This essay examines the tensions and uncertainties that developed out of the Swahili coast's interactions with the premodern Indian Ocean world. While most analyses of this period focus on East ...Africa's emerging cosmopolitanism--such as the formation of Islamic port cities--scholars have generally overlooked Swahili speakers struggles over the social, religious, and economic changes brought by early moments of maritime connectivity. Employing evidence from historical linguistics, this essay shows that from the late-first millennium, Swahili speakers developed new ideas about patronage and status. They also created a lexical repertoire that expressed their apprehensions about rapid changes in social and economic life, including vocabulary to gossip with and abuse leaders and fellow town residents. Using this language evidence, this essay illuminates the frictions that Swahili speakers faced in their early encounters within Indian Ocean networks to demonstrate both the opportunities and the challenges born out of global interconnections. KEYWORDS: Swahili, Indian Ocean, precolonial Africa, historical linguistics, urbanism, Islam, cosmopolitan.
This article explores the transforming meanings of kaya forests in coastal Kenya during first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the deployment of the kaya-indicating lowland coastal ...forests with a linguistic connotation of "home" - as discursive tool in the political practices of elder Mijikenda men in their interactions with the colonial state. From the mid-nineteenth- to early-twentieth century, kaya forests were assigned a variety of meanings, including as historical settlements, ancestral graveyards, and ritual sites. By the late-colonial period, the forests and forest authorities - or kaya elders - were central categories of political practice on the Kenya coast. The article argues that elder Mijikenda men and colonial officials generated novel ideas about the significance of the kaya forests as they collaborated to establish bodies of legitimate authority and demarcate lands for colonial forestry projects and development schemes. In the process, they reworked and standardized the meanings attached the forest groves which became a setting for - and symbols of - political action.
The Antarctic is the last vast terrestrial frontier. Just over a century ago, no one had ever seen the South Pole. Today odd machines and adventure skiers from many nations converge there every ...summer, arriving from numerous starting points on the Antarctic coast and returning some other way. But not until very recently has anyone completed a roundtrip from McMurdo Station, the U.S. support hub on the continental coast. The last man to try that perished in 1912. The valuable surface route from McMurdo remained elusive until John H. Wright and his crew finished the job in 2006. Blazing Ice is the story of the team of Americans who forged a thousand-mile transcontinental “haul route” across Antarctica. For decades airplanes from McMurdo Station supplied the South Pole. A safe and repeatable surface haul route would have been cheaper and more environmentally benign than airlift, but the technology was not available until 2000.As Wright reveals in this gripping narrative, the hazards of Antarctic terrain and weather were as daunting for twenty-first century pioneers as they were for Norway’s Roald Amundsen and England’s Robert Falcon Scott when they raced to be first to the South Pole in 1911–1912. Wright and his team faced deadly hidden crevasses, vast snow swamps, the Transantarctic Mountains, badlands of weird wind sculpted ice, and the high Polar Plateau. Blazing Ice will appeal to Antarctic aficionados, conservationists, field scientists, and adventure readers of all stripes.
This dissertation maps out a new approach to studying small-scale societies and their place in global historical narratives by examining the history of coastal East Africa’s immediate interior from ...the first millennium to the 1800s, in particular the Mijikenda-speaking societies that live adjacent to the Swahili port city of Mombasa, Kenya. Drawing insights from comparative historical linguistics, oral traditions, archaeology, and archival records, I demonstrate that while Mombasa has been a hub of Indian Ocean commercial activity for over a millennium, the communities that live only kilometers away have for just as long rejected the signifiers of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism that pervade the urban center’s social, economic, and religious life. Mijikenda speakers shrunk their settlements at the same moments that Mombasa urbanized; they were receptive to the ritual knowledge of outsiders but rejected Islam; and they pioneered long-distance inland trade routes that transformed East Africa’s economy, but only participated selectively in maritime commerce. I argue that Mijikenda speakers’ divergences from their Swahili neighbors helped to lay a foundation for commercial expansions across coastal East Africa and ultimately enabled the region to integrate into global networks.I conceptualize my approach to East Africa’s Indian Ocean littoral as a history of what I term “global dissonance,” which explores how disconnecting from certain social or economic networks is not an act of self-isolation, but generates new possibilities within other mosaics of interaction. Departing many global histories that focus primarily on integration, such as the literature on Swahili urban centers and Islamic maritime networks of the Indian Ocean world, focusing on dissonance illuminates new narratives, such as the transformations in social and economic life that occurred when global maritime networks went into decline in the mid-first and mid-second millennium CE. By foregrounding the actions of small-scale societies and places seldom visible in regional macro-narratives, this study identifies new processes through which the coast of East Africa became a part of the Indian Ocean world.
