Myths, memories and metaphors: recollecting landscape change in the Eritrean highlands

Abstract

Using the case of Eritrea, this article investigates why people's visual recollections and oral accounts of past landscapes can be an unreliable source of accurate information on environmental change. In Eritrea, a longstanding narrative exists that claims that forest cover throughout the country has decreased from 30% of land cover in the late nineteenth century to less than 1% today. Yet popular recollections are contradicted by available archival and photographic evidence, all of which indicates that the landscape has changed far less dramatically than generally imagined. This article explores why a disjunction between the historical evidence regarding the extent and pattern of deforestation in the central Eritrean highlands and people's memories and beliefs about this process should have evolved. Drawing on recent findings in social psychology, and placing this within prevailing debates on landscape and memory, it seeks to explain why visual recollections may be strongly...