1 Introduction
This chapter explores the possible reasons for both why the idea of climate change is sometimes rejected as well as why—in some contexts—it is not a commonly articulated concern. More specifically, it interrogates the reasons as to why the idea of climate change is wholeheartedly embraced by most actors along the translation chain from international to regional actors until it reaches the village of Terrat in Maasailand, where it is to some extent questioned and rejected, or only hesitantly adopted. During my fieldwork in Tanzania, climate change discourses were omnipresent throughout policymaking circles and regularly featured on the radio, in newspapers, at conferences and workshops, and in daily conversation. Yet, I encountered few traces of climate change narratives in Terrat. While some informants gave accounts of the lack of rain that they experience nowadays, others perceived climate variability as being part and parcel of their normal lives. This ‘climate change void’ has fascinated me in my fieldwork ever since I was confronted with this absence of what I was looking for, at least as far as Maasailand was concerned. The data that is presented here is based on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, which I carried out between 2012 and 2014.1 In this research, I moved between (inter)national and local platforms where the idea of climate change was translated by different stakeholders and policymakers before reaching Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. The central argument that I put forward in this chapter is a simple one, namely that we have to take the absence of data—in this case, the lack of climate change narratives and observations—seriously. How does one write about and give meaning to something that is not overtly present?
This chapter interrogates some theoretical concerns related to the question of why ideas sometimes do not travel or are not adopted.2 Against this background, the absence of climate change ‘realities’ will be juxtaposed with the presence of other concerns, including those influenced by the ways in which earlier environmental paradigms have entered Maasailand. By contextualising older discourses that have profoundly shaped human-environment relations in Maasailand, such as conservation, this chapter sheds light on how the idea of climate change is entangled with current socio-political structures in both old and novel ways. I begin by discussing some epistemological considerations on the notion of absence, before continuing with more in-depth analysis of my research findings.
2 On Seeing Climate Change
We tend to find what we are looking for. This does not mean that there is no real basis to what we find. Rather, it is just that reality has a tendency to reveal itself in accordance with the perspectives through which it is engaged.
gareth morgan3
Since climate change’s rise as a key topic for anthropological analysis and ethnographic inquiry over the last two decades, it has, perhaps to nobody’s surprise, been accompanied an anthropological lens that captures and encounters the phenomenon almost everywhere across the globe. Of course, anthropologists do not see or feel climate change with the naked eye or their bare senses, for it is a phenomenon that is—unlike its manifestations—not perceptible in unmediated form.4 However, we ask questions about it, and very frequently we receive satisfying answers that by and large testify to the fact that climate change is real and that it is already being experienced by ‘vulnerable’, or ‘frontline’, communities on the ground. As we all do, the communities that are generally under anthropological climate change scrutiny (i.e. those in the Global South) have a tangible relationship with the weather, for they feel and experience short-term weather patterns as much as they give meaning to longer-term climatic conditions based on their experiential realities. It is often assumed and stated that communities that are more ‘nature-bound’ and whose livelihoods are directly dependent on nature have a much more detailed, attached, and thorough understanding of their environment, thus making them climate change witnesses par excellence.5 Nonetheless, we should not forget that the ways in which we give meaning to the weather and the climate, and the knowledge that is generated in the process, is always the result of a mediated process that is given life through the categories we have at hand and the language that we use.6
Furthermore, it is not only impossible to isolate natural climate variability from its anthropogenic counterpart through observation, but it is all the more difficult to translate a global statistical abstraction into a personal and tangible reality.7 Yet, climate change realities and testimonies abound within anthropological studies and social science research. Only recently have anthropologists advanced a more critical position that scrutinizes the bases for such knowledge claims.8 In a similar vein, this chapter seeks to build upon this increasing epistemological ‘climate change sensibility’ by arguing that reflexivity towards the concepts that we employ9 could prove a welcome corrective to the overwhelming climate change realities that we bring into being with narrations of climate change and crisis as each other’s cognate.
By way of reflecting on concepts, a crucial distinction must be made between direct (sensory) observation of changing environmental and climatic phenomena, on the one hand, and having access to climate change information and knowledge, or the so-called reception of secondary sources, on the other.10 This distinction is important, since having access to the idea of climate change—in the form of scientific knowledge or discourse—inevitably informs and shapes the ways in which people give meaning to and speak about their (changing) environments and lifeworlds.11 Yet, as anthropologist Peter Rudiak-Gould has demonstrated, the treatment of these two distinct sources of information in anthropological climate change research has not come without epistemological confusion. Firstly, the majority of research has largely focused on observation rather than reception, while studies on the interplay between the two are largely missing. Secondly, and of more relevance to the argument that will be put forward in this chapter, climate change accounts by local or ‘indigenous’ communities are predominantly treated as being solely the fruit of direct observation.12 However, in this ever more interconnected world in which people increasingly have access to global information flows, local climate change accounts are often the result of the interaction between direct observation and translated information.13
In a similar vein, Julie Cruikshank, among other anthropologists, has queried the category of ‘local knowledge’, emphasising that local knowledge is not something static or timeless that can be ‘discovered’, but that it is instead continuously being brought into being via human encounters and could possibly also be used to inform science.14 This attests to the idea that knowledge does not emerge in isolation, but is always in motion and a co-production involving many different people and manifesting itself in many different forms. Hastrup shares such a perspective on climate knowledge, which allows for an understanding of the ways in which perceptions and knowledge continuously come into being by focusing on the entanglement of places and epistemic practices. According to Hastrup the task of anthropology is “to show how such potentially incongruent sources and knowledge practices fuse into a shared knowledge space, upon which people may act. In the process, traditional cosmologies may bend and twist, incorporating new national ideologies as well as scientific knowledge from many sources.”15 In this chapter, the term ‘climate change realities’ refers to this complex set of interactions between knowledge that constantly takes form through both sensory observation and the reception of information as practices that take (and make) place in a particular ‘knowledge space’. Two theoretical propositions inform my overall argument.
First, it is posited that if we wish to make sense of local or ‘located’ climate change accounts, while acknowledging their biophysical and sensory underpinnings we also have to be attentive to the ways in which climate change travels as an idea that entangles with, shapes, and is shaped by varying perceptions and lifeworlds in an array of intricate ways.16 Second, environmental or climatic changes often coincide with societal changes;17 hence climate change discourses can provide “the ‘imaginative grist’ for making sense of broader societal changes.”18 This awareness is important for the following analysis, in which a conundrum will be addressed: what do we do when—considering both reception and observation as sources of information—our findings do not immediately match global climate change narratives, in which a looming crisis is assumed for vulnerable populations in the Global South? Furthermore, how can we make sense of the fact that the communities under study are, to varying degrees, cognisant of the scientific rationale underpinning climate change, yet either reject the idea or do not embrace it? These questions will be explored on the basis of the fieldwork that I carried out among the Maasai (agro)pastoralists on the Simanjiro plains in northern Tanzania.
