Invasive alien species as drivers in socio-ecological systems: Local adaptations towards use of Lantana in Southern India
- Authors: Kannan, Ramesh , Shackleton, Charlie M , Shaanker, Ramanan U
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/180932 , vital:43671 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-013-9500-y"
- Description: Lantana camara. L (hereafter Lantana) was first introduced by the British into India in 1807 as an ornamental plant. Since then the species has spread across the length and breadth of the country. Attempts to control Lantana in India have not been successful. In this study, we analysed the use of Lantana by local communities in southern India and identified the possible causes and consequences of its use through the use of a household survey of the socio-economic profile of the user and nonuser households and an analysis of the ecological history of the communities. Communities have been using Lantana for over 25–30 years and apparently such use was not prompted by external agencies. The characteristics of user and nonuser households were similar, except that Lantana users were more literate and had a greater number of occupations per household than nonusers. Per capita income was similar between user and nonuser groups. For nonuser groups, their main income sources were from trading (44 %), wage labour (32 %) and forest resources (23 %). In contrast, the Lantana user groups substituted their loss of income from forest resources (7 %) by income from Lantana (46 %). The ecological history revealed that Lantana was adopted as a resource at a time when it was increasing in the landscape and traditional bamboo resources were in decline because of overuse by commercial enterprises and mast flowering. This change in ecological resource availability prompted a major shift in livelihoods for some in the area.
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- Date Issued: 2014
The Seduction of Ash: " Mia Couto's" The Day Mabata-bata Exploded" and" The Bird-Dreaming Baobab
- Authors: Njovane, Thandokazi
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142702 , vital:38103 , 10.4314/eia.v41i2.2
- Description: Chesca Long-Innes argues that Mia Couto's installation of the fantastic in his short story collection, Voices Made Night, may best be understood "not so much as a product of any 'magical realist' poetics, but as 'naturalised,' or motivated as a function of the collective neurosis of a [Mozambican] society traumatised by its continuing history of poverty and extreme violence". Couto's use of the fantastic, she adds, encompasses both empirical and psychic reality, and both are characterised by instability and elusiveness. The collection, she then maintains, constitutes a reinvention or reimagining of subjective realities constructed and perpetuated by the social trauma underpinning what she terms the "psycho-pathology of post-colonial Mozambique, in which the society as a whole is [. . .] caught in the grip of a profound depression or melancholia".
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- Date Issued: 2014