ABSTRACT
If political ecology seeks to develop greater sensitivity to the dynamics of peasant micropolitics, it requires a new qualitative texture to complement its structural legacy. Political ecology's structural legacy emerges from its geneaology. Influential critiques of neoMalthusian explanations of environmental degradation, food insecurity and famine, and land conflicts looked to political and social factors, not the "natural" mechanism of population pressure, to explain resource struggles. A Gramscian metaphor opens up space for viewing resource struggles through a deep history of opposing claims. Local cultural categories for land and features of the environment shape resource struggles, serving as crucibles in which competing claims are forged. Class, gender, age, and ethnicity are important in shaping not only the experience of resource struggles in Kaerezi, but also social actors' participation in those fields of conflict. Kaerezi is in Zimbabwe's mostpreferred "agroecolog-ical zone," a highrainfall belt running along the mountainous Eastern Highlands.
