Description:

Abstract:

In this presentation, Cliggett examines several decades of cyclical shifts in the political ecology of a Zambian national park buffer zone, where Gwembe Tonga migrants have pioneered land for ambitious livelihood dreams, while repeatedly encountering challenges from the government, development programs, and host populations. The cycles of access and alienation she describes have normalized socioecological uncertainty and instability, something she calls a state of “chronic liminality,” which has led to ongoing vulnerability for the region’s people and ecosystems.

Bio:

Lisa Cliggett (PhD, Indiana University) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky, and former editor (2011-2015) of the Wiley-Blackwell journal Economic Anthropology. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia since 1992, focusing on kinship, economy, development, and environmental change. While she conducted research through the 1990s in the Gwembe Valley, since 2001 her field research takes her to the border zones of the Kafue National Park, Zambia’s largest national park where she has conducted National Science Foundation (USA) funded projects.
These recent projects include a study of migration, land tenure security and environmental change, which is the topic of her current writing project (book manuscript); and food and livelihood security in the context of migration. Also, during the 2004-2007 field seasons Cliggett and colleagues ran an NSF funded field school in anthropological research methods. Her most recent NSF funded project (BCS-1157418; 2012-14) explores ways to build a digital data archive for cultural anthropology, using the longitudinal data from the Gwembe Tonga (Zambia) Research Project (GTRP), started in the 1950s by Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder.
Cliggett has published in a variety of journals including American Anthropologist, Human Organization and Human Ecology. Her books include Grains from Grass: aging, gender and famine in rural Africa 2005, Cornell University Press; Economies and Cultures: foundations of Economic Anthropology (Co-authored with Richard Wilk) 2007, Westview Press; Economies and the Transformation of Landscape (co-edited with Christopher Pool) 2008, Alta Mira Press, and Tonga Timeline: Appraising 60 years of multidisciplinary research in Zambia and Zimbabwe (co-edited with Virginia Bond), Lembani Trust Publishers/ Africa Books Collective.