Narrating Nature

Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8165-4696-1
Verlag: University of Arizona Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 418 g

Reihe: Critical Green Engagements: Investigating the Green Economy and its Alternatives

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Goldman, Mara Jill

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltschutz, Umwelterhaltung
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 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
- Append
- Glossary
- Notes
- References
- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Mara J. Goldman is an associate professor of geography and fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She co-edited Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies.