Overview

South African rooibos tea is a commodity of contrasts. Renowned for its healing properties, the rooibos plant grows in a region defined by the violence of poverty, dispossession, and racism. And while rooibos is hailed as an ecologically indigenous commodity, it is farmed by people who struggle to express ""authentic"" belonging to the land: Afrikaners, who espouse a ""white"" African indigeneity, and ""coloureds,"" who are characterized either as the mixed-race progeny of ""extinct"" Bushmen or as possessing a false identity, indigenous to nowhere. In Steeped in Heritage Sarah Ives explores how these groups advance alternate claims of indigeneity based on the cultural ownership of an indigenous plant. This heritage-based struggle over rooibos shows how communities negotiate landscapes marked by racial dispossession within an ecosystem imperiled by climate change and precarious social relations in the postapartheid era.

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9780822369868

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Reviews

This beautifully-written ethnography is a major contribution to the literature on commodities. Steeped in Heritage brilliantly brings together the political ecology of a commodity with an astute analysis of the intersection of land-based politics and questions about race, labor, and spatial and economical belonging. --Paige West, author of From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea

Compelling and prescient . . . New Ecologies of the Twnety-First Century is a fascinating exploration of the dynamics surrounding identity and its ties to things and places in a racist, capitalist context. -- Aran Mackinnon * African Quarterly * A nuanced and theoretically engaged analysis. Steeped in Heritage offers a novel contribution to a long tradition of deeply ethnographic political ecology scholarship. This book will interest scholars working on a vast range of issues including indigeneity, environmental change, climate change, agricultural labor, identity politics, multispecies relationships, place-based products, and African studies. -- Emma McDonell * Journal of Political Ecology * Steeped in Heritage is likely to be of interest to any scholar interested in anthro-ecological interactions, racial politics, questions of self-hood and belonging, or simply interested in finding meaning in the tealeaves left at the bottom of their cup. -- Sarah Bradley * Journal of Ecological Anthropology * Steeped in Heritage is an excellent and highly recommendable account. Offers wonderful scope for comparison. -- Annika Teppo * Anthropological Forum * Ives provides an accessible and interesting perspective on the complex, ongoing issue of race relations within South Africa. Recommended. -- C. W. Herrick * Choice *

This beautifully written ethnography is a major contribution to the literature on commodities. Steeped in Heritage brilliantly brings together the political ecology of a commodity with an astute analysis of the intersection of land-based politics and questions about race, labor, and spatial and economical belonging. -- Paige West, author of * From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea * Steeped in Heritage is a vivid and insightful account of the complex cultural politics that link people to places via the intermediary of the botanical world (in this case, a scrubby little `red bush'). By taking rooibos tea as a window onto our times, it provides an original and enormously illuminating perspective on race and racialization, cultural identity and indigeneity, the globalization of niche commodity markets, and much more. A remarkable book. -- James Ferguson, author of * Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution *

Author Information

Sarah Ives is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University.

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