The political construction of desertification: the creeping desert

The political construction of desertification: the creeping desert

Pedro Tomé Martín

Drawing from a series of studies on ethnohistorical Chichimeca’s War and through the establishment of analogies with other processes that have deserts as scenarios, this article argues that the notion of wilderness is more a category of political action than a geographical concept. After showing how the process of the social invention of ‘deserts’ takes place, the paper analyzes the way in which some of the components that have characterized this invention are being analogically transferred to dominant discourses about contemporary environmental problems such as desertification.

2013

Antropología del desierto, desertificación, desierto verde, ecología cultural política, parque natural

10.5209/rev_RASO.2013.v22.43190

Revista de Antropología Social

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology