ABSTRACT
Since the oil crisis of the late 1970s, peasant farming has been eroding under the influence of stringent structural adjustment cutbacks and the labour-displacing effects of market liberalization policies. Processes of capitalist accumulation and impoverishment now permeate Tanzania’s rural areas. A country, fostered under an inclusive ujamaa philosophy of African socialism with the stated aim of a relatively egalitarian division of the fruits of independence, is now experiencing a fundamental upheaval of its moral economy (Bryceson 2010). Within mining settlements, new hierarchies of status and authority are emerging in conjunction with the surge in artisanal mining (Bryceson and Jønsson 2010). Relational ties within mining and between mining communities and surrounding rural settlements are being embroidered around a new division of labour and its erratic, but sometimes highly lucrative, material rewards.
