who argued that whites create a sense of belonging through nature but that this is also a strategy to create a life ‘away’ from blacks (several examples in Suzuki’s book… Click to show full abstract
who argued that whites create a sense of belonging through nature but that this is also a strategy to create a life ‘away’ from blacks (several examples in Suzuki’s book show very different dynamics). Moreover, some parts of the book provide information that does not always clearly add to the overall story. This happens most prominently in Chapter 5, with the descriptions about wild dogs, bears as criminal animals in the USA, the cockerel and ‘miss wildlife’, which are all parts that seem to stand somewhat apart from each other and from the rest of the book. I can understand that there are connections, but these could have been made more explicit. Another, slightly lesser issue is the conflation of ethnicity and race. In the earlier chapters (particularly Chapter 2), Suzuki focuses more on ethnicity than on race, explaining the difference between white Zimbabweans of British and Afrikaner origin; or between the Shona and the Ndebele, and how these different groups of people articulate their identity in relation to each other. These differences, however, are mostly reduced to the racial categories of black and white in the second half of the book, almost as if they are a part of history and no longer important in the contemporary politics of belonging. Furthermore, the history as described in Chapter 2 is really a human history, lacking a description of the (white) people’s relation with nature and/or animals, the central theme of the book. In some cases, assumptions are perhaps made a bit too hastily; especially when these assumptions are controversial, more explanation and/or argumentation is needed. For example, the author suggests that white farmers are often seen as ‘an archetype of rural conservatism’, about whom ‘it is also often assumed that anything more about them is not worth knowing’ (p. 5). Some recent literature, however, has in fact shown an increased interest in these people. In another example, she explains on p. 22 that a white woman uses air spray on black labourers before they can enter her car, which makes them symbolically less dangerous. This really puzzled me, and my first thought was that, after a long day of physical work, people can simply smell bad. This does not take away the idea that the use of air freshener might be highly problematic and derogatory, but why this is symbolic of reducing the labourers’ ‘danger’ remains unexplained, though is a highly sensitive thing to say. The above questions are not meant to discourage anyone from reading the book; especially for scholars working on nature conservation and (white) belonging in Africa, in particular southern Africa, this book is recommended as a rich ethnography full of important issues that are crucial in African nature conservation and race relations. The Nature of Whiteness shows empirically very well how power, privilege and inequality are constituted, and the convictions that these are based on (racial, gendered and natured). As such, the book provides very important insights for scholars into the dynamics of nature conservation in Africa, which remain relevant also after the fall of Robert Mugabe.
               
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