| reviews
Suffering
for Territory: Race, place and power in Zimbabwe Review
from African
Studies Review, September 2006 Drawing on thirty months of fieldwork between 1988 and 1996, including a period of over two years spent in Kaerezi, Moore lays bare the dense (or to use his apt metaphor of choice, “entangled”) social geographies of racialized, gendered, and at times, ethnicized land politics in Zimbabwe. He invokes the idiom of “suffering for territory” used by many of his Kaerezian interlocutors to convey the brutalities they experienced during the colonial period and what they struggle with now to make land claims against a postcolonial state that has its own agendas and forms of violence. The three parts of the book expand on and tease out the historical, social, and discursive contexts that sustain this idiom. The first part examines the historical modes of power that shaped the social, physical, and political landscapes of Kaerezi to the 1990s, in particular the tension between the postcolonial government resettlement policies and the modes of livelihood, land claims, and forms of chiefly rule as the government tried to enforce its disciplinary techniques on a resettlement scheme also claimed by the Tangwena chiefdom. The second part expands Moore’s analysis of the colonial period by providing a richly detailed examination of the individuals, labor, and production dynamics, textual acts, and movements of people that consolidated the categories, boundaries, and contours of rule and resistance in Kaerezi and beyond. The final part carries out a similar analysis of the postcolonial period, engaging analytically with both the sharp and fraying edges of power over people’s lives and livelihoods. In terms of providing a substantive historical and ethnographic rural case study of the contested politics of rule, administration, development, and nationalism, Moore makes a significant contribution to the already impressive number of strong historical and social science monographs on these topics in Zimbabwe and southern Africa. But Suffering for Territory also makes important theoretical advances. Moore has an admirable grasp of historic and current theoretical strands and debates in anthropology, political ecology, cultural geography, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism, and political theory, among others, and his book is in critical dialogue with them all. His anchoring theoretical framework is what he calls “the triad-in-motion of sovereignty, discipline and government,” informed particularly by his reading of Foucault and Gramsci, which he utilizes to great advantage in his historical and ethnographic analyses, demonstrating the important point that to better understand global, national, or regional processes and power relations it is vital to see how they are entangled with the shifting micropolitics of place. He shows the great possibilities for understanding by grounding one’s theoretical preoccupations in localized struggles, which inevitably are also informed by translocal practices. However, Moore’s book is not simply an uncritical promotion of
ethnography as an unproblematic supplement to other approaches to understanding
the colonial and postcolonial state, nationalism, and development in
Africa. Rather, he rigorously shows how analyzing micropractices also
requires attending to the shifting politics of the position of the academic
observer. His theoretical insistence that subjects are not “self-sovereign
agents” as they are shaped by power relations is deployed not only
to criticize populist claims about the Mugabe regime’s land program
but also to examine his own choices in the field and in writing. Suffering
for Territory is an exemplary book that provides many forms of engagement
for the reader – empirical, theoretical, political, and ethical – as
it carefully examines such key themes as sovereignty, colonialism, nationalism,
globalism, development, gender, and conservation through their grounding
in the lives of men, women, and children and the physical landscape of
Kaerezi, Zimbabwe.
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