Building the nation from the hinterlands: Poverty, participation, and education in rural Tanzania

This dissertation, based on eighteen months of ethnographic, oral historical, and archival research conducted between 2004 and 2007, is an ethnography of rural development in the Singida region of central Tanzania. In the dissertation, I examine what it means to be a rural central Tanzanian in the new millennium---so central to national identity and the international imaginary as "the poor villager without access to schooling, health care, and water" and yet so peripherally positioned to access the rights and resources of development that the political prototype of the rural peasant has inspired. Specifically, I explore what kind of participation---in politics, in the economy, and in the national and international project of development---is possible from rural locations.;The first part of the dissertation lays out the historical and social foundations of contemporary development in rural Singida. I highlight the annual cycle of scarcity and bounty and the high incidence of hunger that have shaped central Tanzanian narratives of authority, faith and governance; I describe how the tropes of participation and voluntarism have long served to incorporate rural Tanzanians into the state and state projects; and I trace the gendered, generational, and educational politics of the history of the state in rural Tanzania. In the second part of the dissertation, I show how Tanzanians appropriate the symbols of local gendered and gerontocratic forms of authority into the idioms of statecraft and citizenship. Through this analysis of the paternalistic state, I show that rural people become subject to exploitation through the very explicitly participatory, redistributive, and democratic realms of multi-party politics, food aid, and participatory development initiatives in education. In this way I show how, contrary to the international ethic of participation and development as universal human 'rights', the politics of rural participation must be understood in the context of the socioeconomics and sociomorality of village life. For rural participation in Singida is inextricably bound to an ethic of obligation deeply embedded in historical experiences of hunger, state discipline, and the politics of education.