Partial Stories: Repeat Photography, Narratives and Environmental Change in Tanzania

Abstract

Repeat photography has emerged as a popular tool for visualizing climate change yet has been employed relatively little by visual and environmental anthropologists. Based on research in Tanzania’s South Pare Mountains, this article shows how repeat photography can be a powerful method for environmental anthropologists both practically and epistemologically: repeat photography as a practice integrates well with ethnography, while the contradictions emerging through multimodal research help us reflect on the narratives about environmental change that we encounter and write ourselves. At the same time, detailed ethnography is crucial for understanding the lived experience and wider politico-economic dimensions of landscape change that are not visible through repeat photography alone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Adam Jones and staff at the Archives of the Leipzig Lutheran Mission archives for their help with the early missionary photographs, and all my informants in the Pare Mountains. Thank you to Rebecca Prentice, Chris Wright and Flora Bartlett for constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to Paul Hockings for excellent editorial help.

Notes

1 Extract from fieldnotes, Vudee, 12 August 2008.

2 https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/stories/startling-before-and-after-images-melting-glaciers-tell-story-climate-change, accessed on 17 October 2018.

3 http://repeatphotography.org/biblio/, accessed on 16 October 2018.

4 https://anthrodendum.org/2018/08/02/repeat-photography-coastal-change-notes-research-method/, accessed on 5 November 2018.

5 http://savageminds.org/2015/09/05/anthropologies-21-is-there-hope-for-an-anthropocene-anthropology/

6 HEEAL was funded by a Marie-Curie Excellence grant (MEXT-CT-2006-042704).

7 These USC digital archives can be found at http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/

8 Here and throughout the article, in accordance with the wishes of those I worked with and interviewed, I am using real names. To preserve some degree of anonymity, however, I am using first names only.

9 Rainfall in the South Pare Mountains as a whole is less than on the North Pare Mountains, averaging around 1000 mm per year on the wetter eastern, and 750 mm on the drier western slopes.

10 All quotations in this article are not verbatim but are extracts from full, written-out English notes of interviews, based on comprehensive notes taken during interviews conducted in Kiswahili, with or without translators.

11 This vision of “forests everywhere” and rich forest fauna is squarely at odds with early 20th-century photographs and historical landscape descriptions by travelers such as Baumann (1891).

12 In Chome, for example, large parts of old irrigation systems are still in use today, but there are also remnants of old terracing and irrigation channels that have long been abandoned.

13 TNA, 19/6/1, Annual Report of the Pare District 1953.

14 The last figure is based on the 2012 Tanzania Population Census, http://www.citypopulation.de/php/tanzania-northern-admin.php?adm1id=0303. This lists all the wards in Same District, including the lowland ones, and gives the total for the whole district. To obtain the figures for the South Pare Mountains alone I added up all the individual wards on the mountain; the 1948 figure is in TNA, 19/3/6, Africa Census 1948.

Additional information

Funding

This research was done under the umbrella of the Historical Ecologies of East African Landscapes (HEEAL) project at the University of York, and funded by a European Union Marie Curie grant (MEXT-CT-2006-042704) awarded to Paul Lane.

Notes on contributors

Pauline von Hellermann

PAULINE VON HELLERMANN is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her speciality is environmental anthropology. Her doctoral research at SOAS and Sussex University evaluated the causes of deforestation in Nigeria. She then researched resource politics and conflict in Nigeria and, using repeat photography, landscape change, memory and narratives in the Pare Mountains in Tanzania. In 2018 she began research on the environmental anthropology of palm oil. Her publications include Things Fall Apart? The Political Ecology of Forest Governance in Southern Nigeria (Berghahn 2013) and Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (with Simon Coleman; Routledge 2011). E-mail: [email protected]