Date: August 3, 2011 13：30～15：30
Venue: Room No. 332, Inamori Foundation Building, CSEAS
Title: Formation and Dynamism of Secondary or Anthropogenic Vegetation:From the Two Cases of African Rain Forest and Savannah Societies
Presetation:
１３：３０－１３：４０Introduction
１３：４０－１４：２０
Takanori Oishi （Center for African Area Studies (CAAS),Kyoto University ）
Title: Local people's multilayered perception on the diversity of tropical rainforest vegetation of Southeast Cameroon: Its comparison to modern ecological understandings
１４：３０－１５：１０
Yuka Tomomatsu（The university of Tokyo）
Title: Dynamics and Factors to Shape Vitellaria paradoxa and Parkia biglobosa Parkland:A Case Study from a Dagomba Area of Northern Ghana
１５：１０－１５：３０
General Discussion
【Record of activity】
Anthropogenic vegetation that has been maintained through human intervention over long time spans is distributed widely in many parts of the world. At the Initiative 2 Seminar we examined the association between anthropogenic intervention and the formation and dynamism of such vegetation. The first report, from researcher Takanori Oishi, concerned the detailed classification of the forest by the people who live in the tropical rainforest of Cameroon. Mr. Oishi firstly showed from forest ecology surveys that the tropical rainforest in this region has a high degree of diversity, not only at the species level, but also at the level of the plant community. An investigation from an ethnobotanical viewpoint indicated that the perception and classification of the forest by the local people is more detailed than can be described by ecological science. Furthermore, he reported that the people’s classification of vegetation was not uniform throughout the local society, but that there were significant ethnic and gender differences. It was considered important for the future to highlight how these folk classifications have come into existence through their relations with daily life practices. At the same time, there is also the issue of how folk classifications can overcome their subordinate relation to ecological classifications.
The second report, from researcher Yuka Tomomatsu, focused on the long-term relations between people and useful trees such as the shea tree (Vitellaria paradoxa) and the parkia tree (Parkia biglobosa), which grow on farmland, and the background to the maintenance of the trees, in the Dagomba kingdom society of the densely populated savannah region of northern Ghana. The oil extractable from the shea fruit can be sold for cash. With the increase in the ability to gain cash income from the shea fruit from the 1980s onwards, the right to gather the fruit shifted from the former arrangement, under which the rights of the villagers were widely acknowledged over and above property rights, to a more exclusive right of the owner, which is said to have led to a more meticulous management practice with denser tree plantings. On the other hand, it has been shown that gathering rights of the parkia fruit, much used in the local people’s diet, have a close association with the male-dominated class system, of which the king is the head. Essentially, the parkia trees are owned only by upper class males, but the males are said to emphasize their generosity by tacitly granting gathering rights of the fruit to women. In other words, in Dagomba society the parkia is given symbolic value based on a unique political structure. Ms. Tomomatsu’s report is a valuable case study that indicates that the background to useful trees remaining on farmland differs according to tree species even within the same society.
In this seminar, it has been empirically indicated that anthropogenic influences have been involved in the origin of the vegetation in both tropical rainforest and savannah, but that the form of the involvement differs greatly in the two regions. As Ms. Tomomatsu also pointed out, it will be necessary in the future to conduct further analyses of these differences.
(Masaaki Hirai)