Was it Ever About the Animals? Conservation, Accumulation, and the Dispossession of Maasai Pastoralism

• In Event: Student Forum Open Topic Paper Session

Abstract

This study draws on semi-structured interviews conducted in Northern Tanzania to examine how Maasai community members interpret displacement and state conservation initiatives. Maasai interpretations of land loss illuminate the entanglement between postcolonial state formation, neoliberal conservation regimes, and global capitalist development. Their accounts reveal how pastoralist communities confront the transformation of land into a site of primitive accumulation, as their pastoralist mode of production is destabilized through state-led conservation and the expansion of capitalist land ownership. This disruption occurs not only through the loss of land, but the erosion of the material conditions necessary for reproduction, such as loss of grazing land, pressure toward proletarianization, and increasing poverty. Cultural, historical, and political relationships to land described in the interviews were inseparable from the pastoralist political economy and constitute the material basis of Maasai social reproduction and resistance. Moving forward, concerns, demands, and grievances of the Maasai need be taken seriously not only within academic parameters, but by the Tanzanian state, investing states, and international organizations focused on human rights and the environment, as violations to both humans and wildlife are presented in the data. The participants in this study already propose solutions, as evidenced in the data, urging immediate action necessitating the participation, consent, and awareness of the Maasai.

Author

• Ainsly Rivera, California State University-Fullerton