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Chapter 7
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Human evolution | Long-term biological maturation of the human species. Geographically, all evidence points toward East Africa as the source of humankind. Our species, Homo sapiens, emigrated from this hearth to eventually populate the rest of the habitable world. |
Cold War | The post-World War II standoff between the Soviet Union and the Western alliance led by the United States, which lasted from 1945 to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Largely coincided with the postcolonial era |
Continental drift | The slow movement of continents controlled by the processes associated with plate tectonics. |
Rift valley | The trough or trench that forms when a thinning strip of the Earth’s crust sinks between two parallel faults (surface fractures). |
State formation | The creation of a state, exemplifying traditions of human territoriality that go back thousands of years. |
Ethnicity | The combination of a people’s culture (traditions, customs, language, and religion) and racial ancestry. |
Nation‐state | A country whose population possesses a substantial degree of cultural homogeneity and unity. The ideal form to which most nations and states aspire—a political unit wherein the territorial state coincides with the area settled by a certain national group |
Land tenure | The way people own, occupy, and use land. |
Indirect rule | British colonial practice that kept indigenous power structures in place, co-opting individual rulers. The purpose was to minimize armed conflict and maximize profits. |
Land alienation | One society or culture group taking land from another. |
Agribusiness | The agricultural operations of large, often multinational, corporations. |
Green Revolution | The successful late-twentieth-century development of higher-yield, fast-growing varieties of rice and other cereals in certain developing countries. |
Medical geography | The study of health and disease within a geographic context and from a spatial perspective. Among other things, this geographic field examines the sources, diffusion routes, and distributions of diseases. |
Endemic | A local or regional outbreak of a disease |
Epidemic | A local or regional outbreak of a disease. |
Multilingualism | A society marked by a mosaic of local languages. Constitutes a centrifugal force because it impedes communication within the larger population. Often a lingua franca is used as a “common language,” as in many countries of Subsaharan Africa. |
Formal economy | The part of a national economy that is registered with government agencies and complies with laws and regulations, especially taxation. The complement to a country’s informal economy. |
Informal economy | The part of a national economy that is not registered with the government, and for which reliable statistics are rarely available. The complement to a country’s formal economy. |
Sharia law | led to the departure of thousands of Christians, intensifying the cultural fault line that we now know as the Islamic Front |
Boko Haram | The violent, jihadist, terrorist organization that is based in— and controls parts of—northeastern Nigeria. It engages in extreme terrorist attacks, increasingly beyond its territory as it seeks to expand into other parts of the country |
Anthropogenic | Environmental impacts emanating from human activities, particularly the production of pollutants associated with atmospheric warming. |
Mobile money | The dominant system of text-messaged money exchange in Subsaharan Africa that is attributable to the realm’s general lack of a formal banking infrastructure. Elaborated in Box 7-15. |
Cash economy | An economic system in which all transactions are made in cash. |
Exclave | A bounded (non-island) piece of territory that is part of a particular state but lies separated from it by the territory of another state. |
Apartheid | Literally, apartness. The Afrikaans term for South Africa’s pre-1994 policies of racial separation, a system that produced highly segregated socio-geographical patterns. |
Xenophobia | Extreme dislike and fear of foreigners, sometimes fueled by populist politicians. |
Pandemic | An outbreak of a disease that spreads worldwide. |