Contesting Terrain in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands: Political Ecology, Ethnography, and Peasant Resource Struggles

Abstract

In this paper, I rethink some of the conceptual tools of “political ecology” through an analysis of environmental resource conflicts in a state-administered resettlement scheme bordering Nyanga National Park in eastern Zimbabwe. Since 1987, state administrators and peasants have clashed over the expansion of the park's estate and a proposed protected river corridor running through the scheme. An ethnographic approach to peasant micropolitics emphasizes differences among state functionaries and peasants, whose relationships to the local landscape have been shaped by historical transformations in the regional political economy. Gender, in particular, mediates not only productive inequalities and access to resources but also the cultural construction of environmental resources. The analysis alternates between an “event history” and peasant historical consciousness—the construction of the remembered past in the present—arguing for the integration of political economy and cultural interpretation. This perspective emphasizes the simultaneity of symbolic and material struggles over resources, critically engaging a macrostructural bias manifest in many “political ecology” analyses of Third World resource conflicts.

Key Words:

• peasants
• political ecology
• culture
• gender
• ethnography
• landscape
• environmental resource struggles