socially informed, politically participatory,
and morally legitimate version of CBNRM
could be constructed by identifying and
anticipating the contradictions, conflicts, and
ambiguities that exist in all communities.Anthropology has been promoting the cul-
ture concept as a way to make sense of
human difference for over a century, and it
has been moderately successful at pushing
both scientific understanding and public poli-
cy away from the racism that characterised
19 thcentury analyses. This classical
approach to culture was that it was homo-
geneous, collective, cohesive, intrinsic, geo-
graphically bounded, and an essential trait
of a community. This was a useful approach
in the late 19thand early 20thcenturies, but
such a definition is clearly obsolete in a rap-
idly globalizing world. Many anthropologists
are therefore redefining the discipline’s key-
word as a heterogeneous, contested, open-
ended, flexible, and power-driven economic,
political, and ideological process.^25
Conservation practitioners can benefit from
this academic reorientation by using the
concepts of contestation and ambiguity in
the economic, socio-political, and ideologi-
cal-moral domains of ‘culture’ to redefine
their own keywords of ‘community,’ ‘develop-
ment,’ and ‘management.’Notes(^1) Esman and Uphoff, 1984; Ostrom, 1990.
(^2) Western et al., 1994.
(^3) Brosius et al., 1998.
(^4) Little, 1994; Peters, 1996.
(^5) This article is based on one year of ethnographic research
in 1997 – 1998 for my dissertation at Boston University
(Sheridan, 2001), with support from the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright Programme. Two months of follow-up research
in June and July 2004 allowed me to corroborate my
conclusions with North Pare farmers and former develop-
ment agency staff. I thank the people of North Pare and
the staff of the TFAP-North Pare project for their open-
ness and generosity.
(^6) This degradation crisis is a system of assumptions that is
not supported by archival and oral historical evidence.
See Gillson, Sheridan and Brockington, 2003.
(^7) The Traditional Irrigation Improvement Programme
(TIP), funded by the Dutch agency SNV, is also active in
the North Pare highlands on SWC issues (Sheridan,
2002). For the sake of brevity, however, I have limited
my discussion in this article to TFAP activities.
(^8) Masuki and Bakuti, 1994.
(^9) Glückert, 1994. Many areas show direct evidence of
severe erosion. Vegetation that once stabilised riverbeds
is now gone, and the water flows over boulders and
bedrock. Nearly all ridgelines completely lack layers of
humus and topsoil, and these layers’ gravel remains atop
an exposed layer of subsoil. In the most severely eroded
areas, eucalyptus grows without any soil at all because it
can drill its roots into the crumbling gneiss that remains.
(^10) Bench terraces require farmers to convert a sloping plot
into a series of step-like strips of land. The wall of each
terrace is stabilised with a strip of a fast-growing grass
which also provides fodder for livestock. To make fanya
juuterraces, farmers dig a shallow trench perpendicular
to the fall line of the hillside and throw the soil on the
uphill side of the trenches to form ridges. After several
years, rain washes the soil from the back of the terraces
to the grass-covered ridges, and the terraces level them-
selves as long as the farmer maintains the trenches’
uphill walls.
(^11) Humann-Bellin, 1996: 35.
(^12) Other administration officials were less subtle. Many
farmers told me that they had attended meetings in
which officials threatened to take away their land if they
refused to build terraces (and reallocate it to someone
who would).
(^13) Sheridan 2004.
(^14) TFAP, 1993.
(^15) There was a similar situation in the Usambara Mountains
of Tanzania in the 1950s (Feierman, 1990: 181). The
colonial government’s demand for terraces under the
Usambara Scheme led to widespread protest, passive
resistance, and anticolonial activism. Usambara farmers
opposed soil and water conservation because terrace-
building threatened to deny land to the poor and ulti-
mately create a landless class. Much like the scenario in
contemporary North Pare, women feared that building
terraces amounted to giving land to men for cash crop
production.
(^16) Glückert, 1994: 9.
(^17) One researcher, Zainab Semgalawe, has identified the
social and economic variables that encourage North Pare
farmers to adopt soil and water conservation techniques
(Semgalawe, 1998). She argues that the area’s labor
shortage has a negligible effect on the adoption of SWC
techniques, and that the major determinants are the
head of household’s education level and participation in
development activities. Most of my informants, however,
History, cculture aand cconservation
Michael J. Sheridan
([email protected]) is Assistant
Professor in Anthropology at the University of
Vermont in Burlington. He worked as a Peace
Corps Volunteer in Kenya in 1988-1990, and
received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Boston
University in 2001. His research on the material
and symbolic aspects of African land manage-
ment focuses on the colonial and postcolonial
management of sacred forests and indigenous
irrigation systems.