Plantation Households
This chapter tackles the materiality of households, largely focused on the plantation of Mgoli, Pemba, and drawing extensively on excavation data. It is argued that plantation owners’ homes were sometimes used to materialize an Omani identity. This chapte
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Plantation Households
Households as Units of Analysis The previous chapters have examined the way in which ideas of landscape and the construction of particular kinds of buildings and spaces, such as the homes of enslaved laborers and clove-drying floors, were constituent parts of the social relations of slavery and capitalist formations. Zooming in to a smaller scale of analysis, this chapter takes up the archaeology of households to examine capitalist formations, power dynamics, gender and sexuality, and newly emergent identities on nineteenth-century clove plantations. Archaeological data are central to these interpretations, and I draw heavily on material from my fieldwork on Zanzibar to explore these topics. On Zanzibar, the plantation owner did not simply construct a landscape. They brought together what we might usefully think of as a household; a grouping of individuals who lived on land demarcated as a part of the plantation, more or less articulated into a unit. Finding language to describe the main residential core of the plantation is difficult. Historical studies of Zanzibari plantations have highlighted the fact that a form of social unit was created on plantations, but these are certainly not coterminous with the idea of a single family. As a further complication to this analysis, these social units were also variable: The groups into which slaveowners brought their slaves were by no means uniform. The imagery…was patriarchal, but the structure was not that of a family or kinship group. A wealthy individual often included slaves—along with poorer kinsmen, clients, and others— in his personal entourage. Plantation agriculture rooted such groups in the owner’s land and in a differentiated economic organization. (Cooper 1977, pp. 213–214)
Such social groups did not always align with specific bounded units in the landscape. Client–patron relations were obviously a means of binding together subjects who might be separated at times by hundreds of miles, as was the case for those involved in the caravan trade (Rockel 1995, p. 15). But within the specific context of clove plantations, we can identify the types of relations Cooper is discussing as manifest in the physical form of plantation buildings. We might usefully think of these as households, a term commonly employed by archaeologists to describe the slippery unit which may or may not be contained within a single building. A household may be thought of as a “primary human soS. K. Croucher, Capitalism and Cloves, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8471-5_5, © Springer New York 2015
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cial unit” which is variable through different cultural contexts, not to be conflated simply with family (King 2006, p. 297). This separation of family from household becomes particularly useful in thinking about the spatial manifestation of the social groups Zanzibari plantation owners were creating. Within the plantation context, particularly in relation to enslaved subjects, households have been unevenly analyzed (Beaudry 2004, p. 257). It remain
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