More specifically, the subsequent sections address the following questions: How is climate change translated in Terrat, northern Tanzania, and how do different truth regimes fuse or confuse as they encounter one another in a particular place? How can we make sense of the overall absence and rejection of climate change discourses as well as the lack of otherwise all too conspicuous experiential climate change realities? Based on findings (or rather the lack thereof) that are similar to my own, Greschke and her research partners have raised questions that I deem relevant in this context: “Are they [the informants] all ‘sceptics’ or ignorant?” And: “Do we primarily have to enlighten our research fields about the ‘real’ causes and dynamics of the global socio-ecological system […]?”19 These questions bring us back to old anthropological concerns about the relationship between the researcher and the subject of the research—and the models of abstraction that we use and generate—that deserve more critical attention within current climate change debates.
3 Blinded by Sight20
Anthropology and the social sciences have embarked rather late upon climate change research, which was first considered a topic of primary interest for the natural sciences and was thus largely confined to technical and positivist inquiry.21 Nowadays we can speak of a new climate change paradigm that has progressively set the stage for the anthropological research agenda. This disciplinary engagement is to be embraced as a re-examination of climate change by the more interpretative sciences, contributing to a critical understanding of the global and universaling tendencies that climate change discourses can bring about22 and yielding insights into the discordances between locally grounded approaches and global models and discourses.23 Yet, this climate change focus similarly bears the risk of engendering blind spots, for it increasingly serves as an all-embracing explanatory framework. I contend that we should not lose sight of the reasons why climate change realities are not to be found everywhere we look, as is imagined and encapsulated in global climate change narratives that by and large evoke a sense of crisis.
Given the burgeoning global awareness of human-induced climate change, not only anthropologists but also climate-cognisant communities across the globe are increasingly prone to explaining environmental changes through a climate change lens. This should in turn lead us to reflect on the local accounts that we as anthropologists assemble and that we tend to accept as direct proof of climate change all too easily. Mike Hulme has criticised the way scholars have elevated climate change to become the dominant predictor variable in a complex matrix of interdependencies as a new form of climate determinism or ‘reductionism’.24 Drawing on this epistemological critique, this chapter is an ethnographically based discussion of absence, a phenomenon that has been given scant attention within the wider climate change literature.
As such, we must also allow for the possibility that the increasing ‘visibility’ of climate change on the ground could be (at least partially) the consequence of a new research focus and corresponding paradigm, or, as Gareth Morgan has framed it, our tendency “to find what we are looking for.”25 By exploring or positing this alternative view, one clearly enters a slippery ontological road, for fear of being accused of neglecting the severity of climate change impacts across the globe. Yet the point here is not (merely) a constructivist one—in the sense that language is our access to reality—but primarily addresses issues of representation, namely the relationship between the anthropologist and the empirical reality that he or she seeks to describe. For example, Edmund Leach, among others, criticised the idea that the social structure of a society is directly observable, insisting instead that the analyst created an abstract model that was the product of a particular way of looking at the world. As such, his criticism was directed at how anthropological analyses create ‘entities’ by lifting them out of the space and time of social interaction.26 It is in this context that Greschke,27 drawing on Albert Schütz, has pointed out the underlying difference between physical and social facts, thereby reminding us that natural and social climate scientists begin from fundamentally different realities. Whereas natural scientists focus on the physical facts, social scientists deal predominantly with the social facts of global warming, and hence with “second-order observations” as opposed to “first-order observations” or the biophysical effects of climate change.28 By drawing attention to climate change as an explanation of, and primary determinant for, social realities and vulnerabilities on the ground, anthropological climate change models risk concealing as much of human-environment interactions as they seek to reveal.
Anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup has rightfully criticised the manner in which a climate change lens has been used to push interpretations that focus on the devastating impacts of global warming on local communities, as “[…] climate is no longer seen to make places but rather mostly to destroy them, with anthropologists called upon to mediate local understandings through their incomparable method of fieldwork.”29 This apocalyptic eye has by and large found ways of seeing and talking about communities in the Global South—with particular urgency in the case of sub-Saharan Africa and small island developing states—in terms of climate vulnerability, or an “adaptation deficit.”30 One consequence of global narratives on climate change that regard frontline communities in the Global South as victims is that it deprives them of their agency, thereby “redirecting their fate out of their hands.”31 The agropastoral Maasai communities in Tanzania are considered to be among the most vulnerable in the country to the consequences of climate change.32 However, ngos representing the Maasai in Tanzania have a different view of the pastoralists’ vulnerability. Instead of seeing them as climate change victims, they consider them to be “masters of adaptation,”33 for their ways of life not only boast a long history of adapting to climatic fluctuations,34 but historical evidence shows that their nomadic lifestyles have even sprung therefrom.35
Finally, scholars have pointed to the danger of ‘naturalising’ when using the climate change lens as an explanatory framework. This occurs in particular by erasing the global political economy from the focus of analysis, with poverty and vulnerability increasingly being explained by the natural and (seemingly) apolitical forces of the climate.36 In the case of the agropastoral Maasai, who have had a longstanding problematic relationship with the government of Tanzania, climate change discourses are indeed embraced by the latter as the ultimate scapegoat to explain away the deplorable socio-economic conditions experienced by the Maasai.37 As will be demonstrated below, by retrofitting older conservation discourses the government seeks to obscure ongoing practices of land alienation and the fact that thousands of Maasai are increasingly losing their rights in the name of conservation. In this context the discourse on adaptation to climate change is also embraced by regional ngos as an opportunity to bring about new pathways of development for the Maasai. However, the idea of “masters of adaptation” should also be seen as a counter-discourse that at the same time has also provided ground for criticising the top-down nature of government planning, competing land uses, and incompatible policies that are limiting the communities in their traditional planning mechanisms.38
4 Methods
From 2012 to 2014, I carried out fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork. During this research I moved between (inter)national and local platforms, where the idea of climate change was translated among different stakeholders and policymakers before reaching Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. Trying to understand how climate change realities came about in Terrat, I employed participant observation as a basic ethnographic method, which mainly consisted of walking, herding cows, fetching water, going to the market, spending time with the local men and women, cultivating the land, and attending church services. Moreover, I employed a set of mixed (yet predominantly qualitative) methods, such as in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and a survey. All interviews were conducted with a research assistant who translated between English, the Maa language, and occasionally Swahili (depending on the informant and the concepts that we were using). The majority of the local residents speak Swahili, but the main language in Terrat is Maa. However, since many educational activities also occur in Swahili, knowledge and information about climate change was often communicated in this lingua franca. Officially, there is no accepted translation for ‘climate change’ in Maa yet, but some attempts have been made by the local radio station (a point to which I will return below). My choice of interlocutors aimed at a balance between both female and male respondents as well as different age groups, since Maasai society is structured along age sets (with each person staying within his or her own age set throughout his or her life). Furthermore, I talked to informants from different social layers, such as Christians and non-Christians (although the majority of society is Christian), richer and poorer families, and families that both cultivate crops and keep cattle and families that only engage in pastoralism. In order not to bias my informants, I adhered to a methodology that Rudiak-Gould has framed as “following best practices in measuring climate change perceptions.”39 I therefore did not announce myself as a climate change researcher, but explained that I was doing research about the environment.40 Moreover, I always began interviews with general questions about people’s livelihoods, and only towards the end, if they would not talk about it themselves, did I gradually address more weather-specific topics. This enabled me to understand whether my informants would spontaneously speak about changes in the weather, seasons, or climate.41
Moreover, in addition to ‘being there’, I also followed trajectories of ‘getting there’, tracing the idea of climate change along its varied and multiple trajectories from international platforms to national translation forums and ultimately to Terrat itself. I analysed several media sources such as radio programmes, newspaper articles, ngo talks, and educational video material. Furthermore, I attended workshops, conferences, and sensitisation meetings where Maasai pastoralists were exposed to (new) climate change information. While my stay in Terrat was primarily intended to be devoted to grasping processes of translating climate change, due to its apparent absence, I was ultimately, and naturally, bound to pursue the task of making sense of what my informants actually conveyed to me. As we shall see below, Terrat is inhabited by a society that finds itself enmeshed in a complex web of historically situated political discourses and environmental paradigms that have profoundly shaped human-environment relations.
5 Study Site: Terrat Village and the Interpretive Context
As the map below indicates, the village of Terrat lies in the midst of Tanzania’s Maasailand, on the northeastern outskirts of Tarangire National Park. The village is home to some 6,000 agropastoral Maasai people, who predominantly live in shared enclosed compounds (boma in Swahili, engang in Maa) scattered across the vast plains of Simanjiro. In the case of a good year, during the long rainy season, the area is exceptionally beautiful and blessed with an abundance of lush pastures, blossoming flowers, and sufficient crops like maize or beans to feed whole families. When the rains arrive on time, if they arrive at all, people and cattle alike will have the chance to recover from and regain their strength after the harsh dry season. In this period of abundance, there is no need for long-distance movement, since grass and water are usually found in the local vicinity. The contrast with the dry season could not be sharper, during which the area turns into a semi-desert, with dust clouds covering the pastures and land, water sources drying up, and food for both people and cattle gradually diminishing. This is the time of the year when the illmuran (circumcised boys, or young men often glossed as warriors) begin their search for greener pastures and water sources.
It might go without saying that the Maasai are inextricably bound to their cattle, since this symbiotic relationship is at the heart of how they sustain their livelihoods and forms the fabric of socio-cultural life. Cattle provide the Maasai with milk, butter, meat (blood, while still perceived to have been a good adaptation strategy in the past, is only consumed rarely nowadays as it is prohibited by most churches), and hides. Furthermore, their other livestock, including goats and sheep, also form part of the lifeblood that sustains social relationships (bride wealth, gift exchanges, loans or exchanges to build patron–client relations or to repent for injustices) and feature in ritual practices and feasts (births, circumcisions, weddings, sacrifices, rain prayers). Moreover, human-animal relationships form part and parcel of the ways in which the Maasai adapt to a continuously changing environment and climate. Many informants referred to their herd as fulfilling the role of a bank that provided them with money to buy maize and other foodstuffs, pay their children’s school fees, purchase medication, or cover unforeseen expenses in the case of a drought or other (environmental) calamity. While the Maasai have a history of semi-nomadism, they are increasingly diversifying their livelihoods through the adoption of agriculture and labour migration.42 This is in part due to a long history of policies in Tanzania that have not been favourable for the Maasai, for they have increasingly been marginalised by their own government. All in all, the crafting of new sustainable livelihoods, such as their engagement with cultivation over the last fifty years, has been a response to rising population pressure, a reduction in grazing areas, and the increasing emphasis on and pressure from a monetary economy.43
6 History, Politics, and the Construction of Nature
While in the early 19th century, Maa-speaking people coexisted with different economic specialties, by the late 1870s the ethnonym ‘Maasai’ had shifted to indicate economic specialisation, and its meaning gradually coalesced with pastoralism.44 The fixation of Maasai identity and their consolidation into a ‘tribe’ of pastoralists began to take root when the British took control of Tanganyika from Germany in 1916. In order to control the scattered, ‘dangerous warriors’, and to find orderly alignments of culture, political system, and modes of production, the British administrators decided to isolate the Maasai in a newly created reserve that formed part of the driest and most desolate land in Tanganyika.45 The Simanjiro District (Map 1.1), of which Terrat forms a part, has been home to the Kisongo Maasai, who have dwelled here since the mid-19th century and began to practise transhumant pastoralism around the the beginningof the 20th century on the Simanjiro Plains. Their livelihood was based upon seasonal mobility patterns, in which families were on the move with their herds in search of water and green pastures, following a migratory pattern similar to that of the wildlife that can be found in the area.46 More specifically, during the dry season (July to October) both people and animals concentrated around permanent and reliable water sources, particularly along the Tarangire River. With the onset of the short rainy season (October or November) they would disperse onto the Simanjiro Plains.47 My informants pointed out that shifting far away with their herd has been until the present day their most vital strategy to adapt to a changing climate, a practice that is increasingly impeded by a reduction in grazing areas. In addition, a large herd size and good social relations based on trust and reciprocity are crucial to adapt to environmental changes and are particularly important during drought.48 Maasai life in general and human-environment relationships in particular have undergone drastic changes from the early days of colonialism to the neo-liberal political regime of today, which allows private investors to lease land at the expense of local communities. One particular continuity in political efforts, which began around the 1920s, has largely been driven by discourses that have perceived the pastoral mode of living as environmentally destructive. These misconceptions have largely resulted in policies that have impacted upon precisely the Maasai’s most important adaptation strategies. The Tanzanian state’s attempts to promote the adoption of agriculture and to relocate the pastoralists in order to force them to live a sedentary life date back to the era of British colonial rule.49 However, even after independence, when President Nyerere established the socialist-inspired villagisation programme known as Ujamaa (‘familyhood’ in Swahili, Operation Imparnati in Maa) that reached Maasailand around 1977–1978, the pastoralists were forced into permanent settlements and compelled to engage in farming and reduce their herd size. This villagisation programme was perceived by the Maasai as yet another attempt by the state to subjugate them and alienate them from their grazing lands.50
A dominant paradigm that has shaped historical trajectories of the Maasai in Tanzania and persisted throughout different political regimes has been the idea that pastoralists have an ‘irrational’ attachment to the environment and their livestock. At the beginning of the 20th century, Herskovits posited the assumption that pastoral people maximise herd size regardless of the carrying capacity of their rangelands.51 Similarly, Hardin’s 1968 article on “The Tragedy of the Commons” was buttressed by the supposition that pastoral systems are fundamentally unsustainable.52 These scientific paradigms and Western conceptions about pastoral inefficiency continued to shape rangeland policies that advocated for the total abandonment of pastoralism or for a sedentary lifestyle, a reduction in herd sizes, or the privatisation of rangeland resources.53 Yet, while being externally imposed, over time these scientific theories about grazing capacities were perpetuated by the Tanzanian government and continue to persist into the present day.54 The pastoral inefficiency paradigm has been so perseverant in part because it has served the conservationist agenda so well. As a result, supposedly objective scientific arguments have been misused to justify political ends rather than to support sound management.55 What is important to bear in mind is that this part of northern Tanzania is well-known worldwide for its scenic beauty and spectacular wildlife. Hence, this region has a particular history of being subjected to Western images of nature, which are based on the ideology of separating ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.56
Terrat in Northeastern Tanzania
© monika feinen, university of cologne
Conservationist ideology had already started to play out in Tanganyika during the onset of the German colonial period, which coincided with a devastating crisis for wildlife populations due to the rinderpest epizootic that entered East Africa in 1889 and caused ninety per cent of ruminant ungulates to die.57 Hence, to protect these animals the first hunting regulations were implemented in the colony in 1891, after which protected areas for wildlife followed. When the British took control of Tanganyika from the Germans after the First World War, these game reserves were re-gazetted with varying levels of restricted access and wildlife use.58 In the 1930s the first national park was created, for which pastoral people needed to be evicted from near Lake Manyara. This trend continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s and gained momentum after independence.59 Today, land evictions in the name of conservation continue to take place, while the Maasai still receive the blame for environmentally destructive practices. Very recently, an old land conflict came to the fore after thousands of Maasai were violently evicted from their lands in Loliondo. This conflict dates back to the year 1992 and resurfaced after former President Kikwete leased the land to a private investor from Dubai for hunting purposes. The government initiated a police operation and violently evicted thousands of Maasai from a disputed area east of the world-famous Serengeti National Park, leaving more than 3,000 people homeless and more than 50,000 cattle without access to grazing lands. Allegations of human rights abuses followed, while economic losses to the communities, such as burnt houses, the death of livestock, and property loss, were reported.60
When we lost this area to the national park we did not know that in the long run this would have such drastic consequences for us and our cattle. But now since life has become difficult because we lack pastures, we realise that this land was really important for our cattle and for our own survival.
One striking similarity between the older conservation discourses and the new climate change idea is the artificial separation between nature and culture on which both narratives are premised. The idea of climate change that is largely translated as a secular discourse finds little resonance within Maasai society for people who generally do not detach changes in the weather and climate from altered values, eroding morals, and general ways of being and believing (see the section on values and culture below).
In brief, if we wish to understand the broader interpretive context of which Terrat forms part, we need to historicise the village’s exposure to the travelling ideas of the construction of nature, thereby revealing the fear and actual problem of large-scale land alienation that has haunted Maasailand over the past decades and continues to do so today. It is within a neo-liberal political landscape that Maasai grazing land is being sold to private investors, leading to extensive and violent mass evictions, thus depriving many pastoralists of their most basic rights and reinforcing their marginalised position within Tanzania. It is therefore not surprising that this political context has incited a certain reluctance to accept foreign (environmental) discourses as well as an opposition to externally imposed policies. Not only in Terrat, but also in surrounding villages in the vicinity of Tarangire National Park, there exists an overwhelming perception that there is a strong risk of losing land due to government-imposed conservation plans.63
The restriction of grazing areas has not only resulted in changing livelihoods among local residents, but also in a deeply altered identity. An account by an informant, a middle-aged man, gives a good idea of how shifting human-environment relations and changing perceptions of the environment go hand in hand: “It could be that the rains are less nowadays, but it is hard to tell because we are also more dependent on rain because we live and eat differently. Our mentality has changed.” Similarly, an elderly woman commented: “Perhaps the weather has changed, but we have changed too. We used to follow the clouds, nowadays we have settled.” Thus while ‘following the clouds’ used to guide the Maasai’s relationship to their environment and the climate, due to drastic changes in their ways of living it has become impossible to disentangle climatic and societal changes.64
My informants’ most widely shared concerns were their lack of access to drinking water, good schools for their children in the area, basic healthcare facilities, medication, and good roads and general infrastructure. Other major issues were the lack of rain and pasturage for cattle (mainly during the dry season), population growth, diseases spread by wildebeest that give birth in the area and posed a risk to cattle, the lack of dipping facilities, and the high costs of vaccinations and medication for treating animals. Some informants mentioned the challenges of cultivating in the area due to the unpredictable rainfall and lack of sufficient rain as well as to wildlife (mainly zebras and impala) that destroy and eat their crops. Finally, most informants mentioned the fact that there were too many wild animals grazing in their area and finishing off the grasses before the onset of the dry season, thus not leaving enough pasture for their herds to survive until the next significant rains. One underlying problem is the fact that while wildlife can enter the lands of Terrat, the Maasai cannot enter the grazing area of Tarangire with their herds, which contains the most fertile dry season pastures.
