Economies and Ecologies of the Sacred in Zimbabwe

Abstract

I am happy to talk about the specifics of the ethnographic study that I conducted in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, as well as the ways in which both the political and the economic crisis have unfolded since 2000 and 2001, which I document. But what I wanted to do more broadly is just to talk about some of the general issues and problems that I think are related, and that tie in very much with several of the themes that we have looked at before. I shall address conflict—which is one thing that in fact we have not really addressed thus far in much detail. And I think that is partly—if I can be provocative—because we are switching now from normative models to some actually existing histories, and of course models of how the world should be, or how humans should act, do not always get borne out in practice.