Tea stories : cultivating indigeneity in South Africa's Western Cape
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The story of South African rooibos tea unfolds in the margins. Punctuated with rumors of public fights, political corruption, and corporate greed, it is a story about globalization and isolation, neoliberal economic reforms and post-apartheid politics. It is about 'whiteness' and 'colouredness, ' migrants and indigeneity. Finally, it is story of economic marginality and of the ways these tensions were negotiated and experienced in a rural South African community. Yet, significantly, it is also a story about the crop itself, an indigenous plant with particular qualities that make it valuable and intensely political. Based on more than fourteen months of ethnographic research in South Africa's rooibos-growing area between 2009 and 2013, this dissertation explores the social, political, and ecological relations in the farming of rooibos tea. In this project, I engage debates on race, indigeneity, and natural resources in the context of a commodity that is celebrated for its ecological indigeneity and of people who do not fit easily into the category of culturally indigenous: Afrikaners who espouse a white African indigeneity and 'coloured' people, a South African racial category often considered mixed or impure and denied nativity to anywhere. I argue that farmers came to understand rooibos differently as its economic value rose. Formerly viewed as just a wild shrub, rooibos became a culturally significant product through which local residents measured their sense of indigeneity and, more broadly, their claim to belonging in South Africa. At stake in this context was not the conventional scholarly concept of indigeneity as a binary relationship between people and place. Instead, rooibos farmers expressed a more fluid idea of indigeneity based on a triadic relationship between plant, place, and farmer. With the majority of land still in white South Africans' hands and more than a quarter of the population without work, indigenous claims have taken on growing importance as political rallying points and means of economic survival. At the same time, my research examines the ways that connections between race and natural resources have legitimized political, social, and economic hierarchies. Through what I call a 'critical natural history, ' I show how the rooibos landscape is fraught with political and social tensions: it embodies both violent racial histories of dispossession and celebratory narratives of belonging to a beloved ecosystem.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Ives, Sarah Fleming |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
| Primary advisor | Ferguson, James |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Thesis advisor | Meskell, Lynn |
| Advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Advisor | Meskell, Lynn |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sarah Fleming Ives. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2014 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Sarah Fleming Ives
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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