The crucible of cultural politics: reworking "development" in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands

In this article, I examine the cultural politics of development in a Zimbab wean resettlement scheme, situating stare interventions in the deep histori es of colonial efforts to discipline rural livelihoods. Popular memories of resistance to colonial conservation, shaped by transnational circuits and constitutive of Zimbabwean nationalism, animate the cultural idioms of enti tlement and state power in the 1990s. The contingent micro-politics of agra rian struggle counter a recent tendency toward discursive determinism in an thropological perspectives on development.