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Paper short abstract:

This paper about dove-keeping in Zanzibar treats doves as agentive beings who contribute to human 'homes,' traditional healing and cooking as well as to poetic and literary practices. Transforming the atmosphere, doves permit active meditation on love, peace, mobility, freedom and limitation.

Paper long abstract:

On the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar, as they do elsewhere, human beings continually struggle for political, domestic, and interior peace. Since the mid-twentieth century, a persistent political impasse, old and new colonialisms, human rights abuse, and poverty constrain ordinary Zanzibaris from every side. In both urban and rural Zanzibar, in walled-in enclaves and village homesteads, the keeping of doves fosters serenity, cultivates hope, and creates personal havens in an agitated world. Doves are entangled in human discourses and practices of both peace- and place-making, as well as in traditional healing and in cooking. Their ability to vanish from sight and reliably return, which humans cannot always do - provokes active meditation on mobility, freedom and the meaning of 'home.' As they do in many traditions, doves also recur in classical and contemporary Swahili love songs as well as in intimate social exchanges. In anticipation of 8 weeks of ethnographic research to be conducted in summer 2023, and based on over 25 years' ethnographic engagement with rural communities in Zanzibar, this paper explores doves as meaningful agents in the creation of Zanzibari senses and experiences of 'home.' Viewing doves as material, agentive beings who contribute to human environments, ‘co-becoming’ with their carers, as well as to poetic and literary practices, I aim to bring a transdisciplinary, transspecies perspective to scholarship on Swahili communities while also contributing African material – often sorely lacking – to animal studies in general and avian studies in particular.