Dorothy L. Hodgson

Dilemmas of Counter-Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania

Recent work has celebrated the political potential of ‘counter-mapping’, that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter-mapping literature, and compares four counter-mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community-based initiatives led by a church-based NGO, ecotourism companies, the Tanzanian National Parks Authority, and grassroots pastoralist rights advocacy groups, illustrate the broad range of activities grouped under the heading of counter-mapping. They also present a series of political dilemmas that are typical of many counter-mapping efforts: conflicts inherent in conservation efforts involving territorialization, privatization, integration and indigenization; problems associated with the theory and practice of ‘community-level’ political engagement; the need to combine mapping efforts with broader legal and political strategies; and critical questions involving the agency of ‘external’ actors such as conservation and development donors, the state and private business interests.

PASTORALISM, PATRIARCHY AND HISTORY: CHANGING GENDER RELATIONS AMONG MAASAI IN TANGANYIKA, 1890–1940

This article describes the gender relations among Maasi in Tanganyika. Males typically dominate the relationship taking the role of “ruler” over their wife. Women are groomed by the fathers during childhood to become wives to their husbands upon reaching the appropriate age. At the right age a woman is then “transferred” from her father to her husband. Thus men hold a higher social status within the community. Research demonstrated various other indicators to social standing in the community besides for gender including age marital status financial worth etc.

“Once Intrepid Warriors”: Modernity and the Production of Maasai Masculinities

Mentioning “the Maasai” usually invokes images of warriors, of men herding cattle, of proud patriarchs: The most picturesque people in East Africa are those of a tribe which has changed little of its ways since the advent of the White Man—the Masai. The tourist, when he spots a Masai herding his beloved cattle, or leaning gracefully on the haft of his long bladed spear, cannot but feel the spirit of Africa of yesterday (“Kilusu” 1956–1957:135) As this quotation indicates, such romanticized images of Maasai,2 particularly male Maasai, as immutable icons of traditional Africa have been shared by many Westerners, from the first explorers and missionaries in the nineteenth century to the tourists taking their pictures today Many would sympathize with the sentiments of a 1989 letter to The New York Times that lamented the fate of Maasai in Tanzania: After reading your … [article] from Tanzania, which asks if the fate of the semi-nomadic Masai people is at last to be fenced in, I was horrified to learn that Tanzania is encouraging subjugation and ultimate obliteration of some of its oldest and noblest inhabitants, the once free and beautiful Masai. Now they are supposed to be farmers. They know nothing of farming. They are nomadic herdsmen and once intrepid warriors.

Becoming indigenous in Africa

Abstract: This article traces the history of how and why certain African groups became involved in the transnational indigenous rights movement; how the concept of the indigenous has been imagined, understood, and employed by African activists, donors, advocates, and states; and the opportunities and obstacles it has posed for the ongoing struggles for recognition, resources, and the rights of historically marginalized people like Maasai.

LESSONS LEARNED? DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCES IN THE LATE COLONIAL PERIOD

The post-World-War-II period has typically been seen as the beginning of the ‘development era’. As global power relations shifted and nationalist and international pressure to liberalize and end colonial rule mounted, the colonial powers sought to revise their rationales for the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor. Longstanding dichotomies such as metropole/colony and civilized/primitive were reworked into the categories of developed/underdeveloped. The scale and intensity of development interventions increased dramatically, and a language of planned development, undergirded by ‘science’, came to frame the policy debates of colonial administrators and the technical experts they relied on, as well as nationalists and local elites. But development had been a central feature of encounters between the West and Africa since at least the early twentieth century, so that by the 1950s, all parties involved in the encounter had substantial experience of its policies and practices. Using detailed ethnohistorical and archival data, the papers in this special issue examine development programs in the late colonial period from across the continent in order to analyze how such historical experiences contributed to the conceptualization, implementation and outcomes of these programs. These papers, like much recent research on development, explore development discourses and the ways in which experts and government officials defined particular development problems and conceptualized solutions. But in examining particular development programs across Africa, these papers seek to bring development practice into the analysis of development discourse. Rather than situating persistence and change in development discourses largely within dominant international and government institutions, these papers argue that such discourses were inevitably intertwined with development practice. In considering the local configurations within which experts and officials sought to implement their ambitious master plans, these papers show that few if any plans remained uninfluenced by local struggles over land, labor or agricultural and environmental expertise. Neither hegemonic nor unchanging, late colonial development agendas were in fact rooted in the experiences of earlier colonial efforts to manage rural livelihoods and tied to both the global changes and local realities of the late colonial era.

Critical interventions: Dilemmas of accountability in contemporary ethnographic research

Anthropologists are accountable in unique ways to “the people we study” in “the field.” Yet today “the field” is more likely to be some transnational process linking multiple actors, sites, and agendas rather than a bounded physical space. To whom, then, are we accountable in a world of blurred boundaries and of intersecting and often contradictory oppressions based on gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality? Are we equally accountable to everyone we encounter in “the field?” If not, are there some ethical or political principles that we can use to help us determine to whom we are most accountable and how? In this essay I explore these questions through an interrogation of my own work on the cultural politics of “indigenous” development among Maasai in Tanzania.

