<i>Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe</i> by Donald Moore

Moore, Donald , Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe . Durham , NC : Duke University Press , 2005 . ISBN 0-8223-3582-4 ( cloth ), ISBN 0-8223-3570-0 ( paperback ). Donald Moore is an anthropologist based at Berkeley whose previous work is known to many geographers. One of his first published pieces appeared in Economic Geography during the early 1990s, while a similar study graced the pages of the now-classic volume Liberation Ecologies (Peet and Watts 1996) when the first edition appeared over a decade ago. Around this time Donald Moore suffered serious injuries in a car accident—injuries that have badly affected his physical mobility ever since. Happily, though, his powers of thought and expression survived the accident unscathed. Years in-the-making, Suffering for Territory is clearly the work of a fine mind. Rendered in often artful prose, this rich and rewarding book will, I hope, gain its author plaudits in both geography and his own disciplinary community. What's more, I hope this monograph is read widely outside the US, where Moore's work is currently best-known. Before explaining why I think this is such a good book, let me summarise its aims and focus. Suffering for Territory is a theoretically informed (and informative) ethnography. The territory in question is the Kaerezi Resettlement Scheme (KRS) in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands. This scheme was established after British southern Rhodesia became the nominally postcolonial, independent state of Zimbabwe in 1980. It made available—under certain terms and conditions—land that, during the colonial period, had been the white-owned Gaeresi Ranch. But Moore's story is no simple one of black smallholders' triumphant return to land they were previously displaced or excluded from by racialised property laws. Instead, he draws upon over two years of field research to narrate a complex tale about the making and remaking of this particular patch of territory. I quote Moore at length: “the [KRS]… overlay a chiefdom and rainmaking territory where several sovereigns asserted rule … State officials, a postcolonial chief, his headman, and a rainmaker all sought to influence resettlement. These competing practices of spatial discipline, sovereignty and subjection all coexisted at the same time in the same postcolonial place. Kaerezi's multiple and simultaneous spatialities conjured heterogenous histories. [Its]… landscape of rule was not the result of a serial succession of new rationalities and administrative designations [erasing]… previous power relations. Rather, previous sedimentations remained consequential even as they became reworked” (p 3). Moore focuses on how Kaerizians staked claims to territory during the 1990s. But in doing so he necessarily delves into the several histories not only of Kaerezi but of Zimbabwe as a whole, especially pre-independence. In nine consistently interesting chapters, prefaced by a long introduction, Moore depicts “an entangled landscape, in which multiple spatialities, temporalities, and power relations combine” (p 3). A major theme throughout is how “race” and ethnicity—contingent and mutable constructions both—become woven into various claims to inhabit Kaerezi in particular ways, over-against the diktats of present-day actors as much as prior colonial overlords. Even in “postcolonial” Zimbabwe, “race” casts a very long shadow indeed—as the recent travails of white farmers in that country demonstrate so graphically. I have already said that this is a theoretically informed and informative study. Yet only the introduction is given over to a discussion of Moore's major sources of intellectual inspiration, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci (Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Henri Lefebvre, and Deleuze and Guattari also receive a more-than-honourable mention). The bulk of the book comprises a detailed account of how various groups have justified and asserted (not always successfully) a claim to inhabit Kaerezi in specific ways. Does this make Suffering for Territory an “empirical” text by default? Certainly, Moore is a typical anthropologist in that he respects the intricacies and textures of life in Kaerezi above all else. In this sense, his approach to “theory” recollects Clifford Geertz (1973:24) when he observed that “Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; the longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, bemusements with formal symmetry”. Here I think many present-day human geographers have something to learn, especially those in or just out of graduate school. For it is not that Moore subordinates theory to empirics. Rather, he understands the particular insights that field research yields rather as Canadian geographer Geoff Mann (2007) does in his new book Our Daily Bread. “The specifics matter enormously, …”, Mann argues of his empirically particular study, “but in the way that the specifics always matter” (p 19). What he means is that it is entirely wrong-headed to think of “theory” as something that represents “general” processes whose realization is an “empirical” question. Instead, the empirics in all their complexity and spatio-temporal variability are ultimately all there is, and all that matters. Theory, therefore, exists strictly to illuminate our understanding of peoples, places and situations that are more than “examples” or “variations” of some process or phenomena imagined through “long flights of ratiocination”. As Moore says in defense of his own intensely empirical book, “I insist that micropractices matter” (p 2)—a claim that echoes Tim Mitchell's (2001) sentiments in Rule of Experts. This said, Moore cannot resist the academic convention of positioning his study relative to previous and existing theoretical contributions. His interest, after Foucault, is in governmentality which, “by displacing power from the structural dictates of state and capital … offers a useful means to explore how Kaerezian subjects participate in the projects of their own rule” (p 6). But this is a critical appropriation of the French geneaologist, in two senses. First, Moore envisages governmentality not as a sequential overlaying of coherent regimes of rule onto malleable spaces. Instead, the real world consists of coexisting, interfering and complementary regimes, such that Kaerezi, for Moore, is a multiple time–space not a territory legible if one just had the correct set of interpretive lenses. What is clever about this otherwise simple move is that it provides one way of dealing with the classic social science conundrum