Pauline E Peters
Biographic Data
| ID | 86168 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pauline E Peters |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pauline E |
| FAMILY NAME | Peters |
| SIGNATURE | PETERS P E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 748 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Jane Isabel Guyer (1943-2024)
Embedded Systems and Rooted Models: The Grazing Lands of Botswana and the Commons Debate
Revisiting the Social Bedrock of Kinship and Descent in the Anthropology of Africa
Analysing Land Law Reform
Conflicts over land and threats to customary tenure in Africa
Journal Article Conflicts over land and threats to customary tenure in Africa Get access Pauline E. Peters Pauline E. Peters * *Pauline Peters ([email protected]) retired from Harvard's teaching faculty and is now Faculty Fellow, CID, Harvard University. My thanks go to the following: a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2011 with Ben Cousins, Bridget O'Laughlin, Henry Bernstein and Jim Ferguson; encour…
Introduction: Agrarian Change, Rural Poverty and Land Reform in South Africa since 1994
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of agrarian futures in Africa
The debate about 'land grabs' by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents. Much of the appropriated land is under forms of 'customary' tenure. In arguing that a fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of 'customary' tenure as not equivalent to property rights, the docume…
Contesting Land and Custom in Ghana. State, Chief and the Citizen – Edited by Janine M. Ubink and Kojo S. Amanor
Our daughters inherit our land, but our sons use their wives' fields: Matrilineal-matrilocal land tenure and the New Land Policy in Malawi
Renewed efforts in recent years to reform land tenure policy in Sub-Saharan African countries have – in some cases – included provisions aimed at improving women's land rights. The premise of such provisions is that women's land rights under customary tenure are fragile, threatened, and/or in the process of being undermined. The matrilineal-matrilocal areas in Southern Malawi described here present a counter case. Only daughters are the heirs of …
Contestations Over "Tradition" and "Culture" in a Time of Aids
In Malawi, the distress and unease caused by rising numbers of deaths and chronic illness due to HIV infection have led people to search for explanations. Here, we describe two particular "turns to culture." Zomba villagers over two decades have come to link AIDS with kanyera, an indigenous illness syndrome. In contrast, the public media, government, and donors blame "promiscuity" and "cultural practices" for HIV infection. The resulting stigmati…
Gaining Ground? ‘Rights’ and ‘Property’ in South African Land Reform by Deborah James
Challenges in Land Tenure and Land Reform in Africa: Anthropological Contributions
Conflicts over Land and Water in Africa ‐ Edited by Bill Derman, Rie Odgaard and Espen Sjaastad
Suffering for Territory: Race, Place and Power in Zimbabwe, by Donald S. Moore
Striving for normality in a time of Aids in Malawi
Drawing on a twenty-year study, we examine the effects of HIV-related illness and death on villagers in Malawi during 2006. Contrary to unidimensional images of an AIDS disaster, we found people striving for normality - trying to control the abnormal circumstances of the rising toll of HIV-related illness and death. Just over 40% of the sample households had experienced at least one death (certainly or probably) related to HIV, but only about 10%…
Whose security? Deepening social conflict over 'customary' land in the shadow of land tenure reform in Malawi
Malawi, like other countries in Africa, has a new land policy designed to clarify and formalise customary tenure. The country is poor with a high population density, highly dependent on agriculture, and the research sites are matrilineal-matrilocal, and near urban centres. But the case raises issues relevant to land tenure reform elsewhere: the role of 'traditional authorities' or chiefsvis-à-visthe state and 'community'; variability in types of …
Temporal Heterogeneity in the Study of African Land Use: Interdisciplinary Collaboration between Anthropology, Human Geography and Remote Sensing
Making Sense in Time: Remote Sensing and the Challenges of Temporal Heterogeneity in Social Analysis of Environmental Change-cases from Malawi
Changing Properties of Property
Rural income and poverty in a time of radical change in Malawi
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa. There is widespread, though not universal, agreement about the shape of poverty in the country and the policy challenge this sets. Agriculture continues to be the most obvious means to stimulate broad-based rural growth and to provide levels of food security and income needed for the majority rural population. A longitudinal study over a decade during which radical policy and political changes occ…
Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites
Fragmented Worlds, Coherent Lives: The Politics of Difference in Botswana
Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa
The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts a…
Communities at the Margin: Studies in Rural Society and Migration in Southern Africa, 1890-1980
The practice of social history is particularly advanced by the publication of collective volumes each consisting of fairly diverse studies. An outstanding feature of these publications is the comprehensive introductions in which historiographical, theoretical and comparative frameworks are provided. Communities at the margin: Studies in rural society and migration in southern Africa, 1890-1980 forms part of this valuable body of work. The authors…
