Cutting down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990. Henrietta L. Moore , Megan Vaughan

Storytelling in Northern Zambia: Theory, Method, Practice and Other Necessary Fictions

“…93 he agreed to summon some people 92 among many resources, see richards 1939;a. roberts 1973;and moore and Vaughan 1994. 93 mary Frost collected hundreds of bemba narratives and included some twenty or thirty in her dissertation.…”

Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of reflexive ethnography

“…That is, they rely on a configuration of external forces to explain the discrepancy between the two studies. Here my two main examples are Hutchinson's (1996) revisit to Evans-Pritchard's' (1940) The Nuer and Moore and Vaughan's (1994) revisit to Richards's (1939) Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia.…”

“…They examine the contingency of external forces as well as the deep schisms these forces induce within societies. They think more deeply about the implication of the original ethnographers living in the world they study, and even their impact on the world that is revisited.F Hutchinson (1996) and Moore and Vaughan (1994) replace Firth's homogeneous society undergoing modernization with societies beset by domination, contestation, and indeterminacy. These revisits reflect the profoundly different theoretical lenses that the ethnographers bring to their field work.…”

“…She attributed her postulated "breakdown" to the slash and bum agriculture (citimene system) that could not survive the absence of able-bodied men to cut down the trees. Moore and Vaughan (1994) returned to the Northern Province of Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) in the 1980s only to discover that the citimene system was still alive, if not well! Why was Richards so wrong and yet so widely believed?…”

“…Why was Richards so wrong and yet so widely believed? Moore and Vaughan's (1994) first task was to reexamine Land, Labour and Diet in the light of the data Richards (1939) herself compiled and then in the light of data gathered by subsequent anthropologists, including themselves. Moore and Vaughan discovered that Bemba women were more resourceful than Richards had given them credit for being-they cultivated relish on their own land and found all sorts of ways to cajole men-folk into cutting down trees.…”