Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1 890-1990

by Henrietta L. Moore, Megan Vaughn

Cutting Down Trees is about local responses to global processes of change. This major study traces detailed changes in the agricultural system of Zambia's Northern Province over a period of 100 years. The authors assess the ecological, social, and political changes affecting the region, and relate current development initiatives to long-run interventions. Drawing on their extensive research experience, Moore and Vaughan have produced a detailed examination of the changing nature of gender relations, household production, and nutrition.

278 pages, Paperback

First published December 27, 1993

About the author

Henrietta L. Moore is a British social anthropologist. She is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Culture and Communications Programme at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics (LSE). Previously Moore was a Governor of the LSE; LSE Deputy Director for research and external relations 2002-2005, and served as the Director of the Gender Institute at the LSE from 1994-1999.

Reviews

[Mwanafunzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an innovative book by two excellent scholars. Moore and Vaughan essentially appraise Audrey Richards’s 1939 study of land, labor, and diet among Bemba groups in what is now Zambia. Richards and colonial employees understood the Bemba practice of citimene as a form of shifting cultivation, the chief feature of which was the felling and burning of trees to render ashy soil. Colonialists believed that this was a wasteful ecological practice, but in reality it was one practice among many that Bemba employed in agricultural management. The repertoire of cultivation techniques that Bemba and others practised long before European intrusion was particularly well suited to their regional conditions. Richards also misjudged the gendered aspects of citimene. Whereas Richards asserted that migratory male labor had sapped citimene of its normal practitioners, Moore and Vaughan show that women were as effective as men in carrying out the felling and burning. The authors persuasively argue that a binary opposition between “traditional” and “modern” socio-economic activities does not hold weight. Women’s investments in kinship relations and subsistence patterns were not fundamentally at odds with the appearance of cash and wage labor in Zambia. As had been the norm before colonialism, Bemba men and women adapted to changing ecological and economic conditions.