Bewitching Land: The Role of Land Disputes in Converting Kin to Strangers and in Class Formation in Malawi
Multiple quarrels within and between families in rural southern Malawi mediate an invisible, subterranean process of social differentiation and class formation - a 'hidden history'. The paper argues that conflict over land underlies most of the disputes, is central to the division of matrilineal families and, in turn, to the process of social differentiation and class formation. The disputes have the effect of turning family members into 'strange…
Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa
The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts a…
Challenges in Land Tenure and Land Reform in Africa: Anthropological Contributions
Household food security and child nutrition: The interaction of income and gender of household head
Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of agrarian futures in Africa
The debate about 'land grabs' by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents. Much of the appropriated land is under forms of 'customary' tenure. In arguing that a fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of 'customary' tenure as not equivalent to property rights, the docume…
Against the Odds: Matriliny, land and gender in the Shire Highlands of Malawi
■ The people of the Shire Highlands in southern Malawi (with origins in Nyanja, Mang'anja, Yao, and Lomwe-speaking groups) practise a form of matriliny, including matrilineal descent and inheritance and uxorilocal mar riage, that has proven remarkably resilient in the face of direct and indirect chal lenges. These include misperceptions and prejudices about matriliny by Christian missions and European travellers; the promotion of a patriarchal nu…
Our daughters inherit our land, but our sons use their wives' fields: Matrilineal-matrilocal land tenure and the New Land Policy in Malawi
Renewed efforts in recent years to reform land tenure policy in Sub-Saharan African countries have – in some cases – included provisions aimed at improving women's land rights. The premise of such provisions is that women's land rights under customary tenure are fragile, threatened, and/or in the process of being undermined. The matrilineal-matrilocal areas in Southern Malawi described here present a counter case. Only daughters are the heirs of …
Struggles over water, Struggles over meaning: Cattle, water and the state in Botswana
IntroductionIn a recent paper on 'The state and social processes in Africa', Lonsdale (1981) convincingly demonstrates the poverty of assuming that any one 'grand theory' is able to explain the complex relations among state, social process and class struggle and other equally complex social phenomena. Images of the state as parasitic (as in formulations of the 'Asiatic mode of production'), as an epiphenomenon of property relations or as a neutra…
Whose security? Deepening social conflict over 'customary' land in the shadow of land tenure reform in Malawi
Malawi, like other countries in Africa, has a new land policy designed to clarify and formalise customary tenure. The country is poor with a high population density, highly dependent on agriculture, and the research sites are matrilineal-matrilocal, and near urban centres. But the case raises issues relevant to land tenure reform elsewhere: the role of 'traditional authorities' or chiefsvis-à-visthe state and 'community'; variability in types of …
Conflicts over land and threats to customary tenure in Africa
Journal Article Conflicts over land and threats to customary tenure in Africa Get access Pauline E. Peters Pauline E. Peters * *Pauline Peters ([email protected]) retired from Harvard's teaching faculty and is now Faculty Fellow, CID, Harvard University. My thanks go to the following: a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2011 with Ben Cousins, Bridget O'Laughlin, Henry Bernstein and Jim Ferguson; encour…
Maps, Metaphors, and Meanings: Boundary Struggles and Village Forest Use on Private and State Land in Malawi
Recent studies have examined social and cultural perceptions of spatial relationships, with particular attention to contests over boundaries.'Counter-mapping' offers a technique to defend local rights in these contests.However, this approach may inadequately represent certain complex socio-spatial ideas.Specifically, whereas recent studies emphasize contests over the legitimacy or location of boundaries, the case studies from Malawi in this paper…
Dividing the commons: Politics, policy, and culture in Botswana
Introduction: Agrarian Change, Rural Poverty and Land Reform in South Africa since 1994
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
Bewitching Land: The Role of Land Disputes in Converting Kin to Strangers and in Class Formation in Malawi
Multiple quarrels within and between families in rural southern Malawi mediate an invisible, subterranean process of social differentiation and class formation - a 'hidden history'. The paper argues that conflict over land underlies most of the disputes, is central to the division of matrilineal families and, in turn, to the process of social differentiation and class formation. The disputes have the effect of turning family members into 'strange…
Gender, developmental cycles and historical process: A critique of recent research on women in Botswana
The dominant focus in the present literature on women in Botswana is on femaleheaded households and their relative disadvantage in a migrant labour economy. Schapera in the 1930s had noted that the femme sole had 'emerged' but that there was 'as yet no place for her in the legal system, or in the political life of the community'. I Today, women can apply for residential and arable plots in their own names and can speak for themselves in the custo…
