Maps, names, and ethnic games: the epistemology and iconography of colonial power in Northwestern Zimbabwe

Worby, Eric

doi:10.1080/03057079408708408

Cited by 83 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…As others have shown, there were innumerable land conflicts involving state agencies, traditional authorities, elected politicians, immigrants and ‘firstcomers’ in the first two decades of independence — conflicts that were mostly not between white farmers and black land claimants (see for instance, Alexander, 2006; Dzingirayi, 2003; Fontein, 2006; Hammar, 2002; Hughes, 2006; Nyambara, 2001; Rutherford, 2001: 203ff. ; Spierenburg, 2004; Worby, 1994).…”

Section: Domestic Government In Post‐colonial Zimbabwementioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

Rutherford

2008

Development and Change

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This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.

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Section: Domestic Government In Post‐colonial Zimbabwementioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

Rutherford

2008

Development and Change

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“…'Resettlement' is thus an old problem for the state, and one that the Zimbabwean government inherited considerable expertise in dealing with from its colonial predecessors (Moyo 1986, 169;Alexander 1994). 25 The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 was likewise intended to fix a grid of tenurial categories that segregated mere peasants from accomplished (black) yeoman farmers (Worby 1994(Worby , 2000Moore 1999Moore , 2001. The latter, given access to leasehold African Purchase Lands, were, in fact, often urban professionals more eager to see themselves as gentleman farmers and interested in settling their extended families on these lands (Cheater 1984;Shutt 2000).…”

Section: A Morally Charged Lexicon: 'Resettling' 'Squatting' 'Invadmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet as Hammar notes (this issue), it is the members of the Council itself who, ironically, fit this latter description from the point of view of their erstwhile colonial rulers. On the implications of the opposition between modernity and indigineity for the imagination of ethnic difference by immigrants in the northwest, see Worby (1992Worby ( , 1994 and Alexander and McGregor (1997). instruments of state at his disposal to foment the unique agrarian revolution that is now afoot. A case might well be made that Mugabe's strange mix of authoritarian populism, racial and ethnic chauvinism and external adventurism are merely means to consolidate new sources of accumulation for the military-political class he has managed to consolidate through control of the party since Independence.…”

Section: Conclusion: State Violence Contested Identities and Agrariamentioning

confidence: 99%

A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions in Zimbabwe

Worby

2001

Journal of Agrarian Change

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The recent land invasions in Zimbabwe represent a profound and contradictory revolution in that country's agrarian social order, with implications that have already spilled over the borders of this small southern African country. A settler colonial heritage that tenaciously mapped land and tenure forms into unequal zones according to race is giving way to a more complex and spatially diversified configuration of agrarian property forms and production strategies. Control over access to the means of violence has been devolved to ruling party loyalists, war veterans, army personnel, provincial administrators and local councillors, thus shifting the forms and functions of power exercised in the name of the state and the nation. 'Resettlement', 'squatting' and 'farm invasions' constitute morally charged alternatives in the lexicon of movement across tenurial boundaries. Contested rights to land and to movement are mediated through discourses of national and sub-national belonging and exclusion, with commercial farm workersdeemed foreigners -the chief victims. The dramatic challenge that the invasions pose to private property, and to the rule of law more generally, suggest the possible collapse of large-scale capitalist farming and the withdrawal of aid and foreign investment. Yet, at the same time, new forms of capitalist investment

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“…Reexamination of the colonial context in which concepts of 'tribe' emerged suggests social structures and expressions of identity differed markedly from western perspectives. 'Ethnic' attributions were intertwined with economic and political status, within and between communities, and did not reflect 'nationhood' as colonial perspectives conceived it (Worby, 1994). Instead, ethnicity was only one expression of multifaceted identities, which were socially contingent and varied in the intensity which they were expressed (Barth, 1969;Fenton, 2003: 114).…”

Section: Naming Tribesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other colonial encounters, when authorities defined certain identities as more acceptable, individuals manipulated their identities accordingly, even in the disruptive context of colonialism. In Africa, as languages, which previously had little ethnic affiliation, were ascribed ethnic associations, choosing to read in particular languages was to engage in ethnic self-attribution (Worby, 1994). In Rwanda, tribal definitions were established not by indigenous groups but by colonial definitions which were related to authorities' perceptions of social status (Mamdani, 2001: 75).…”

Section: Identity In Colonial Contactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detribalizing the later prehistoric past: Concepts of tribes in Iron Age and Roman studies

Moore

2011

Journal of Social Archaeology

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In studies of the Iron Age and Early Roman periods the concept of the 'tribe' has long been a social framework upon which to hang the archaeological record. Yet, despite widespread recognition of the complex social processes and shifting identities during Rome's expansion, the nature of 'tribes' in Late Iron Age Britain and the suitability of this term for describing societies at this time has been largely ignored. This article examines why the term 'tribe' has retained its prominence in archaeological studies despite being widely critiqued by anthropologists. Through an examination of the historiography of the term I argue that the traditional tribal model was born of nineteenth-century perceptions of social systems and that neither archaeological evidence nor classical sources support many of its current connotations. The names in classical sources should instead be regarded as reflecting the emergence of new social and political entities in the later Iron Age.

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Maps, names, and ethnic games: the epistemology and iconography of colonial power in Northwestern Zimbabwe

Cited by 83 publications

References 12 publications

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions in Zimbabwe

Detribalizing the later prehistoric past: Concepts of tribes in Iron Age and Roman studies

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