The beginning of time? Evidence for catastrophic drought in Baringo in the early nineteenth century

New developments in the collection of palaeo-data over the past two decades have transformed our understanding of climate and environmental history in eastern Africa. This article utilises instrumental and proxy evidence of historical lake-level fluctuations from Baringo and Bogoria, along with other Rift Valley lakes, to document the timing and magnitude of hydroclimate variability at decadal to century time scales since 1750. These data allow us to construct a record of past climate variation not only for the Baringo basin proper, but also across a sizable portion of central and northern Kenya. This record is then set alongside historical evidence, from oral histories gathered amongst the peoples of northern Kenya and the Rift Valley and from contemporary observations recorded by travellers through the region, to offer a reinterpretation of human activity and its relationship to environmental history in the nineteenth century. The results reveal strong evidence of a catastrophic drought in the early nineteenth century, the effects of which radically alters our historical understanding of the character of settlement, mobility and identity within the Baringo–Bogoria basin

Symbiotic modeling: Linguistic Anthropology and the promise of chiasmus

Reflexive observations and observations of reflexivity: such agendas are by now standard practice in anthropology. Dynamic feedback loops between self and other, cause and effect, represented and representamen may no longer seem surprising; but, in spite of our enhanced awareness, little deliberate attention is devoted to modeling or grounding such phenomena. Attending to both linguistic and extra-linguistic modalities of chiasmus (the X figure), a group of anthropologists has recently embraced this challenge. Applied to contemporary problems in linguistic anthropology, chiasmus functions to highlight and enhance relationships of interdependence or symbiosis between contraries, including anthropology’s four fields, the nature of human being and facets of being human

A proposal for the retrospective identification and categorization of older people with functional impairments in scientific studies : recommendations of the Medication and Quality of Life in Frail Older Persons (MedQoL) research group

When treating older adults, a main factor to consider is physical frailty. Because specific assessments in clinical trials are frequently lacking, critical appraisal of treatment evidence with respect to functional status is challenging. Our aim was to identify and categorize assessments for functional status given in clinical trials in older adults to allow for a retrospective characterization and indirect comparison of treatment evidence from these cohorts. We conducted 4 separate systematic reviews of randomized and nonrandomized controlled clinical trials in older people with hypertension, diabetes, depression, and dementia. All assessments identified that reflected functional status were analyzed. Assessments were categorized across 4 different functional status levels. These levels span from functionally not impaired, slightly impaired, significantly impaired, to severely impaired/disabled. If available from the literature, cut-offs for these 4 functioning levels were extracted. If not, or if the existing cut-offs did not match the predefined functional levels, cut-off points were defined by an expert group composed of geriatricians, pharmacists, pharmacologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, and epidemiologists using a patient-centered approach. We identified 51 instruments that included measures of functional status. Although some of the assessments had clearly defined cut-offs across our predefined categories, many others did not. In most cases, no cut-offs existed for slightly impaired or severely impaired older adults. Missing cut-offs or values to adjust were determined by the expert group and are presented as described. The functional status assessments that were identified and operationalized across 4 functional levels could now be used for a retrospective characterization of functional status in randomized controlled trials and observational studies. Allocated categories only serve as approximations and should be validated head-to-head in future studies. Moreover, as general standard, upcoming studies involving older adults should include and explicitly report functional impairment as a baseline characteristic of all participants enrolled

Towards an Arid Eden? Boundary making, governance and benefit sharing and the political ecology of the “new commons” of Kunene Region, Northern Namibia

Over the last two decades many sub-Saharan African countries have devolved rights and obligations in rural natural resource management from state to local communities in an effort to foster social-ecological sustainability and economic development at the same time. Often these governmental projects were launched in settings in which traditional commons, informed by both the demands of traditional subsistence-orientated agrarian systems and the tenure policies of colonial and postcolonial states were well established, and in which power struggles between rivaling traditional authorities, between seniors and juniors, and between state agents and local communities were pertinent. These moves were also embedded in (partially contradictory) discourses on decentralization, political participation, economic empowerment, and neo-liberally inspired commoditization of natural resources. In the process of devolvement rights and obligations were handed over to communities which were formalized in the process: formal membership, social and spatial boundaries, elected leadership, established models of governance, and accountability both to the wider community and to state bureaucracy. New commons were established around specified resources: pastures, water, forests, game. In the process these resources were (partially) commoditized: game owned by the community could be sold as trophies for hunting, lands could be rented out to private investors, and water had to be paid for. This contribution is intended to shed light on the process of establishing new commons – in the local context named conservancies – of game management in north-western Namibia. Game on communal lands had been state-owned and state-controlled in the colonial past. This did not preclude poaching but certainly inhibited significant degrees of commoditization. The new commons of game management are meant to do exactly this, in two steps: first specific rights (in this case management rights and transfer rights) are devolved to a well-defined community; then this community (or its committee) decides how to put the newly gained rights to good use and transfers such rights to private investors, tourism entrepreneurs and commercial hunters. While the first step is informed by discourses on participation and co-management, the second step is market-oriented and seeks so-called public-private partnerships