Blue-veiled nomads, camels crossing infinite dunes, oases shimmering on the horizon: ready-made images of the Sahara are easy to conjure. But they can never truly capture a region that crosses eleven countries and is home to millions.
This sweeping account upends old fantasies, revealing the far more interesting reality of the Earth’s largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, anthropologist Judith Scheele takes us from Libya to Mali, Algeria to Chad, from the ancient Roman Empire to contemporary regional battles and fraught international diplomacy, questioning every easy cliché and exposing fascinating truths along the way.
From the geology of the region, to the life it shelters, to the religions, languages and cultural and political forces that shape and fracture it, this is a landmark work that tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and whose future holds implications for us all.
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Judith Scheele is a social anthropologist trained at Oxford. After a few years spent in Germany she now holds a professorship at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in France. She has spent many years living in and researching the Sahara, with a focus on Algeria, Mali and Chad and a more recent focus on northern Sudan and its borders with Libya and Egypt. She has published three books, one with James Currey, and two with Cambridge University Press. Her second book, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara, has been described by Deborah Harrold (The Journal of North African Studies) as ‘an irresistible read’, ‘something particular and intensely human’, and, by Roman Loimeier (Africa), as ‘an academic page-turner’, ‘brilliantly written and thrilling to read’.
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