Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the extraction of rosewood, an Indigenous tree species to the forests in Southwestern Zambia. By centring the resource in the ethnography I analyse the impacts of its extraction on its value and the relations it brings about between heterogenous actors in past, present and future.

Paper long abstract:

Despite conservation efforts Zambia is experiencing rising deforestation. Especially the forests in its Western Province have increasingly become the target of foreign logging companies in recent years. One tree species in particular is in demand. Rosewood is of great value in East Asian markets and refers to a group of hardwood species with a red colour which are mainly used for the production of luxury furniture. In order to meet the rising demand for rosewood furniture by China’s elite and middle class, logging companies started to exploit Zambia’s forests (among others) seeking red-coloured hardwood. I aim to investigate current and past conservation strategies simultaneously to extraction patterns to identify processes that lead to changing knowledge-practices and changing values of rosewood. How did the value attributed to the tree species changed over time and space and which implications has the logging and the enormous increase in commercial value for local knowledges, uses, and value-making of the resource in the rural areas near the forests of Zambia’s Western Province? Rosewood has a different meaning, different value and a different history for those who harvest rosewood for the purposes of furniture production and for those who live with and from the tree. Moving along the ‘biographies’ of trees allows us to understand how they are valued and perceived in contextually specific ways influenced by specific processes of extraction, exchange, or protection. This paper examines the multiplicity of relations that the extraction of rosewood produces between heterogenous identities with diverse positionalities and histories.