Temporal Heterogeneity in the Study of African Land Use: Interdisciplinary Collaboration between Anthropology, Human Geography and Remote Sensing
Striving for normality in a time of Aids in Malawi
Drawing on a twenty-year study, we examine the effects of HIV-related illness and death on villagers in Malawi during 2006. Contrary to unidimensional images of an AIDS disaster, we found people striving for normality - trying to control the abnormal circumstances of the rising toll of HIV-related illness and death. Just over 40% of the sample households had experienced at least one death (certainly or probably) related to HIV, but only about 10%…
Manoeuvres and debates in the interpretation of land rights in Botswana
This article seeks to show how transformation in both practices and concepts are involved in the changing patterns of rights to and use of grazing land in Botswana over the past five decades. 'The symbolic struggle over ... legitimate naming' (in Bourdieu's words) is centrally involved in attempts both to change and to preserve patterns of rights in land. Analysis has to address the uses of multi-referential concepts by differently placed persons…
Contestations Over "Tradition" and "Culture" in a Time of Aids
In Malawi, the distress and unease caused by rising numbers of deaths and chronic illness due to HIV infection have led people to search for explanations. Here, we describe two particular "turns to culture." Zomba villagers over two decades have come to link AIDS with kanyera, an indigenous illness syndrome. In contrast, the public media, government, and donors blame "promiscuity" and "cultural practices" for HIV infection. The resulting stigmati…
Is “rational choice” the best choice for Robert Bates? An anthropologist's reading of Bates's work
Making Sense in Time: Remote Sensing and the Challenges of Temporal Heterogeneity in Social Analysis of Environmental Change-cases from Malawi
Maps, Metaphors, and Meanings: Boundary Struggles and Village Forest Use on Private and State Land in Malawi
Recent studies have begun to closely examine social and cultural perceptions of spatial relationships, with particular attention to contests over boundaries. Counter mapping has emerged as a technique to represent local claims, but this approach creates tension between efforts to empower social groups and recognition that Western cartographic methods may inadequately represent complex socio-spatial ideas among non-Western peoples. Specifically, w…
Jane Isabel Guyer (1943-2024)
Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana
Women in Botswana
My critique of research on women in Botswana was undertaken as a constructive comment on current concepts and interpretations. 1 This brief response to Kerven's rejoinder is offered in the same spirit. 2 I will focus on those points that perhaps will promote rather than deter constructive dialogue. I believe the opposition drawn between research and social or applied research is counter-productive. Research questions are influenced by practical a…
Gender, developmental cycles and historical process: A critique of recent research on women in Botswana
The dominant focus in the present literature on women in Botswana is on femaleheaded households and their relative disadvantage in a migrant labour economy. Schapera in the 1930s had noted that the femme sole had 'emerged' but that there was 'as yet no place for her in the legal system, or in the political life of the community'. I Today, women can apply for residential and arable plots in their own names and can speak for themselves in the custo…
Women in Botswana
My critique of research on women in Botswana was undertaken as a constructive comment on current concepts and interpretations. 1 This brief response to Kerven's rejoinder is offered in the same spirit. 2 I will focus on those points that perhaps will promote rather than deter constructive dialogue. I believe the opposition drawn between research and social or applied research is counter-productive. Research questions are influenced by practical a…
Struggles over water, Struggles over meaning: Cattle, water and the state in Botswana
IntroductionIn a recent paper on 'The state and social processes in Africa', Lonsdale (1981) convincingly demonstrates the poverty of assuming that any one 'grand theory' is able to explain the complex relations among state, social process and class struggle and other equally complex social phenomena. Images of the state as parasitic (as in formulations of the 'Asiatic mode of production'), as an epiphenomenon of property relations or as a neutra…
Books reviewed: Development and settlement in Botswana
J. Parson, Botswana: Liberal Democracy and the Labor Reserve in Southern Africa (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press and London: Gower, 1984). Pp. 145. £11.50. R. M. K. Silitshena, Intra‐Rural Migration and Settlement Changes in Botswana (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 1983). Pp. 230. Df1.10. K. Shillington (comp.), Essays on the History of Botswana: a bibliography of history research essays presented in part fulfilment of the B.A. degree of the U…
Settlement in Botswana: The Historical Development of a Human Landscape
The Evolution of Modern Botswana: Politics and Rural Development in Southern Africa
Journal Article The Evolution of Modern Botswana: Politics and Rural Development in Southern Africa Get access The Evolution of Modern Botswana: Politics and Rural Development in Southern Africa, edited by Louis A. Picard. Rex Collings, London and University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1985. 339 pp. £20 hardback. ISBN 0 86036 211 6. PAULINE E. PETERS PAULINE E. PETERS Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google S…
