An Irrigation Intake Is like a Uterus

This case study of intensive agriculture in precolonial Tanzania argues that irrigation existed under conditions of low population density because a regional exchange network created incentives for farmers to invest in their land. This economic context cannot, however, explain specific strategies for accumulating wealth in a 19th-century African society. Descriptions of how precolonial farmers managed labor, land, and water show that production was relatively compartmentalized from the formal politics of centralized chiefdoms. In this sparsely inhabited frontier zone, irrigation was a way to accumulate wealth in people. An analysis of the symbolism of irrigation shows the symbolic correlations between human and agricultural fertility, which, in turn, became an ideological force for organizing labor. Landscape features such as irrigation systems were therefore forms of symbolic and material capital, and the management of both constituted the politics of maintaining a particular division of labor and rights to resources by gender and age. [Key words: intensive agriculture, irrigation, symbolic capital, fertility symbolism, gender division of labor

Agricultural economics · Agriculture · Archaeology · Capital (architecture · Context (archaeology · Economic growth · Economics · Fertility · Geography · Irrigation · Population · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Tanzania · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · Demography · Ecology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

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