Tanzanian Ritual Perimetrics and African Landscapes: The Case of Dracaena*
2008; Boston University; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2326-3016
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture analysis
ResumoWhenever I encountered the dracaena plant when hiking through the forests of North Pare, Tanzania, my companions found it significant. Ah, here we see an old homestead, they would say, or must be an old grave. This shrub, which has green sword-shaped leaves growing from central stalks, is ubiquitous in the social landscape of North Pare. It forms living fences between adjacent fields, it marks the borders of sacred groves and graves, and it symbolizes the coolness and peace that result from having the ancestors' blessings in Pare. I had long considered the social functions of dracaena in Pare to be examples of the arbitrary production of cultural meaning in a society's physical environment. I was wrong. I had put my North Pare work aside in 2004 to review the literature on African sacred groves for a book I was editing.1 I was looking for general themes, and so was quite surprised- astonished, really- when I found references to dracaena in West African sacred groves. It is a common genus throughout the tropics, so its presence in West Africa was no surprise, but the striking continuity of social significance in both East Africa and West cried out for explanation. This article is a preliminary attempt to make sense of the ethnobotanical fact that dracaena carries a complex cultural load in northeastern Tanzania and also in many societies across Africa. I argue that some symbolic systems, especially those relating to ecological, social, and metaphysical order, have affected land use systems in tropical Africa at a continent-wide spatial and a centuries-long temporal scale. Because people in northeastern Tanzania often evaluate and respond to changing land use patterns and institutions by reference to these webs of meaning, the symbolism and power of a particular plant provides a window on regional political ecology. Symbolic Practice in the East African Regional System Unraveling the meanings of dracaena in northeastern Tanzania requires attention to the social history of key symbols at various temporal and spatial scales. Matters of power, scale, and meaning have long framed scholars' understanding of the dynamics of the Tanzanian past and the dilemmas of its present. The precolonial economy of East Africa became a dominant topic in Tanzanian historiography after the end of colonial rule ushered in a period of intellectual re-assessment of old assumptions in the 1960s. The goal of the new generation of Africanist historians was an openly nationalistic program of countering the European and Swahili biases of earlier work, emphasizing Africans' agency in their own history, and illuminating the tangled contradictions of colonial rule.2 This reinterpretation of Tanzania's past in terms of power took three major forms from 1964 to 1991. The first group comprised detailed, highly localized descriptions and analyses of the cultural history of particular ethnic groups.3 The authors in this group organized oral traditions into coherent narratives, but regional patterns served mainly as a background to local politics. The second cluster drew on Marxist economic theory to mount a radical critique of the political and economic changes introduced by colonization and capitalism.4 The major theme of this body of work is that capitalism invaded East Africa and transformed economic and political relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These authors have argued that precolonial economic relationships were egalitarian exchanges rather than capitalistic, profit-seeking activities. The third set explored the implications of the enlargement of scale in social relations as the lives of relatively isolated groups of people became increasingly intertwined. 5 This line of thought culminated in John Iliffe's synthesis of Tanganyikan history as a constantly changing regional dynamic of cultural, political, and economic processes.6 His even-handed analysis focuses on the expansion of within this dynamic, as Africans creatively responded to changing ecological, economic, and political constraints and opportunities. …
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