Jessie Fredlund

JESSIE FREDLUND, then a graduate student at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Rainmaking, Religious Change and the Politics of Land and Environment in Uluguru, Tanzania,’ supervised by Dr. Gary Wilder. Focusing on Uluguru, a key water catchment area in Tanzania, this project examines questions of conflicting temporalities in the era of climate change. Diminishing rainfall and downstream urban growth have placed farmers in Uluguru under mounting pressure to drastically change their practices for the sake of downstream water users, at the same time that their own livelihoods are threatened by an increasingly unpredictable climate. However, these crises and the interventions they have provoked can only be understood in light of on-going local debates about relationships to ancestors, land tenure, and reproductive labor. Rituals to reconcile with ancestors in exchange for rain and health for future generations, the traces of unrealized socialist utopias, and millenarian expectations of some Muslims and Christians compete with government and international ideas about sustainability. Moving beyond binaries of global/local and society/nature, this project looks instead at how these boundaries are contested and produced. It places the current struggle over water in historical context and centers questions of labor and temporality in order to understand the conflicts that shape environmental management in Uluguru today.