Kaj Arhem
The Maasai: Essays on Culture, Conservation and the Pastoral Predicament gathers together a selection of anthropological essays on the pastoral Maasai, based on the author’s fieldwork in Ngorongoro, Tanzania, in the 1980s. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area, world-famous for its exceptionally rich wildlife, is also the home of a large population of Maasai livestock herders.The essays provide a penetrating portrait of the age-old Maasai culture and pastoral way of life and a close-up study of the predicament of the Ngorongoro Maasai who, evicted from the adjoining Serengeti National Park in the 1950s, currently live under 'conservation rule' in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The book is lavishly produced and richly illustrated with color- and black-and-white photos by the author. Drawing on published sources on the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania in the light of the author’s fieldwork in Ngorongoro, the first three essays examine little-studied aspects of Maasai culture, including the profound symbolic meanings of their apparently simple homesteads (kraals), their unique pastoral diet of milk, meat and blood, and their peculiar ideas about medicine-almost exclusively based on wild plants.The final two essays critically explore the politics of wildlife conservation in Tanzanian Maasailand, focusing on its consequences for the Maasai pastoralists living in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The Epilogue provides an update on the precarious situation of the Ngorongoro Maasai who, squeezed between grazing restrictions and expanding safari tourism, presently face imminent eviction from their homeland.All in all, the book offers a rare combination of accessible ethnographic analysis and engaged critical research, in the end amounting to a powerful plea for the rights of the Maasai to continue their pastoral way of life in their ancestral lands. Although focusing on the Maasai, the essays address fundamental issues today confronting most of the world’s indigenous peoples.The author’s work among the Ngorongoro Maasai is recognized as an early and seminal contribution in the field of political ecology, specifically concerning the frequently conflictive relation between indigenous peoples and conservationists.Kaj Århem is emeritus professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg and Senior Research Associate at the Dept. of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University. His books include Pastoral Man in the Garden of Eden: The Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania (1985), Makuna: Portrait of an Amazonian People (1998), and Animism in Southeast Asia (2016), coedited with Guido Sprenger.
