Environmental Iniaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

摘要

With this collection of essays, editors Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke Ⅲ call for sustained attention to environmental history within the field of Middle Eastern and North African studies. Davis cogently argues that since the late nineteenth century, the Middle East has been portrayed by colonial actors, scholars, and travelers as an ecologically marginal environment, little understood by local inhabitants and degraded by their customs despite mounting ecological evidence that "the environment in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa has been carefully. . . transformed to improve human life for much of the last five to seven thousand years" (p. 2). Thus a study of "environmental Orientalism," to use Davis's term, has the potential to tie decades of important critique within Middle Eastern studies to the study of "environmental imaginaries" within environmental history. Collectively, the volume is successful in making a case for their call while not fully answering what a mature field could add to environmental history or Middle Eastern studies more broadly.