Tracking Puku: traditional knowledge, skills, and the crafting of Zambian wildlife science

• In Event: Conservation Knowledges: Converging and contested environmental knowledge in colonial and national southern Africa

Abstract

Between the 1950s and 1970s, during the consolidation of both the colonial and national state in Zambia, wildlife officers sought to manage, make sense of, and develop data and findings about the territory’s wildlife populations and ecological zones. They saw themselves as practicing quintessentially modern science, and sought to attach themselves to conversations occurring in South and East Africa, and in Western Europe and North America. However, they drew on—depended on, in fact—the skills and knowledge of people without formal scientific training, but who themselves possessed what we might think of as traditional ecological knowledge, or traditional ecological skills. Much of the labor undergirding the creation of Zambia’s wildlife science, which was designed to inform the management of parks and reserves, was performed by personnel low in the administrative hierarchy, but rich in knowledge about animals and their habitats. Puku, the scientific journal of Zambia’s wildlife department, offers a revealing glimpse of the work of these people and the manner in which they informed Zambian wildlife science during the late-colonial and early-national eras. Ultimately, the wildlife sector drew more on their skills than their knowledge (extracting the former, sidelining the latter), although state and civil society alike debated whether such knowledge should also inform wildlife science and management in a more significant way, in part because of how Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda’s official ideology of “Zambian humanism” philosophized about the relationship between rural and urban values and settings. This investigation seeks to identify the material and conceptual influences of traditional ecological knowledge and skills at the intersection of conservation work and state-building projects.

Author

• Jeff Schauer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas