ABSTRACT
Some Tanzanian farmers say that “the rain is different now” and that postcolonial leaders and development agency experts cannot “bring rain” the way that colonial chiefs once did. 1 Government officers, expatriate administrators, and Pare farmers agree that average annual rainfall has declined dramatically in recent decades—despite rainfall records that show increasing variability rather than desiccation. The impression that rainfall has declined is a consequence of a particular cultural interpretation of ecology. This cultural model is both a hard-won indigenous knowledge system and a set of moral evaluations of appropriate relationships among people (Shaffer and Naiene 2011). Given this linkage between politics and rainfall, the local narrative of declining rainfall over the 20th century is both a cultural metaphor for changing terms of resource entitlement and the ambiguities of power, morality, and social relations and a description of a geophysical process. Understanding this process requires a closer look at the historical course of social change, the cultural roots of environmental narratives, and the political relationships between powerful institutions (such as governments and development agencies) with rural populations on the periphery of the global economic system. This chapter draws on research into the intersections of culture and power to examine the history of contestation over rainmaking, sacred sites, and climate models in North Pare. After describing these shifting ideologies of power, legitimacy, and value, I conclude that anthropology offers climate change researchers a nuanced vision of “power” and “politics” that can account for how culture affects responses to climate change.
