The Circulation, Durability, and Erasure of Brands in a Biodiversity Hotspot

Abstract

Through an account of the ephemerality and durability of brands’ meaning and materiality in rural Tanzania, this article expands the semiotic scholarship on brand with an analysis from the world of international development—where branding operates in similar but also different ways. By using an abandoned brand fraction to name contemporary interventions, residents of Tanzania’s East Usambara Mountains aggregated what, from another perspective, were distinct activities, institutions, and goals. In this biodiversity hotspot, residents thus constructed a chronotopic framing that countered the marketing efforts of more powerful actors shaping the region’s landscape through conservation. Such framings allowed residents to bundle and estrange successive, short‐term interventions, thereby emphasizing the continuity of foreign influence and reinforcing a social distance between conservation authorities and village residents—a distance that Tanzanian foresters tried to overcome.