Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, water and belonging in southern Zimbabwe
本书基于访谈和档案资料，探讨津巴布韦穆提里克维湖周边人群与土地的关系，分析归属、主权和合法性如何被过去的景观互动所塑造，适合关注土地改革、政治生态和非洲研究的读者。
In his own words, Joost Fontein’s Remaking Mutirikwi is an interrogation of ‘the immanence of diverse past practices, interventions and occupations in the active political materialities of landscape’ (p. 14). Focused on and around the man-made Lake Mutirikwi—Zimbabwe’s second-largest body of water and a Brobdingnagian legacy of white Rhodesia’s efforts in the post-war years to tame the African veldt—this book seeks to disentangle the complex relationships between people and land. Based off numerous interviews and complemented by field-notes, archive work, and secondary sources, it is an ambitious and at times overly dense work. Yet it is one that succeeds in bringing together multiple strands into a cohesive, compelling, and insightful analysis: that struggles for belonging, sovereignty, and legitimacy are shaped by the endurance of past interactions with and within the landscape. Building upon an excellent library of work by JoAnn McGregor, Donald Moore, and Jocelyn Alexander among others, Fontein’s book is set apart by the agency given to the landscape and its own place in history. In part this is due to the book’s layout with Fontein having deliberately written ‘the history of Mutirikwi backwards […] in order to defy normative linear temporalities and the determinist causalities they imply’ (p. 289). Thus part one (five chapters) opens towards the end of the story, with the remaking of Mutirikwi’s landscapes in the early 2000s and the reclamation of land around the lake by a variety of groups during Zimbabwe’s Fast-Track Land Reform Programme’s (FTLRP) most contentious years. The author assesses claims to and aspirations for the land through autochthonous knowledge, the role of water in legitimising the presence of these claimants (including issues of fishing, wildlife, and irrigation), and finally the ‘genealogical geographies’ of Mutirikwi’s inhabitants whose connections with the land are often facilitated by the presence of ancestral spirits and physical remains.