7 On Climate
The second feature of the interpretive context and one of the reasons why the idea of climate change does not resonate in Terrat has, at least partly, a climatic grounding. As much as the semi-nomadic Maasai have faced rapid socio-cultural, political, and economic changes in the face of globalisation, they have also been confronted with an environment that is known to be characterised by strong, and often unpredictable, ecological fluctuations.65 The Simanjiro ecosystem forms part of a semi-arid environment, or Savanna drylands, and is characterised by bimodal rain patterns, with an annual average rainfall of 500–800 mm. Rains are unreliable, and the area is drought-prone.66 There is commonly a long period of rains (Masika in Swahili and Alari in Maa) that occurs approximately between February and April; in some years the dry season is first followed by a short period of rains (Vuli in Swahili and Irkisirat in Maa). However, in Simanjiro precipitation is limited and is spatially and temporally highly variable,67 while droughts occur frequently. The annual occurrence of (partial or complete) crop failure is testimony to the ecosystem’s inherent climatic variability and to the fact that—at odds with the government’s push to stimulate agriculture—the area is not very well suited for cultivation. One informant expressed the insecurity of cultivation in a vivid, metaphoric way: “planting crops is like gambling, sometimes you win but more often you lose.” Similarly, the chairman of the village mentioned that “it is more common not to harvest than to harvest. You cannot know in advance if you will lose or not because the environment is very unpredictable here. But we cannot lose hope so we keep on trying, even though we lose a lot of money and effort.”
In other words, irregular rainfall patterns and environmental hazards like severe droughts are (to some extent) part and parcel of normality. The droughts of the past are ingrained in people’s memories and still spoken about, have been given special names, and feature prominently in warrior songs. For example, the year 1997 has been called alari lengolong (‘year of the sun’) and is remembered as an extraordinarily dry year in which all pastures dried up. Another very bad year was 2005, when numerous cows died and many Maasai arrived from Kenya in search of pastures. It is remembered by the name alari leunoto oorkoryanga, referring to the circumcision ceremony that initiated a new age group of illmuran that took place in that year. The unpredictability of the climate makes climate change a confusing idea, as emphasised by the traditional leader: “When I heard about climate change for the first time I thought it was just a repetition of the past. We had many drought spells in our history.”
Nevertheless, many villagers in Terrat continue to cultivate crops, as this forms an important livelihood diversification strategy. Their accounts reveal that the benefits of a somewhat rare successful harvest may outweigh the risks and costs of crop failure.68 Furthermore, this attests to the fact that irregular rainfall and climate variability—and thus unpredictable wealther pattners have been accepted as the norm. It is possible to imagine that in a relatively stable climate with regular seasonal variation, manifestations of climate change might be more distinctive and thus easier to observe. By contrast, the climate in Terrat is characterised by such pronounced variability that the idea of climate change arrives as a notion that appears initially all too common, but ultimately becomes alien for its construction of a stable climate as the norm. As one older female informant put it: “Of course the rains are changing these days, they have never been the same in this locality.” In understanding the interpretive context in which climate change is translated it is thus crucial to consider both the climatic as well as the environmental context and the consequent production of nature. Climate itself is not so much spoken of in terms of fear, threat, or crisis; what is at stake rather are dwindling resources and restricted mobility patterns. In a similar vein, the broader network of ngos representing pastoralist groups in Tanzania holds the opinion that climate change is just one factor among many that exacerbate the Maasai’s already marginalised position. In fact, regional ngos argue that the pastoral mode of living—as a complex livelihood system based on (seasonal) mobility—is inherently very well adapted to changing climatic conditions. Since mobility features among their most important adaptation strategies, their decreased access to traditional grazing land forms an increasing impediment to pastoralists’ livelihood security.69
8 On Culture, Values, and Believing
Researcher:“Do you think that the rains nowadays are different from the past?”Informant A:“Yes, in the past my grandfathers, they went to large trees to pray to their god, then they made a sacrifice. And at the same time they went to see a witchdoctor to ask for rain. […] But then we realised that they are not really gods because they die as normal people. So when the Christians came and told us about Christ we decided to follow them. […] Now in church we are happy to have found the real God, and we believe that when we pray everything will be possible.”Informant B:“Nowadays people don’t respect each other anymore. Our society has changed; we don’t have faith in each other any longer.”
The final explanation why climate change as a scientific (and supposedly secular) discourse is rejected in Terrat is both a cultural and religious one. The great majority of my informants described an intrinsic relationship between morality, social ties, and the climate. For instance, an old man who is known for his extensive environmental knowledge and weather prediction skills stated: “The rains have changed because we have changed. We are not good people anymore, so the rains are not good either.” Especially when asking elderly people about changes in the environment, seasonal changes, or altered rainfall patterns, they began to exclaim their discontent over the behaviour of the younger generation, whom they accused of no longer greeting properly nor showing any respect for others. When speaking about changes in the climate, the Maasai in Terrat—like many other societies worldwide—told tales of general changes in their culture, belief system, and way of life. In other words, the idea of ‘climate’ cannot be detached from themselves and the world they inhabit, and, as such, climate discourse must be understood as a meta-commentary on society’s moral well-being.70
It should be emphasised here that the majority of Maasai have converted to Christianity. Yet, the ‘traditional’ Maasai religion is a monotheistic belief system in which people worship the (predominantly female) deity Eng’ai; while many different names exist for Eng’ai, there is only one supreme being, and therefore a certain continuity between the traditional way of believing and Christianity can be observed. Nevertheless, religious practices such as ritualistic rain prayer and other customary religious rituals underwent drastic changes due to the establishment of churches in the area. Interestingly, the Maasai were initially suspicious of Christianity (and other features that they considered to be part and parcel of ‘modernity’s project’). The mass conversion took place relatively late and occurred predominantly among women, despite concerted efforts by Catholic missionaries to evangelise men.71
For the villagers of Terrat, talking about the climate and the weather is a commentary upon a rapidly changing society in which God expresses his discontent with people, as manifested in the tangible realities of the sky. For example, similar to many other religious traditions in the world, the climate is seen as a mirror of God’s judgment of a society in which drought is perceived to be a curse and rain as a blessing. Some climate- cognisant informants asked me the question of “whether it is true that these people from Europe and America who call themselves scientists do not believe in God?” Other cognisant informants wondered “why these scientists, who are talking about climate change on the radio, say that God has nothing to do with it?” However, even informants who were unaware of climate change asked me this question frequently, such as the chairman, who enquired: “Is it true that white people like you don’t trust God?” The fundamental transcendental and moral connection that exists between God, society, and the weather is revealed by the most significant word in the Maa language: Eng’ai, which concurrently means God, rain, and the sky (or heaven). Remarkably enough, the first attempts to translate ‘climate’ into the Maa language by the radio station were contested by the traditional leader of Terrat, who stated that the climate could only be captured by the holy trinity of Eng’ai.72 According to the traditional leader, who understood that climate change is the result of industrial pollution, the domains of rain and sky are—ultimately—in the hands of God. This nascent scientific story about climate change with its secular causality appeared for many informants to be a genuine attempt to disprove the existence of God, to deny his power—a disavowal of their understanding of the world.
