Crossing the threshold: What is a home without windows or doors?
Abstract
In north-western Tanzania homes prove to be contested spaces, at once highly spatialized and yet unfixed, built on shifting inclusions as well as exclusions. At the borders of Serengeti National Park and neighboring game reserves, where village land, private land concession and ecological buffer zone overlap, remoteness is cultivated by some and renounced by others. Enduring threats of displacement in the name of conservation, private investment or national identification shape possibilities for being at home, for remembering the past and for imagining a future. Symbolic battles over the area as a home for animals or a home for people impact personhood and belonging, passing over or reworking existing ontologies and political possibilities. Yet spatialized characteristics of homesteads and villages continue to underpin kinship dynamics, ritual boundaries, and gendered aspects of political engagement. While cultural, spiritual and livelihood practices tie people to the land and to shared histories, they also demand physical mobility and social pliability that extend far beyond the homestead or the constraints of recent landuse plans. New governance structures and landuse plans are mediated by people as certain villages are tied together under the auspices of wildlife management, while tensions over development, resources, money and symbolic values pervade. Travel between village, town and city is common—whether for reasons of market access, schooling, employment or political participation, or for purposes of ceremonial observances or visiting family and ancestral homes. Within this milieu, workers from nearby tourist lodges and campsites come to the village seeking both connection and escape.
Bio
Celeste Alexander is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Princeton University and a Graduate Fellow of the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (PEI-STEP) as well as Princeton’s Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars (FWWS). Her dissertation draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in north-western Tanzania and continued engagement with ecologists, conservation scientists and policy scholars in the US and Europe. Concerned with competing valuations of nature, personhood and political participation, her work examines the daily arts of living of village residents within a Tanzanian community-based conservation area as well as those of a diverse set of regulatory authorities, development experts, conservation professionals and private investors. Possibilities and limitations surface through uncomfortable interdependencies, revealing both connection and disconnection across power divides and scales, as well as responses to patterned histories and the unanticipated effects of changing regulatory and institutional frameworks.
[email protected]
In north-western Tanzania homes prove to be contested spaces, at once highly spatialized and yet unfixed, built on shifting inclusions as well as exclusions. At the borders of Serengeti National Park and neighboring game reserves, where village land, private land concession and ecological buffer zone overlap, remoteness is cultivated by some and renounced by others. Enduring threats of displacement in the name of conservation, private investment or national identification shape possibilities for being at home, for remembering the past and for imagining a future. Symbolic battles over the area as a home for animals or a home for people impact personhood and belonging, passing over or reworking existing ontologies and political possibilities. Yet spatialized characteristics of homesteads and villages continue to underpin kinship dynamics, ritual boundaries, and gendered aspects of political engagement. While cultural, spiritual and livelihood practices tie people to the land and to shared histories, they also demand physical mobility and social pliability that extend far beyond the homestead or the constraints of recent landuse plans. New governance structures and landuse plans are mediated by people as certain villages are tied together under the auspices of wildlife management, while tensions over development, resources, money and symbolic values pervade. Travel between village, town and city is common—whether for reasons of market access, schooling, employment or political participation, or for purposes of ceremonial observances or visiting family and ancestral homes. Within this milieu, workers from nearby tourist lodges and campsites come to the village seeking both connection and escape.
Bio
Celeste Alexander is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Princeton University and a Graduate Fellow of the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (PEI-STEP) as well as Princeton’s Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars (FWWS). Her dissertation draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in north-western Tanzania and continued engagement with ecologists, conservation scientists and policy scholars in the US and Europe. Concerned with competing valuations of nature, personhood and political participation, her work examines the daily arts of living of village residents within a Tanzanian community-based conservation area as well as those of a diverse set of regulatory authorities, development experts, conservation professionals and private investors. Possibilities and limitations surface through uncomfortable interdependencies, revealing both connection and disconnection across power divides and scales, as well as responses to patterned histories and the unanticipated effects of changing regulatory and institutional frameworks.
[email protected]