Graves, ruins, and belonging: towards an anthropology of proximity*

Abstract

This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to explore how the affective presence of graves and ruins, which materialize past and present occupations and engagements with/in the landscape (by different clans, colonial and postcolonial state institutions, war veterans, chiefs, and spirit mediums, as well as white commercial farmers), are entangled in complex, localized contests over autochthony and belonging, even as they are finely implicated in wider reconfigurations of authority and state‐craft. Situating these highly contested assertions, discourses, and practices in the context of national redefinitions of citizenship and belonging articulated by ZANU PF's rhetoric of ‘patriotic history’, this article explores how these contests are made real through the consequential materiality of milieu. Although the central hook will be the prominent role that graves, both ancestral ‘mapa’ and recent burials, have played in ongoing claims to land and authority, its main perspective will be on how different, overlapping, and intertwined notions of belonging are enabled, constrained, and structured through the materiality of place, thereby emphasizing the proximity of discourses and practices of belonging that derives from the shared nature of material landscapes. In this vein, the ruins and graves of past white occupation and interventions in the landscape comingle and coexist with the resurgent appeals of local clans to ancestral territories on occupied lands. The broader theoretical purpose of the article is to engage with recent debates over materiality and anthropology's so‐called ‘ontological turn’ to make a case for focusing less on ‘radical ontological difference’ and more on material, historical, and conceptual proximities. Résumé A partir de matériaux ethnographiques recueillis autour du Lac Mutirikwi, dans le sud du Zimbabwe, cet article explore la façon dont la présence affective de tombes et de ruines, matérialisant les occupations et interactions présentes et passées avec le paysage (institutions coloniales et postcoloniales, anciens combattants, chefs, spirites et fermiers blancs), s'intrique dans une complexe concurrence locale autour de l'autochtonie et de l'appartenance, tout en relevant d'une reconfiguration plus large de l'autorité et de la force de l'État. Pour situer ces affirmations, discours et pratiques très contestés dans le contexte de la redéfinition nationale de la citoyenneté et de l'appartenance formulé par la rhétorique de « l'histoire patriotique » du ZANU‐PF, l'auteur explore comment ces rivalités se manifestent à travers la matérialité du milieu. Bien que l'argument central soit le rôle éminent des tombes, « mapa »ancestrales aussi bien qu'inhumations récentes, dans les revendications de la terre et de l'autorité, l'article sera principalement consacréà la façon dont des notions différentes de l'appartenance, se chevauchant et s'interpénétrant, sont éveillées, contraintes et structurées par la matérialité des lieux, mettant ainsi l'accent s...

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