9 Concluding Reflections
This chapter has dealt with a largely underexplored phenomenon within the climate change research agenda in anthropology: what to do with an apparent lack of both experiential as well as discursive climate change realities? In exploring the socio-cultural consequences of climate change across the globe, we as researchers also have to make sense of the absence of that which we were initially looking for, rather than imposing our own climate change lens and crisis narrations. The abstract models that we create are the product of a particular way of looking at the world; juxtaposing them with what is found on the ground might prove a necessary epistemological corrective to the climate change focus that is currently dominating the research agenda. In a similar vein, I have argued that one consequence of the current discourse on climate change—which almost exclusively manifests itself in terms of crisis—is that it can create epistemological blind spots. As many other researchers have also demonstrated, if we turn our research subjects into victims of climate change we risk depriving them of their agency. The case of the large-scale land evictions in Maasailand has illustrated that the idea of climate change also serves as a scapegoat for obscuring power relations (for those in power). This is not to say that climate change is not there, or that it is not (or will not become) a real concern for the Maasai. However, we must take seriously the reasons why both the idea of climate change as ‘the ultimate crisis’ as well as biophysical experiential realities do not always resonate with the socio-cultural horizons and knowledge practices that emerge in a certain locality.
Rather than reproducing climate determinism, social science climate research should allow for the fact that—at least at times—climate change might not be the supreme or sole determinant of contemporary lifeworlds of supposedly ‘vulnerable’ societies in the Global South. For the Maasai pastoralists in Terrat (and presumably elsewhere in Maasailand),73 primary concerns are the lack of access to basic facilities and services such as schools, potable water, medication, and pastures for their cattle as well as the ways in which the construction of national parks has limited their access to natural resources. Bringing the complexity entailed by the politics of climate change knowledge back into our analysis means doing justice to local concerns and processes of marginalisation, whose root causes may reach beyond climate change while being politically and historically produced.74
Finally, the point has been made that climate change is also an idea that travels, entangles, and takes on different shapes along its manifold journeys. In order to understand the ways in which this novel idea takes root—or does not—a thorough insight into the interpretive context is needed. Against this background, arguing for or against the visibility of climate change is perhaps not so much the task of anthropologists. What remains for our field then is to stay true to the old anthropological merit of seeking not to enlighten our research subjects, but rather searching for a reflexive lens that stands receptive to the intricacies and complexities of what we encounter in the field—even if this means that we acknowledge that what we are looking for, or expect to find, is said to be not there.
This research formed part of the dfg-funded priority programme spp 1448, ‘Adaptation and Creativity in Africa—Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder’. I wish to thank the dfg for providing financial support. This is a reworked chapter from my dissertation: Love in Times of Climate Change: How an Idea of Adaptation to Climate Change Travels to Northern Tanzania (Cologne: University of Cologne, 2017).
While the focus of this paper is mainly on Terrat village, the rejection of climate change was prevalent among educated Maasai too. During several workshops that I attended the adaptation to climate change discourse was at times (emotionally) contested by Maasai participants from the grassroots and ngo representatives, on the basis of the claim that they have other things to worry about than climate change, such as land alienation in relation to conservation issues. I have written about the politics of adaptation elsewhere: “A Clash of Adaptations—How Adaptation to Climate Change is Translated in Northern Tanzania,” in A Critical Approach to Climate Change Adaptation. Discourses, Policies, and Practices, ed. Silja Klepp and Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez (New York: Routledge, 2018), 37–54.
Morgan, Gareth, Images of Organization (London, Delhi: Sage, 2006), 338.
I am aware that this is not an uncontested statement, but it should principally be understood as a philosophical position that holds that as soon as we claim that a certain climatic event is the result of climate change, this assertion is always mediated by language.
Some scholars have also questioned this dichotomy pitting a more nature-dependent ‘South’ against a detached and industrialised ‘North’. They argue that this distinction is exaggerated as both are as dependent on the environment as the other; see, for example, Emmanuel Kreike (Chapter 3 of this volume).
By proposing a theory of direct perception, Tim Ingold has criticised such a ‘cognitivist account of perception’—which holds that people can only know and act upon their environment indirectly through the medium of cultural representations—whose roots lie, according to Ingold, in a Western, dualistic worldview. He instead proposes the notion of mutualism between people and the environment, an idea that I embrace. See: Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 39–40. Nevertheless, the point here is related to knowing climate change directly, which is inevitably a second-order observation.
Cf. Jasanoff, Sheila, “A New Climate for Society,” Theory, Culture & Society 27.2–3 (2010): 233–253.
Hastrup, Kirsten, “Comparing Climate Worlds: Theorising Across Ethnographic Fields,” in Grounding Global Climate Change: Contributions from the Social and Cultural Sciences, ed. Heike Greschke and Julia Tischler (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 139–154; Greschke, Heike, “The Social Facts of Climate Change: An Ethnographic Approach,” in Grounding Global Climate Change: Contributions from the Social and Cultural Sciences, ed. Heike Greschke and Julia Tischler (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 121–138; Rudiak-Gould, Peter, “‘We Have Seen It with Our Own Eyes’: Why We Disagree about Climate Change Visibility,” Weather, Climate and Society 5 (2013): 120–132; Rudiak-Gould, Peter, “The Influence of Science Communication on Indigenous Climate Change Perception: Theoretical and Practical Implications,” Human Ecology 42.1 (2014): 75–86.
Cf. Uekötter, Frank, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: A Death-Defying Look at the Future of the Climate Debate,” in Grounding Global Climate Change: Contributions from the Social and Cultural Sciences (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 175–181.
Rudiak-Gould, Peter, “Climate Change and Anthropology: The Importance of Reception Studies,” Anthropology Today 27.2 (2011): 9–12; Rudiak-Gould, Peter, “Promiscuous Corroboration and Climate Change Translation: A Case Study from the Marshall Islands,” Global Environmental Change 22.1 (2012): 46–54.
