Lisa C. Cliggett: Longitudinal Research in Southern Africa and the Decolonial Transition

The Gwembe Tonga Research Project (GTRP) is among the longest-running ethnographic research programs in Africa. Initiated in 1956 by Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder to document the forced relocation of Gwembe Tonga people following the construction of Kariba Dam, the project evolved into a sustained longitudinal study of continuity and change. I joined the GTRP in 1994 while conducting PhD research and moved into a leadership role in the 2010s as Colson and Scudder stepped away from project management. My Zambia research has examined household economies, livelihood dynamics, migration, food security, social networks, and environmental change. This seven decade archive of empirical data is both the project's greatest asset and its most contested inheritance.

This talk offers a critical reflection on sustaining a long-term, US-led research project in a moment defined by the de-colonial turn. Born in the colonial era and built on infrastructures and epistemological frameworks now under rigorous scrutiny, the GTRP embodies tensions the discipline is working to confront: white American researchers conducting longitudinal work in Africa, dependent on threatened federal funding. Drawing on current scholarship in de-colonizing anthropology, I examine the ethical stakes of long-term extractive research, the limits of reflexivity as a remedy, and the structural changes — including collaborative frameworks with the University of Zambia — that genuine de-colonization requires.