Earl P Scott
I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My Ph.D. dissertation is in the Carl Sauer-Roy Rapaport traditions. It examined the cultural/ecological and economic relations between the Hausa and Fulani in Northern Nigeria, including the nature of farmers’ participation in periodic markets and the flows of cash and commodities between savanna and forest-based markets to determine their contributions toward advancements in human well-being.
My teaching and reporting have been grounded in foreign area research and social science survey methods. My objectives have been to understand the lives of "ordinary" people and how they advance their own well-being, to understand the participation of ordinary citizens in urban and rural-based economies and how their participation can be assured through democratic rights, and to understand how households and small-scale enterprises, as the lowest units of civil society, empower themselves. In pursuit of my objectives, I have conducted field research on small-scale enterprises in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Uganda and I have visited many other sub-Saharan African countries.