The asymmetries regarding media coverage and people’s concern for global environmental problems also came to the fore in the ethnographic research carried out by the research team of the Climate Worlds project. See: Greschke, “The Social Facts of Climate Change”; De Wit, Sara, Global Warning: An Ethnography of the Encounter Between Global and Local Climate-Change Discourses in the Bamenda Grassfields, Cameroon (Bamenda, Leiden: Langaa & African Studies Centre, 2015).
Rudiak-Gould, “The Influence of Science Communication on Indigenous Climate Change Perception,” 75.
De Wit, Sara, Arno Pascht, and Michaela Haug, “Translating Climate Change: Anthropology and the Travelling Idea of Climate Change—Introduction,” Sociologus 68.1 (2018): 1–20.
Cruikshank convincingly demonstrates in her collection of oral histories that glacier stories both speak of geophysical changes as well as depict human encounters with European colonials. See: Cruikshank, Julie, “Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories in the Saint Elias Mountains,” in The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Historical Reader, ed. Michael Dove (Boston: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 263.
Hastrup, “Comparing Climate Worlds,” 142.
Weisser, Florian, Michael Bollig, Martin Doevenspeck, and Detlef Müller-Mahn. “Translating the ‘Adaptation to Climate Change’ Paradigm: the Politics of a Travelling Idea in Africa,” The Geographical Journal 180.2 (2014): 111–119, accessed January 23, 2015. doi: 10.1111/geoj.12037; Eguavoen, Irit, Karsten Schulz, Sara de Wit, Florian Weisser, and Detlef Müller-Mahn, “Political Dimensions of Climate Change Adaptation: Conceptual Reflections and African Examples,” in Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation, ed. Walter Leal Filho (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2015), 1183–1198; Hulme, Mike, “Geographical Work at the Boundaries of Climate Change,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2008): 5–11; Hulme, Mike, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy: Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Hulme, Mike, “The Idea of Climate Change: Exploring Complexity, Plurality and Opportunity,” GAIA 19.3 (2010): 171–174; Hulme, Mike, “Climate and its Changes: a Cultural Appraisal,” Geo: Geography and Environment 2.5 (2015): 1–11; Bollig, Michael, and Sara de Wit, “Commentary on: Orlove, Ben, Heather Lazrus, Grete K. Hovelsrud, and Alessandra Giannini, Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World,” Current Anthropology 55.3 (2014): 262–264; De Wit, Sara, “Victims or Masters of Adaptation? How the Idea of Adaptation to Climate Change Travels Up and Down to a Village in Simanjiro, Maasailand Northern Tanzania,” Sociologus 68.1 (2018): 21–42.
Dove, Michael R., “Introduction,” in The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Historical Reader, ed. Michael Dove (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 1–36; Boersema, Jan J., Beelden van Paaseiland: Over de Duurzaamheid van een Cultuur (Amsterdam, Antwerp: Atlas), 2011.
Cruikshank, “Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories,” 266.
Greschke, “The Social Facts of Climate Change,” 124.
I took the liberty of borrowing the title of this subheading from Francis Nyamnjoh’s excellent article on postcolonial power structures in academia. See: Nyamnjoh, Francis, B., “Blinded by Sight: Divining the Future of Anthropology in Africa,” Africa Spectrum 47.2–3 (2012).
Buttel, Frederick H., Ann P. Hawkins, and Alison G. Power, “From Limits to Growth to Global Change: Constraints and Contradictions in the Evolution of Environmental Science and Ideology,” Global Environmental Change 1.1 (1990): 57–66; Hulme, Mike, “Meet the Humanities,” Nature Climate Change 1 (2011): 177–179.
Hulme, Mike, “Problems with Making and Governing Global Kinds of Knowledge,” Global Environmental Change 20 (2010): 558–564; Wisner, Ben et al., “Let Them Eat (Maize) Cake: Climate Change Discourse, Misinformation and Land Grabbing in Tanzania” (paper presented at “The International Conference on Global Land Grabbing II,” New York, October 17–19, 2012).
Greschke, and Tischler, “Grounding Global Climate Change”; Hastrup, Kirsten, ed., The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature (New York, London: Routledge, 2014).
Hulme, Mike, “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism,” Osiris 26.1 (2011): 247. For an example of climate reductionism and the construction of Maasai vulnerability in Kenya see: Filho, Walter, Nzengya, Daniel, Muasya, Gladys, Chemuliti, Judith, and Wanzuu Kalungu, Jokastah, “Climate change responses among the Maasai Community in Kenya,” Climatic Change 145.1–2 (2017), 71–83.
Morgan, Images of Organization, 338.
Leach, Edmund, 1970, in Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, ed. Henrietta L. Moore, and Todd Sanders (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 1–18: here 6.
Greschke, “The Social Facts of Climate Change.”
Albert Schütz, 1953, in Greschke, “The Social Facts of Climate Change,” 129.
Hastrup, “Comparing Climate Worlds,” 146.
ipcc, “Summary for Policymakers,” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. T.F. Stocker et al. (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Cf. Farbotko, Carol, and Heather Lazrus, “The First Climate Refugees? Contesting Global Narratives of Climate Change in Tuvalu,” Global Environmental Change 22.2 (2012): 382–390.
United Republic of Tanzania (urt), National Adaptation Program of Action (napa for the unfccc), 2007.
De Wit, “Victims or Masters of Adaptation?”
Tanzania Natural Resources Forum (tnrf), “Integrating Pastoralist Livelihoods and Wildlife Conservation? Options for Land Use and Conflict Resolution in Loliondo Division, Ngorongoro District,” Policy Paper, 2011.
Saringe, Emanuel, “Impact of Climate Change to Pastoralist and Hunter-Gatherer Communities of Tanzania: A Case Study of Kiteto and Simanjiro Districts,” Pastoralist Indigenous Non Governmental Organizations (PINGO’s) Forum, 2011.
See also Ferguson’s “Anti-Politics Machine” on development: Ferguson, James, The Anti-Politics Machine. ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Eguavoen et al., “Political Dimensions of Climate Change Adaptation”; Gesing, Friederike, Johannes Herbeck, and Silja Klepp, ed., Denaturalizing Climate Change: Migration, Mobilities and Space. Artec Paper 200, 2014, accessed November 3, 2015.
Bollig, and De Wit, “On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World.”
Tanzania Natural Resources Forum (tnrf) and International Institute for Environment and Development (iied), “Implications of Climate Change for Drylands Planning in Tanzania at District and National Levels: Opportunities and Challenges” (report of workshop held in Arusha, May 29–31, 2012).
