Ecological Infrastructures: Rethinking Foraging and Farming in the Sandawe Homeland

The Sandawe are one of two groups of north-central Tanzania, along with the Hadza, whose language has been categorized (controversially) as Khoisan by some linguists. Due partly to this linguistic categorization, ancestral Sandawe are thought to have been foragers until recent centuries. Foraging contributes to present-day Sandawe identity, but local and outside observers alike have described this legacy as endangered by increasing sedentism and a growing reliance upon food production. Long-term ethnographic and ethnobotanical research concerning a particular category of plant foods – leafy vegetables – suggests that contemporary food-getting repertoires form a complex social, spatial, and temporal system that exceeds the explanatory capacity of quasi-historical subsistence categories like “forager” and “farmer.” These results provide the basis for reconsidering a wide range of practical and conceptual matters related to the study of human-environment interactions and historical reconstructions of regional milieus in this ethno-linguistically, socio-politically, and techno-economically complex region.