The Birth of Botswana: A History of the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1910 to 1966
Applied Anthropology: Innovation in African Agriculture . Arthur J. Dommen . Westview Special Studies in Agriculture Science and Policy
Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies . W. Arens and Ivan Karp
Household food security and child nutrition: The interaction of income and gender of household head
Manoeuvres and debates in the interpretation of land rights in Botswana
This article seeks to show how transformation in both practices and concepts are involved in the changing patterns of rights to and use of grazing land in Botswana over the past five decades. 'The symbolic struggle over ... legitimate naming' (in Bourdieu's words) is centrally involved in attempts both to change and to preserve patterns of rights in land. Analysis has to address the uses of multi-referential concepts by differently placed persons…
Social/Cultural Anthropology: The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass . Robert. J. Gordon
Is “rational choice” the best choice for Robert Bates? An anthropologist's reading of Bates's work
Dividing the commons: Politics, policy, and culture in Botswana
The Tswana
Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa
Journal Article Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa Get access Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa, edited by Peter Gibbon, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala, 1993. ( The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies). 381 . £12.95 paperback. 91–7106–331–5. PAULINE E. PETERS PAULINE E. PETERS Harvard Institute for International Development Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volum…
Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana
Botswana's Search for Autonomy in Southern Africa
Against the Odds: Matriliny, land and gender in the Shire Highlands of Malawi
■ The people of the Shire Highlands in southern Malawi (with origins in Nyanja, Mang'anja, Yao, and Lomwe-speaking groups) practise a form of matriliny, including matrilineal descent and inheritance and uxorilocal mar riage, that has proven remarkably resilient in the face of direct and indirect chal lenges. These include misperceptions and prejudices about matriliny by Christian missions and European travellers; the promotion of a patriarchal nu…
Development Encounters: Sites of Participation and Knowledge
The field of development is subject to shifts in paradigms, and it is important to examine systematically how these are realised in actual practice. Two currently favoured approaches are participation and knowledge. In this volume's collected papers, development researchers and practitioners share their ideas and experience on the different forms taken by participation and knowledge, not limited to indigenous knowledge, in the practice of develop…
Maps, Metaphors, and Meanings: Boundary Struggles and Village Forest Use on Private and State Land in Malawi
Recent studies have begun to closely examine social and cultural perceptions of spatial relationships, with particular attention to contests over boundaries. Counter mapping has emerged as a technique to represent local claims, but this approach creates tension between efforts to empower social groups and recognition that Western cartographic methods may inadequately represent complex socio-spatial ideas among non-Western peoples. Specifically, w…
Maps, Metaphors, and Meanings: Boundary Struggles and Village Forest Use on Private and State Land in Malawi
Recent studies have examined social and cultural perceptions of spatial relationships, with particular attention to contests over boundaries.'Counter-mapping' offers a technique to defend local rights in these contests.However, this approach may inadequately represent certain complex socio-spatial ideas.Specifically, whereas recent studies emphasize contests over the legitimacy or location of boundaries, the case studies from Malawi in this paper…
Bewitching Land: The Role of Land Disputes in Converting Kin to Strangers and in Class Formation in Malawi
Multiple quarrels within and between families in rural southern Malawi mediate an invisible, subterranean process of social differentiation and class formation - a 'hidden history'. The paper argues that conflict over land underlies most of the disputes, is central to the division of matrilineal families and, in turn, to the process of social differentiation and class formation. The disputes have the effect of turning family members into 'strange…
Communities at the Margin: Studies in Rural Society and Migration in Southern Africa, 1890-1980
The practice of social history is particularly advanced by the publication of collective volumes each consisting of fairly diverse studies. An outstanding feature of these publications is the comprehensive introductions in which historiographical, theoretical and comparative frameworks are provided. Communities at the margin: Studies in rural society and migration in southern Africa, 1890-1980 forms part of this valuable body of work. The authors…
Fragmented Worlds, Coherent Lives: The Politics of Difference in Botswana
Political science (32 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Geography (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Economics (16 works) · History (16 works) · Land Rights and Reforms (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · African history and culture studies (13 works) · Law (11 works)