blooded” Maasai left in the Serengeti. The Grzimeks’ advocacy helped to transform a colonial debate about “native” rights into an international scandal. The green network had discredited British imperialism yet inherited many of its paternalist assumptions about traditional African land use and modernist development.