Rudiak-Gould, “The Influence of Science Communication on Indigenous Climate Change Perception.”
In Swahili, the word mazingira means environment. It is a well-known word for people in Terrat who understand Swahili, because the radio station that is situated in the village (which is the only radio station that broadcasts programmes in both the Maa language and Swahili) has a weekly programme that discusses topics related to the environment. The word signifies much the same as what we mean by ‘the environment’, including wildlife.
Cf. Rudiak-Gould, “The Influence of Science Communication on Indigenous Climate Change Perception,” 76–77.
McCabe, Terrence J., and Paul W. Leslie, and Laura DeLuca, “Adopting Cultivation to Remain Pastoralists: The Diversification of Maasai Livelihoods in Northern Tanzania,” Human Ecology 38.3 (2010): 321–334.
McCabe, Terrence J., “Sustainability and Livelihood Diversification among the Maasai of Northern Tanzania,” Human Organization 62.2 (2003): 100–111.
Hodgson, Dorothy L., “‘Once Intrepid Warriors’: Modernity and the Production of Maasai Masculinities,” in Gendered Modernities, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 105–145. The term Maasai is by no means a homogeneous or static category as it refers to a large and heterogeneous group of Maa-speaking people who have followed distinct historical trajectories and adopted a diverse array of systems of production. Contrary to common interpretations, not all Maasai are (or were originally) pastoralists. For a historical overview of shifting Maasai identities, see: Spear, Thomas, and Richard Waller, ed., Being Maasai: Ethnicity & Identity in East Africa (London: Villiers Publications, 1993).
Hodgson, “Modernity and the Production of Maasai Masculinities,” 115–116.
Igoe, Jim, “National Parks and Human Ecosystems: The Challenge to Community Conservation. A Case Study from Simanjiro, Tanzania,” in Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development, ed. Dawn Chatty, and Marcus Colchester (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 77–96: here 80.
Igoe, “National Parks and Human Ecosystems,” 80.
Goldman, Mara, and Fernando Riosmena, “Adaptive Capacity in Tanzanian Maasailand: Changing Strategies to Cope with Drought in Fragmented Landscapes,” Global Environmental Change 23 (2013): 588–597.
Hodgson, Dorothy, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011); De Wit, “Victims or Masters of Adaptation?”
Ndagala, D.K., “‘Operation Imparnati’: The Sedentarization of the Pastoral Maasai in Tanzania,” Nomadic People 10 (1982): 29.
Herskovits, Melville J., “The Cattle Complex in East Africa” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1926).
Hardin, Garret, “Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, New Series 126.3859 (1968): 1243–1248.
McCabe, “Sustainability and Livelihood Diversification among the Maasai of Northern Tanzania”; Igoe, “National Parks and Human Ecosystems”; Sachedina, Hassanali. T., “Wildlife is Our Oil: Conservation, Livelihoods and NGOs in the Tarangire Ecosystem, Tanzania” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2008).
Sachedina, “Conservation, Livelihoods and NGOs in the Tarangire Ecosystem, Tanzania”; Bollig, and De Wit, “On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World.”
Sandford, 1983, in Homewood, Katherine M., and W.A. Rodgers, Maasailand Ecology: Pastoralist Development and Wildlife Conservation in Ngorongoro, Tanzania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 69.
Ibid.
Nelson, Fred, Rugemeleza Nshala, and W.A. Rodgers, “The Evolution and Reform of Tanzanian Wildlife Management,” Conservation and Society 5.2 (2007): 232–261.
Ibid.
McCabe, Terrence J., “Giving Conservation a Human Face? Lessons from Forty Years of Combining Conservation and Development in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania,” in Conservation and Mobile Indigenous People: Displacement, Forced Settlement, And Sustainable Development, ed. Dawn Chatty, and Marcus Colchester (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 66.
tnrf, “Integrating Pastoralist Livelihoods and Wildlife Conservation?” Since the time of writing the Loliondo conflict has been been the subject of much controversy since violent land evictions and human rights abuses have continued. As such, the land conflict gained increasing international attention and remains unresolved. For a chronological overview of the events, see:
Igoe, Jim, and Dan Brockington, “Pastoral Land Tenure and Community Conservation: A Case Study from North-East Tanzania,” IIED Drylands Programme: Pastoral Land Tenure Series 11 (1999).
Cf. Igoe, “National Parks and Human Ecosystems,” 80–82.
Leslie, Paul W., and Terrence J. McCabe, “Response Diversity and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems,” Current Anthropology 54.2 (2013): 122.
De Wit, “Victims or Masters of Adaptation?”
Leslie and McCabe, “Response Diversity and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems,” 116.
Igoe, Jim, and Dan Brockington, “Pastoral Land Tenure and Community Conservation: A Case Study from North-East Tanzania,” IIED Drylands Programme: Pastoral Land Tenure Series 11 (1999): 4.
Leslie and McCabe, “Response Diversity and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems,” 120.
However, in 2013 many people in Terrat (as opposed to in other villages) did not plant maize because of successive failed harvests in the preceding years. According to my informants, these failures were due to wildlife that destroyed the crops.
Allegretti, Antonio, “Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation in Drylands Development Planning in Tanzania: Traditional and Government Planning Processes,” Research Report Tanzania Natural Resources Forum (tnrf) & International Institute for Environment and Development (iied), 2012; Saringe, “Impact of Climate Change to Pastoralist and Hunter-Gatherer Communities of Tanzania”; Hakikazi Catalyst, A Future for Pastoralism: A Guide to the African Union’s Policy Framework for Pastoralism in Africa: Securing, Protecting and Improving the Lives, Livelihoods and Rights of Pastoral Communities (Arusha, 2011).
De Wit, Global Warning; Van Beek, Walter E.A., “Echoes of the End: Myth, Ritual and Degradation,” Focaal 35 (2000): 29–51.
Although the question of gender is beyond the scope of this paper, it would certainly be worthwhile to explore whether the Maasai’s initial rejection of Christianity bears similarities to the ways in which current climate change discourses are advanced or rejected, since I found that women were more prone to embracing the idea of climate change than men, Hodgson, Dorothy L., The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters Between Maasai and Missionaries (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005).
For an elaboration on linguistic translation difficulties from English to Swahili to Maa, see: De Wit, “Victims or Masters of Adaptation?”
See the work of Hodgson, Being Massai.
Cf. Smucker et al., “Assessing Climate Change Adaptation Policy in Tanzania.”