| This dissertation examines the changing management of common property resources in the northeastern Tanzanian highlands of North Pare. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between July 1997 and June 1998, it analyzes the landscape of North Pare from a political ecology perspective by comparing the management of water sources, indigenous irrigation systems, and sacred forests. Data for the study were collected by means of participant observation, including interviews with farmers, resource managers, and government officials, as well as research in documentary and photographic archives. Although environmental changes in North Pare have been historically attributed to population pressure on resources, this study revealed that a more critical process was a series of changes in how such rights to local resources were allocated to people at domestic, regional, and national levels over the past century.; In the pre-colonial period, entitlements to resources and labor were vested in a hierarchy that gave precedence to gender, age, and prestige in an intensive agricultural economy. A variety of fertility rituals and taboos supported this division of rights and labor, buttressed by cultural beliefs that set limits on interpersonal relations and political authority. The generalized fertility that was the perceived-product of such culturally appropriate land uses and social relationships was labeled “coolness.” Colonial rule disrupted these cultural practices by introducing cash cropping, converting North Pare into a rural labor reserve, and labeling the resulting disorder land degradation. Attempts to alleviate this problem were almost exclusively technical and often ignored how these changes altered men's and women's differing rights to land and labor. Each intervention added a new layer of entitlement without erasing older systems of access and control. Because postcolonial administrators have continued these practices, resource management remains defective and fraught with moral and political ambiguities. This dissertation demonstrates that indigenous ideologies of political and ecological order can influence land management in changing political contexts. It also demonstrates that land degradation and environmental recovery are as much political processes as they are ecological ones, and that they are shaped by power dynamics, material concerns, and moral debates at household, regional, and global levels. |
