The Social Imaginary of GIS in Contested Environments: Politicized Heritage and the Racialized Landscapes of South African Rooibos Tea

Abstract

We will explore the historical, political and ecological context in which rooibos figures as a topical case study of the potential promise and perils of GIs that we introduced in our previous chapter. There, we argued that the dominant rhetoric promoting the use of GIs has the tendency to project a particular ‘social imaginary’ that represents communities holistically, possessing singular traditions and rooted in a particular place characterized by a naturally bounded and distinctive ecosystem. In this chapter, we suggest that although this ‘social imaginary’ may easily characterize the socionatural contexts of some place-based goods, in the South African context its use may avert political attention from the historical relationship between the rooibos plant, those who control the lands on which it is grown, those who harvest it, the traditional knowledge of its cultivation, and the ecology in which it grows.

Keywords: cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, geographical indications, rooibos, South Africa