A view from mid-Zambezia

Illustrissimos e sapientissimos Senhores (ou Camaradas) colegas!

Barendse, as always, introduces a welcome grain of salt into the discussion
(or, to use the Russian idiom, pours a bucket of cool water).

Primo, on "Orientalizing" ‹ true, a very common trap of learned minds in
relating any manifestation of social life to a cultural meta-text (itself a
product of learned and less than learned generalizations). But there are
instances of amazing continuities or commonalities over centuries, in which
case we have to account for the transmission mechanism and the likely
mutations along the road. Ignorance of historical transmission is
Orientalization, the opposite operation perhaps is social science.

Secundo, my specific observation of someone who has spent the earlier life
somewhere in Mozambique's hinterland trying to wonder about Kiteve and
Muenemutapa (if even as a form of escaping from the traumatic daily
realities of the strange war). The attitudes of contemporary Mozambicans,
Malawians, or Zimbabweans towards nature and ecology were astonishing even
from the standpoint of Soviet military advisors who shouldn't be presumed
devote environmentalists themselves. Animals were treated as either pests
or source of meat or convenient targets for practicing the newly-available
guns. Even domestic animals were treated in a cruelly utilitarian fashion ‹
my suggestions to feed the dogs or goats would seem ludicrous to my
companions or villagers. Everyone knows, would be the response, that
animals find their own food. When they cannot they die -- as in fact did
almost all cattle during the drought of the early eighties. There were
several exceptions, however, such as a certain Francisco Gouveia, former
Portuguese corporal and remote descendant of a prominent warlord family
(owners of a pre-colonial Parzo da coroa) in upper Zambezia. This "kulak"
fed his cows with the reeds from the shores of Zambeze which he arduosly
chopped with catana every day in order to make the reeds chewable. In the
result his was the only cattle herd left around the town of Tete by 1984.
The "mestico" Gouveia treated his compatriots with undisguised disdain --
despite an obvious example of simple feeding techniques, his neighbors
would consider their cows dying from hunger not just a sign of fate but the
cows' own fault.
I can tell numerous stories of Mozambicans (to be specific, or those
Africans found in Manica and Tete in 1983-1984 when they were considered
citizens of Mozambique) -- both men and women, village and urban, educated
and "illitertate" ‹ illustrating a very clear cultural distinction made
between the space of humans (more specifically, the humans belonging to a
community) and nature considered extraneous space, useful only insofar it
can provide resources totally gratis. (A soldier killing an hippo with his
AK-47 or a village woman cutting firewood further and further away from her
village, or dumping garbage in huge piles just outside the water source on
the village's end, or boys catching birds with glue or a peasant burning a
huge track of land to open his small "mashamba" were all alike in this
attitude).

Furthermore, the Mozambicans whom I knew had puzzlingly little interest in
knowing anything about local nature. Consider this: most European languages
are taken for granted in assigning elaborate systems of names to animal and
plant species. There are sparrows and crows, various wrens and jays,
larches and oaks, trouts and pikes in English alone. My questions about the
local names of African species almost invariably ended in amusing my
informants. "What? The name of that bird? No, I don't know. No, neither in
Portuguese nor in Nyungwe.  Perhaps, witch doctors know, they collect them.
If I want to describe it to my friend? What for? All right, I would say "a
big blue bird".
If there were any spefic animal names they were reserved to either very
conspicuous beasts (elefant, hyena, monkey -- all monkeys without
distinction except for the dreaded baboons that rob the fields).
Fish from Zambeze, however, was an exception ‹ specific names existed
locally for a apparently a long time (mkupe, cheni) obviously because fish
was major staple for centuries despite the waves of migrations. Wild
animals or plants weren't.

A hint was provided by a Russian geologist who spent his life in Siberia.
He once told me that Africa, contrary to all his exotic expectations,
turned out to be a very harsh landscape. He claimed that he would easily
survive in a Siberian forest with just a knife and a box of matches for
months. There are berries and mushrooms and lots of eadible plants and easy
to catch animals plus sources of drinking water  --- all that is mostly
absent in African bush.

I suddenly encountered a similar attitude among the Americans (not native,
but just US Americans).  Collecting mashrooms is a preferred Russian
pasttime. In a forest somewhere in upstate New York around Binghamton one
could here the loud voices of some Slavs (Russians, Poles, sometimes
Rumanians) who were collecting delicacies to go excellently with a shot of
vodka -- or encouter the polite and serious American intellectuals
practicing mashrooming as near spiritual experience.  But you will never
encouter American proletarians -- these guys hunt deer all right but no
nonsense with mushrooms. My fellow East Europeans had the names of
mushrooms in their native tongues and, curiously, although the Slavic
languages separated over a thousand years ago, the mushrooming vocabulary
coincided almost perfectly (I tried Lithuanian recently, a Baltic language
even more remote from the Slavic group, with the same result). The American
maushroomers used arcane Latin namaes for their fungi. To the  vast
majority of upstate New Yorkers (among whom majority, curiously, were many
americanized Slavs) the whole enterprise of mashrooming was strange and
frightening --  THOSE ARE INDIAN MUSHROOMS! GOTTA BE POISONOUS.

To summarize,  I think that everything said above tends to support Tom
Hall's understanding of the ways natural environment becomes socialized and
enters the loops of human economy and culture, perhaps with a lag of
several generations. The re-emerging political mythologies  about the noble
and lesser noble savages also seem to be quite clear in origins and
position within the field of intellectual production.

Still, I am puzzled why most Europeans have the specific names for the
useless sparrows and herons. Hausa has about 250  terms for the shades of
green dye, but that's a major historical activity in West Africa near
monopolized by the Hausa artisans. Eskimos have no generic word for "snow"
distinguishing dozens of different kinds of snow. But why distinguish
egrets and herons, loons and ducks, and all the rest of audubonian hobby?

Respeitosamente submetido por
Gueorgui Derluguian

Georgi M. Derluguian
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
(847) 491-2741 (rabota)