Steeped in heritage : the racial politics of South African rooibos tea / Sarah Ives.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ives, Sarah Fleming, author.

Series:

New ecologies for the twenty-first century.

New ecologies for the twenty-first century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rooibos tea--South Africa.

Rooibos tea.

Rooibos tea industry--South Africa.

Rooibos tea industry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (273 pages) : illustrations, maps.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2017.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: the "rooibos revolution"

Cultivating indigeneity

Farming the bush

Endemic plants and invasive people

Rumor, conspiracy, and the politics of narration

Precarious landscapes

Conclusion: "although there is no place called rooibos."

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822372301

0822372304

OCLC:

1148155689