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 Regionally specific conflicts among
governments, private commercial interests, and indigenous groups are
almost entirely unstudied for the northwestern Congo River basin. Suggestive
preliminary work is emerging about regional trade relations over time
(Dupré 1995, Harms 1981), but scholarship has not yet connected
historical and contemporary struggles over forest use. The interface
of history and anthropology has been redefined in recent years through
work addressing environmental and political aspects of colonial encounters
in Africa (Comaroff 1997, Feierman 1989, Spear 1993). But the history
and culture of conservation practices in colonial Africa is only beginning
to be analyzed in depth (Anderson 1987, Grove 1995). Despite such gaps,
the focusing of anthropological analysis upon the cultural institutions
of colonizers has illuminated African roles in and reactions to European
nation-formation processes (Comaroff 1991, Hobsbawm 1983, Vail 1989).
Yet such work limits its temporal scope to the colonial era. Current
social theory is much concerned with nation-transformation processes
and transnationalism (Appadurai 1996, Pessar 1996). Analysis of past
and present resource-use relations in this African region will help
to better define these contemporary scholarly frontiers.
At the same time, such analysis addresses practical dilemmas of ecosystem
management across national frontiers. Disturbance ecology has become a
dynamic subfield of tropical forest ecology in general (Denslow 1984, Lugo
1992, Phillips 1994, White 1994, Whitmore 1984) and allows for new hypotheses
about human roles in ecosystem dynamics (Fairhead 1996). Although central
Africa presents particular challenges to archaeological research and interpretation
(Lanfranchi 1990), new models for long term human/forest relations may
contradict or complement historical work (Eggert 1992, Fay 1996).
 How to incorporate such debates
into management strategies is an emerging question. Despite the application
of regional science for environmental and economic planning in Asian,
European, and American contexts (Cappellin and Batey 1993, Chen 1996,
Siegel, Alwang, and Johnson 1995), there is a dearth of such work applied
to African settings. This is due, in part, to the problematic nature
of obtaining reliable quantitative information in African contexts with
limited infrastructure, language barriers and low data collection capacity
within under-funded government agencies. However, attention to historical,
cultural, and spatial aspects of political economies in regional science
is currently blending quantitative and qualitative approaches in regional
studies elsewhere (Agnew and Corbridge 1995, Crevoisier 1996). Such
developments indicate potential for appropriate, meaningful data collection
and analysis even in rural African forest areas. While regional environmental
information collection has been initiated using remote sensing techniques
(World Bank 1995) such data have not been integrated into policy, with
ground truthing and more traditional forms of information collection.
The upper Sangha region serves here as a concrete case study of international
resource use structures and processes over time. But it is also used as
an analytical construct, which enables confrontation between scientific
and social issues concerning equatorial African forests. Interdisciplinary
research is essential to understanding the intricate biological and social
processes within the Congo River basin region (Vansina 1990). This conference,
focusing on the roles of researchers and conservation projects, will identify
innovative research methods and management concepts as they emerge from
the Sangha River area. We bring conference participants together to initiate
dialogue about interdisciplinarity and about the interactions between knowledge
and policy. The sessions described below serve as first steps toward developing
a long-term process of communication and critical analysis.
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