Narrating Nature

Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing

Mara Jill Goldman

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780816546961
  9780816539673
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816541942
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The current environmental crises demand that we revisit dominant approaches for understanding nature-society relations. Narrating Nature brings together various ways of knowing nature from differently situated Maasai and conservation practitioners and scientists into lively debate. It speaks to the growing movement within the academy and beyond on decolonizing knowledge about and relationships with nature, and debates within the social sciences on how to work across epistemologies and ontologies. It also speaks to a growing need within conservation studies to find ways to manage nature with people.

This book employs different storytelling practices, including a traditional Maasai oral meeting—the enkiguena—to decenter conventional scientific ways of communicating about, knowing, and managing nature. Author Mara J. Goldman draws on more than two decades of deep ethnographic and ecological engagements in the semi-arid rangelands of East Africa—in landscapes inhabited by pastoral and agropastoral Maasai people and heavily utilized by wildlife. These iconic landscapes have continuously been subjected to boundary drawing practices by outsiders, separating out places for people (villages) from places for nature (protected areas). Narrating Nature follows the resulting boundary crossings that regularly occur—of people, wildlife, and knowledge—to expose them not as transgressions but as opportunities to complicate the categories themselves and create ontological openings for knowing and being with nature otherwise.

Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Enkiguena Agenda I: Where Are the Animals?
• 2. Mapping the Study Site of Emanyara Maasailand
• Interlude I. Parsing Knowledge, Closing off Dialogue
• 3. Enkiguena Agenda II: Managing the Range for Wildlife and Livestock
• Interlude II. The Lost Calf
• 4. Bounding Nature and Reorganizing Maasailand
• 5. Enkiguena Agenda III: Wildlife Pathways and Conservation Corridors
• Interlude III. “But There Was No Space to Speak”
• 6. Mountains Do Not Meet but People Do: A Postscript to the Enkiguena
• Conclusion. Knowing and Being with Nature Otherwise
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index