of “structure versus agency”. Moore argues that “structures” rarely determine because they never operate alone, while agency undubitably exists (without ever being sui generis) precisely because the regimes of rule it variously consents to and contests together generate contradictions and tensions that register in human consciousness. Second, Moore sees governmentality as internal (though not reducible) to projects of political economic domination and resistance. The rather crass idea that Marx and Foucault were talking past each other is challenged. Moore sees human reality as a complex and often fractured whole, not (à la Weber or Parsons) a set of relatively autonomous subsystems that require discrete modes of analysis. The whole question of land in Kaerezi—who “owns” it, who has rights of use, who “originally” occupied it, indeed what sort of land it “properly” is—is, Moore argues, assuredly about venerable Marxian questions of property, “original accumulation” and dispossession. But the manner in which land was redistributed and worked in the past and is being redistributed and worked today is, he shows, a process of governmentality very much “internal” to political economic practices, ones heavily inflected by racialised attitudes and habits. The glue that binds Foucault to political economic questions is provided by Gramsci, Moore's second major source. After Gramsci, Moore takes seriously the violence of original accumulation and its legacies but seeks to avoid class reductionism by recalling that civil society is always a rich brew of beliefs, aspirations and grievances. Like Gramsci, Moore also insists that “interests” are discursively constructed: they do not pre-exist their discursive articulation. Finally, like Gramsci, Moore sees “culture” as a vital terrain upon which political economic struggles are fought out and an arena that is always “more than capitalist” in its politics. The book's three major parts seek to make good on Moore's theoretical ambitions. They are organized non-sequentially, working back and forth over the territory that is Kaerezi, precisely to make plain its discursive and material multiplicity. This working over involves, necessarily, some rich discussions of the national scene, pre and post independence. Place, as Doreen Massey persistently argues, is comprised as much by its geographic “exteriors” as in its local “interiors”. Chapter 1 begins with the KRS as a project of rule. Chapter 2 looks at the colonial precursors of all this, which rationalized the landscape and in so doing rendered other landscape patterns beyond the pale. Chapter 3 then looks at how Kaerezian smallholders operate in their fractal landscape. Part II deals with the colonial era and all it produced: racialized dispossession and new labour relations (Chapter 4); the harnessing of the chiefdom and the anchoring of ethnicity in fixed territory (Chapter 5); and employment conflicts on Gaeresi Ranch (Chapter 6). In Part III, Moore returns to the near-present and focuses on the clashes and alignments ongoing in Kaerezi, only some of which constitute “effective articulations” (p 32). A brief epilogue then wraps things up. Who, in geography, might profitably read this text? Third World political ecologists of a post-Marxist stripe might find it conceptually rewarding, even if the empirical detail is such that only Zimbabwean specialists will not be put off. Those interested in the uses of memory in contemporary disputes over place and landscape may also find this book to be a rich resource. Foucauldians and Gramscians in geography may be curious to see how successfully Moore's conceptual marriage actually is—something that can, however, only be fathomed by mastering the empirical chapters. Finally, any geographer interested in places in their own right (rather than as mere “case studies” illustrative of something else) will appreciate Moore's de-essentialisation of Kaerezi—his insistence that this place, like all places, is wrought out of multiple rememberings, practices and struggles that do not make a coherent whole. Yet Suffering for Territory is not a fault-free read. For me—and I fully recognize that this could reflect my own inadequate reading capabilities—it was difficult to relate the nine main chapters. Maybe that is Moore's point: Kaerezi is a fractal landscape and so one should not read his text in the conventional way, looking for pattern and (even complex) order. On the theoretical front, I found the introductory chapter rather overwrought. By page 32, one too many italicized neologisms had passed before my eyes and, again, I could not see the organic connections. The key terms include the already mentioned “entangled landscape, but also “fields of action”, “sovereignty-discipline-government” (from Foucault), and “articulated assemblages” (a term I admittedly like). Given my own commitments to Marxist political economy, I also worried that several of these terms were purely descriptive and I was looking for concepts with more explanatory heft. But, once more, this may reflect my different sense of what “theory” can do “before” it reckons with the empirics that are ultimately the test of its utility. Finally, the use of two major geographical terms throughout the book—namely, landscape and place—recalled for me a lot of large, interesting debates which Moore mostly passes over. These debates have been enormously rich in geography, but have some pedigree in Moore's own subject area too. I wonder that, if anything, Moore's book lost by not engaging more fulsomely with work by the likes of Doreen Massey, Tim Cresswell, or Nick Blomley—though the sadly deceased Allan Pred is warmly acknowledged by Moore early in the book. One final observation. The monograph is well produced by Duke University Press, with that publisher's now trademark use of good paper, attractive and readable font, and—at the author's behest—many plates and two decent maps. The paperback is affordable as a personal purchase, and a snip as a library purchase. Southern Africanists will doubtless want to read this book. Whether others do depends upon a certain fortitude: the “take-home” lessons laid out in Chapter 1 mean little of substance unless readers are willing to plough long furrows through the book's three parts. Anthropologists are still accustomed to reading others' “thick descriptions” of people and place. It is to be hoped that many geographers, too, will find Moore's study worth the investment. If not, I doubt that even a close reading of the opening “theoretical” chapter will offer readers much of substance. This is not a book that one can dip into.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.