We present a catalogue of dense cores and filaments in a \(3.8^{\circ}\times2.4^{\circ}\) field around the TMC1 region of the Taurus Molecular Cloud. The catalogue was created using photometric data ...from the Herschel SPIRE and PACS instruments in the 70 \(\mu\)m, 160 \(\mu\)m, 250 \(\mu\)m, 350 \(\mu\)m, and 500 \(\mu\)m continuum bands. Extended structure in the region was reconstructed from a Herschel column density map. Power spectra and PDFs of this structure are presented. The PDF splits into log-normal and power-law forms, with the high-density power-law component associated primarily with the central part of TMC1. The total mass in the mapped region is 2000 M\(_\odot\), of which 34% is above an extinction of AV \(\sim\) 3 mag -- a level that appears as a break in the PDF and as the minimum column density at which dense cores are found. A total of 35 dense filaments were extracted from the column density map. These have a characteristic FWHM width of 0.07 pc, but the TMC1 filament itself has a mean FWHM of \(\sim\) 0.13 pc. The thermally supercritical filaments in the region are aligned orthogonal to the prevailing magnetic field direction. Derived properties for the supercritical TMC1 filament support the scenario of it being relatively young. A catalogue of 44 robust and candidate prestellar cores is created and is assessed to be complete down to 0.1 M\(_\odot\). The combined prestellar CMF for the TMC1 and L1495 regions is well fit by a single log-normal distribution and is comparable to the standard IMF.
We present the identification of the previously unnoticed physical association between the Corona Australis molecular cloud (CrA), traced by interstellar dust emission, and two shell-like structures ...observed with line emission of atomic hydrogen (HI) at 21 cm. Although the existence of the two shells had already been reported in the literature, the physical link between the HI emission and CrA was never highlighted before. We use both Planck and Herschel data to trace dust emission and the Galactic All Sky HI Survey (GASS) to trace HI. The physical association between CrA and the shells is assessed based both on spectroscopic observations of molecular and atomic gas and on dust extinction data with Gaia. The shells are located at a distance between 140 and 190 pc, comparable to the distance of CrA, which we derive as 150.5 +- 6.3 pc. We also employ dust polarization observations from Planck to trace the magnetic-field structure of the shells. Both of them show patterns of magnetic-field lines following the edge of the shells consistently with the magnetic-field morphology of CrA. We estimate the magnetic-field strength at the intersection of the two shells via the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi (DCF) method. Albeit the many caveats that are behind the DCF method, we find a magnetic-field strength of 27 +- 8 \(\mu\)G, at least a factor of two larger than the magnetic-field strength computed off of the HI shells. This value is also significantly larger compared to the typical values of a few \(\mu\)G found in the diffuse HI gas from Zeeman splitting. We interpret this as the result of magnetic-field compression caused by the shell expansion. This study supports a scenario of molecular-cloud formation triggered by supersonic compression of cold magnetized HI gas from expanding interstellar bubbles.
We present a catalogue of prestellar and starless cores within the Corona Australis molecular cloud using photometric data from the Herschel Space Observatory. At a distance of d~130 pc, Corona ...Australis is one of the closest star-forming regions. Herschel has taken multi-wavelength data of Corona Australis with both the SPIRE and PACS photometric cameras in a parallel mode with wavelengths in the range 70 {\mu}m to 500 {\mu}m. A complete sample of starless and prestellar cores and embedded protostars is identified. Other results from the Herschel Gould Belt Survey have shown spatial correlation between the distribution of dense cores and the filamentary structure within the molecular clouds. We go further and show correlations between the properties of these cores and their spatial distribution within the clouds, with a particular focus on the mass distribution of the dense cores with respect to their filamentary proximity. We find that only lower-mass starless cores form away from filaments, while all of the higher-mass prestellar cores form in close proximity to, or directly on the filamentary structure. This result supports the paradigm that prestellar cores mostly form on filaments. We analyse the mass distribution across the molecular cloud, finding evidence that the region around the Coronet appears to be at a more dynamically advanced evolutionary stage to the rest of the clumps within the cloud.
