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- Chair:
-
Diane Frost
(Liverpool University)
- Stream:
- Series C: Critical Perspective on Education and Heritage
- Location:
- GR 358
- Start time:
- 12 September, 2008 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
to follow
Long Abstract:
This panel brings together different perspectives on how the past plays out in East African landscapes today: the shaping of the landscape through past agricultural practices; memories and perceptions of landscape change; and current land use and heritage policies. It draws on preliminary fieldwork conducted under HEEAL (Historical Ecologies of East African Landscapes), an interdiscplinary project based at the Archaeology Department of the University of York.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on fieldwork to be conducted in summer 2008. Its starting point is a collection of photographs by Wilhem Guth (1880-1980), a German pastor who was stationed at the Leipzig Mission in Gonja in the Southern Pare Mountains of Tanzania from 1911 to 1913 and again from 1927 to 1938. During these stays he took over 400 photographs recording not only missionary buildings and activities, but also the Pare landscape, villages and ‘everyday day’ scenes. I will travel to Gonja with these pictures in order to record landscape change through ‘repeat photography’, by taking pictures of the same views today. At the same time, I will use the pictures to evoke local elders’ memories of past landscapes and land use practices. Recent work in Tanzania (Shetler 2007) has shown how closely people’s historical memories are tied to particular places and landscape features – including present and abandoned villages as well as sacred groves, mountains and rivers – which serve as mnemonic devices of past events. Yet memories of landscapes changes themselves are, for a number of reasons, generally less reliable (Fairhead and Leach 1996). Old photographs can be a useful device to both highlight and address the ‘politics’ of landscape memory, possibly helping to dispel engrained narratives of environmental degradation (see also Brockington 2005). At the same time, missionary photographs themselves are problematic, in that they can be politically sensitive, misleading or simply irrelevant to what local people consider important in the landscape. The paper will therefore critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the use of missionary photography as a tool for exploring landscape change and landscape memory.
Paper long abstract:
The past, or the perception of the past, plays a pivotal role in the formation of modern policies on land-use, since the rhetoric of conservation favours the preservation of ‘ancient’ or ‘pristine’ landscapes, whilst the focus on economic or environmental sustainability has led to the endorsement of apparently long-lived ‘indigenous’ practices or, at least, to the condemnation of modes of exploitation that are seen as causes of resource degradation. With relatively high population densities supported by what seem to be enduring techniques of cultivation, the irrigation and terracing using communities of eastern Africa have thus been the focus of conservationist and developmental narratives in which they are viewed as potential paradigms of non-bureaucratic, low external input, sustainable resource-use; a position that is apparently strengthened by their employment of soil and water conservation techniques, methods of low-tillage farming, and by the presence of high levels of bio-diversity in uncultivated areas. However, recent historical work has questioned the assumption that extant forested areas represent carefully conserved remnants of ‘precolonial’ woodlands, whilst the conjectured antiquity of intensive farming techniques in these areas remains poorly understood historically and has yet to be tested archaeologically. Focussing on examples from northern Tanzania and drawing on current work at North Pare, this paper aims to highlight the historical assumptions within these narratives and will outline how a combination of archaeological, historical and palaeo-environmental research might be employed to produce a more complete understanding of the development of these agronomies.
Paper long abstract:
Aspects of pastoralist culture and heritage have been used to promote tourism in East Africa since the early decades of the 20th century. Pictures of Maasai murran, frequently seen either dancing, herding cattle or standing leaning on a spear, are some of the most iconic images of East Africa on a par with images of the ‘Big Five’ game animals, landscape vistas and sunsets. Such images are often placed in proximity with each other, and so work to naturalise Maasai (and by default other pastoralists) by making them seem to be at one with, and a part of, the elements of the natural world with which they are juxtaposed. As tourism has intensified in East Africa, so increasingly more pastoralist groups have been drawn into the market economy and into performing and portraying aspects of their ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, ‘indigenous knowledge’, and ‘heritage’. Simultaneously, more and more aspects of pastoralist (and especially ‘Maasai’) ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, ‘indigenous knowledge’, and ‘heritage’ have been appropriated by non-pastoralist communities as part of their own marketing strategies. The aim of is to examine how these indigenous constructs of a pastoralist heritage compare with the models of pastoralist heritage that are presented as part of the tourist industry, as exemplified by the recent creation of ‘cultural bomas’ as a device for showcasing pastoralist ‘traditions’, ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’.