Brad Laurence Weiss
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 1996-1997
Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvests
The Haya farmers of northwestern Tanzania had been growing coffee for centuries
before Europeans began colonizing their land a hundred years ago, and coffee
remains their single greatest source of income as well as an important element
in Haya social life. The Haya don't drink the beverage Westerners call coffee;
instead, they cook and chew the beans and use them for family exchanges, ritual
offerings, and snacks. In the late 1980s Brad Weiss spent eighteen months studying
Haya communities for his doctoral dissertation, a contemporary ethnography
published in 1996 as The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World:
Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice (Duke University
Press).
"While writing the dissertation, I realized that
coffee was a connecting thread for analyzing a whole range of social practices,
processes, histories, and places," Weiss said. Eventually that realization
led to Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvests: The Transforming Value of Coffee
in Northwest Tanzania, the book project Weiss worked on during his SAR
residency. "Coffee was and continues to be central to a number of everyday
and ceremonious practices that facilitate the construction of Haya sociality," Weiss
writes in the book's introduction.
Weiss spent the summer before he came to Santa Fe in
Rome, studying archives of the White Fathers, a Catholic order of missionaries
who introduced new varieties of coffee into Tanzania in the early 1900s. At around
the same time, German colonial officials in the region made coffee planting compulsory
in order to promote regional commerce and impose new taxes. "Many of my
questions arose out of the research I had done in Rome." Weiss said.
Weiss's book seeks to integrate material forms, including
commodities, into the wider sociocultural processes through which Haya men and
women construct a lived world. This approach challenges the traditional distinction
between gifts and commodities found in much anthropological literature. "I
focus on the concrete social practices through which objective forms are engaged
in social life and thereby endowed with specific local values and meanings—the
ways commodities are constantly transformed by different cultures and given new
meanings," Weiss said.
Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvests begins with
an investigation of coffee's place in precolonial Haya culture and the introduction
of European colonial currencies at the turn of the twentieth century. It then
traces the colonial and postcolonial history of agricultural innovation in northwest
Tanzania, discusses the rise of coffee marketing as a crucial means of creating
class relations, and compares the place of coffee prepared for local consumption
with that produced for a global market. "As a gift, as a resource, and as
a crop, coffee has different potentials for defining and redefining community
experience," Weiss writes. More broadly, the book is also a study of the
colonial transformation of this region of Tanzania as seen from local as well
as European perspectives: "We need greater recognition of the role of people
who have less power but nonetheless help to shape global systems."
Affiliation at time of award: Assistant professor
of anthropology at the College of William and Mary.
Return to Resident
Scholars 1996-97
