Preindustrial Water Management in Eastern Africa - Juniper Publishers

Preindustrial Water Management in Eastern Africa

Authored by Chapurukha M

Africanist anthropologists have intensively studied land use and land rights, but rights to water are often more fundamental; managing water is often the centerpiece of social organization related to the environment. Not surprisingly, water management has been the center of many anthropological approaches to the origins of social complexity. Our paper will discuss how East African communities managed, used, stored, and distributed water and how they developed intensive agricultural practices in relatively arid environments. We examine two comparative examples from Eastern Africa in detail: hill slope irrigation systems and rice farming in Madagascar.

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