ABOUT THIS BOOK

Scholars who study peasant society now realize that peasants are not passive, but quite capable of acting in their own interests. But, do coherent political ideas emerge within peasant society or do peasants act in a world where elites define political issues? Peasant Intellectuals is based on ethnographic research begun in 1966 and includes interviews with hundreds of people from all levels of Tanzanian society. Steven Feierman provides the history of the struggles to define the most basic issues of public political discourse in the Shambaa-speaking region of Tanzania. Feierman also shows that peasant society contains a rich body of alternative sources of political language from which future debates will be shaped.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Steven Feierman is Professor of History at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is the author of The Shambaa Kingdom and has written extensively on African medicine and healing practices.

REVIEWS

“This brilliant book shatters our intellectual complacency. By transforming the notion of ‘peasant intellectual’ from an oxymoron into a powerful organizing principle, Feierman renders obsolete the usual ways we approach peasant, politics, and culture.”—Steve J. Stern, University of Wisconsin–Madison

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Maps

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Tribute and Dependency in Late Nineteenth-Century Shambaai

3. Healing the Land and Harming the Land

4. Alternative Paths to Social Health in the Precolonial Kingdom

5. Colonial Rule and the Fate of the Intellectuals

6. Royal Domination and Peasant Resistance, 1947-1957

7. The Struggle over Erosion Control: Women's Farming and the Politics of Subsistence

8. Gender, Slavery, and Chiefship: Peasant Attempts to Create an Alternative Discourse

9. Chiefs and Bureaucrats: Independence and the Fate of the Intellectuals

10. Rain in Independent Tanzania: A Drama Remembered but Not Performed

Notes

List of Interviews

Bibliography

Index

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