The Iraqw of Tanzania: Negotiating Rural Development (review)

Schoolteachers and government officials eat meat and drink bottled beer inside, while other wedding guests sit outside eating maize and beans and drinking home-brewed beer. Old women sing songs of blessing in the Iraqw language, while a church choir presses up against them singing louder and louder to drown them out with Kiswahili hymns. The embarrassed mother of the bride refuses to be fed wedding cake by her new son-in-law, maintaining that this new custom constitutes irange, a violation of taboos between generations.

These scenes from a wedding typify the complexities and contradictions captured in Katherine Snyder's portrait of social change among Iraqw in northern Tanzania. Based on more than a decade of ongoing research in northern Tanzania, this portrait details the ways in which different Iraqw come to terms with wide-ranging issues in their contemporary lives through reference to notions of tradition and modernity. Agro-pastoralists in a relatively secluded highland area of northern Tanzania, Iraqw are widely construed in Tanzania as backward traditionalists. Not surprisingly, Snyder shows that, in contrast to this stereotype, they have not only been active participants in the process of change for more than a century, but that their efforts to do so today are informed by deeply held beliefs about the meanings of development.

The opposition of modernity and tradition forms an orienting theme throughout the book, though Snyder is keen to emphasize that she agrees with scholars who consider this dualism be problematic in describing actual life conditions or institutions. Consequently, her concern with this dichotomy is principally ethnographic, exploring the ways in which Iraqw themselves employ this dualism to negotiate diffuse aspects of their lives, to show how "the imagined categories of 'tradition' and 'modernity' are ways of understanding various actors' views and experiences" (p. 2). Readers should not be misled by the subtitle of the book, which seems to imply that this is an ethnography of the formal development process, in the sense of focusing on the agency of local actors in their encounters with externally organized and driven development projects or structures. Snyder makes explicit early on that such projects are not her primary focus. While some examples are drawn from formal development projects, her primary concern with "development" is in the sense common to Kiswahili-speaking East Africa generally: of maendelo, progress or moving forward, a cultural concept that informs how actors construe a wide range of practices and beliefs—from religion to the foods you eat, the clothes you wear, and the trees you plant—rather than merely economic development per se.

Short and well-written, this book is composed of ten chapters, and is a true ethnography in the classical sense. By this I mean that, although notions of maendeleo form a theme to which Snyder returns in every chapter, the overall structure of the book presents a comprehensive view of Iraqw society and culture. Chapters are devoted to most of the standard domains of anthropological inquiry: identity, community, kinship, gender, economy, religion (all of these informed by their historical formation), and current inflections in the political economy of contemporary Tanzania. Some of these, of course, receive deeper and more nuanced treatment than others. Religion and witchcraft are afforded particularly rich attention, with three full chapters devoted to various aspects of them, and the ways in which they interrelate to other aspects of longstanding and contemporary Iraqw life. "Traditional" religion is emphasized in comparison to Christianity, which about half of Iraqw now identify with, though both are discussed extensively. One area where I feel that there is perhaps a missed opportunity is in regard to intergenerational relations and change. There is considerable discussion of generational issues, but I felt at times that the treatment was more formulaic than Snyder's rich ethnography should allow, opposing the usual characters of modernist school-educated youth and traditionalist elders. Knowing more about what had become of "modern" youth of 1990—have they, for instance, become traditional minded elders...