Women as Children: Culture, Political Economy and Gender Inequality Among Kisongo Maasai

The study of gender, that is, the cultural and social relations of power between women and men (but also between women and other women, men and men), has received increasing theoretical attention in the past few decades. As distinguished from the ‘anthropology of women’ school, which seeks to recover and represent the experiences of women as central to their studies and texts (e.g., Shostak 1981), the anthropology of gender shifts the focus from just women to studies of the cultural construction of gender, patterns of gender relations, and the study of gender as an organising force in societies (Moore 1988). Key to this shift has been the realisation that the actions of and ideas about women can never fully be understood unless they are examined in relationship to those of men in the same society (e.g. Scott 1988). Furthermore, recent work has emphasised the need to examine how these gender relations shape and are shaped by local and translocal processes such as colonialism, capitalism, media images, and tourism (e.g., GroszNgate and Kokole 1997; Hodgson and McCurdy 2000d). Approaches to the study of gender, mirroring broader theoretical divisions within anthropology, have generally focused on either its cultural (the meanings people give to their world) or social (their activities and actions in that world) aspects. Studies of gender among pastoralist peoples have generally focused on the latter, providing detailed analyses of the role of gender in livestock production systems (e.g., Dahl 1987, Curry 1996), the impact of economic changes on gender relations (e.g., Oboler 1985, Talle 1988), or gender as a structuring principle of social organisation or spatial order (e.g., Moore 1986). My research attempts to restore cultural analysis to social analysis by examining the relationship between cultural conceptions of gender and gendered social relationships in a historical context of economic and social change among the Kisongo Maasai and Arusha Maasai of Arusha Region, Tanzania. I analyse the nuanced interactions between changes in political economy and cultural meaning to explore how cultural conceptions (such as what it means to be a man or woman) change over time, the degree to which they are shared or not shared within communities, and the relationship between gender inequality and other structures of inequality such as ethnicity, class and citizenship. I have worked and conducted research in Maasai areas in Tanzania since 1985, including an intensive two-year study (1991–93) of three Maasai communities located within the same political ward which differ historically as to the intensity and duration of their interaction with processes of ‘development’, including education, missionisation, commoditisation, extent of cultivation, integration into

Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (review)

Although feminist and other scholars have long argued for the links between state interests and womens bodies, few have demonstrated the depth, complexity, and vitality of these relationships in such convincing and comprehensive detail as Lynn Thomas in Politics of the Womb. Drawing on legal cases, oral evidence, and remarkably rich and creative archival sources, Thomas probes how womens bodies, particularly their reproductive capacities, were central to efforts by the colonial and postcolonial state to assert and maintain political power in Kenya. Moreover, she explores how these reproductive interventions and debates shaped and were shaped by shifting relations and ideas about gender, generation, and governance. Through these struggles over the appropriate time, place, context, frequency, expression, experience, and meaning of sexuality and reproduction (and their repeated conflation), Kenyan men and women constructed and contested moral and material relations of power among themselves, and with their community and nation.

Enriching Gender Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Two new books enrich our understanding of women and gender in sub-Saharan Africa. Brimming with empirical, historical detail, they would be useful in a wide variety of Africa and/or women and gender or sexuality oriented courses. They should also, once and for all, preclude the argument that gender, or indeed “women,” are Western concepts of little applicability in Africa. Wicked Women comprises fifteen essays that are united by the theme of black African women’s transgressions against sundry patriarchal norms — running away from husbands and fathers and fields, accumulating bank accounts, publicly criticizing men, having sex with whomever they choose, and more. The introductory chapter reviews the historiography of women and gender in sub-Saharan Africa in a non-controversial manner, beginning with Denise Paulme’s 1960 collection of essays and stretching to a few recent titles that make masculinity their main focus of attention. It praises African women’s contributions to debates around gender. It defines “wicked” as an analytic concept in an open-ended, ironic way that invites us to regard the different chapters as talking to each other about female agency rather than trying to dictate a new agenda. It concludes with the argument that women’s transgressions of

Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development

Introduction: Seeing Maasai 1. Gender, Generation, and Ethnicity: Being Maasai Men and Women Maasai Portrait 1: Koko 2. Modernist Orders: Colonialism and the Production of Marginality Maasai Portrait 2: Wanga 3. Why Are You in Such a Hurry? Development and Decolonization Maasai Portrait 3: Thomas 4. Politics of the Postcolonial Periphery: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship Maasai Portrait 4: Edward Moringe Sokoine 5. Poverty and Progress: Gender, Ethnicity, and Pastoralist Development Maasai Portrait 5: Mary 6. The Gendered Contradictions of Modernity and Marginality Conclusion: Maasai Pasts, Maasai Futures Epilogue: The Last of the Maasai?