Being Maasai

Being Maasai
Author: Thomas Spear
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 1993-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821445685

Everyone “knows” the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters. Over time many different people have “become” something else. And what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today. This collection by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists examines how Maasai identity has been created, evoked, contested, and transformed from the time of their earliest settlement in Kenya to the present, as well as raising questions about the nature of ethnicity generally.

Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous

Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous
Author: Dorothy L. Hodgson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253223059

Introduction : positionings -- the cultural politics of representation, recognition, resources, and rights -- Becoming indigenous in Africa -- Maasai NGOs, the Tanzanian state, and the politics of indigeneity -- Precarious alliances -- Repositionings : from indigenous rights to pastoralist livelihoods -- "If we had our cows" : community perspectives on the challenge of change -- Conclusion : what do you want?

My Maasai Life

My Maasai Life
Author: Robin Wiszowaty
Publisher: Greystone Books
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2010-07-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 155365823X

Growing up in suburban Illinois, Robin Wiszowaty leads a typical middle-class American life. Hers is a world of gleaming shopping malls, congested freeways, and neighborhood gossip. But from an early age, she has longed to break free of this existence and discover something deeper. What it is, she doesn't quite know. Yet she knows in her heart there simply has to be more. Through a fortunate twist of fate, Robin seizes an opportunity to travel to rural Kenya and join an impoverished Maasai community. Suddenly her days are spent hauling water, evading giraffes, and living in a tiny hut made of cow dung with her adoptive family. She is forced to face issues she's never considered: extreme poverty, drought, female circumcision, corruption — and discovers love in the most unexpected places. In the open wilds of the dusty savannah, this Maasai life is one she could never have imagined.

Being Maasai

Being Maasai
Author: Richard D. Waller
Publisher: James Currey (GB)
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1993
Genre: Ethnicite? - Afrique orientale anglophone
ISBN: 9780852552162

A multi-disciplinary approach to studying ethnicity in Africa.

Narrating Nature

Narrating Nature
Author: Mara Jill Goldman
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816539677

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.

BEING MAASAI

BEING MAASAI
Author: Thomas T. Spear
Publisher:
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1993
Genre: Ethnicity
ISBN: 9781782049814

Many of the people who identify themselves as Maasai, or who speak the Maa language, are not pastoralist at all, but framers and hunters. Over time many people have 'become' something else, adn what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today. This collection by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists examines how Maasai identity has been created, evoked, contested and transformed. North America: Ohio U Press; Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota; Kenya: EAEP...

The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior

The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior
Author: Tepilit Ole Saitoti
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520063259

Recounts the author's traditional childhood, adolescence, and coming into manhood in Maasailand and of his education in Europe and America.

Among the Maasai

Among the Maasai
Author: Juliet Cutler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1631526731

In 1999, Juliet Cutler leaves the United States to teach at the first school for Maasai girls in East Africa. Captivated by the stories of young Maasai women determined to get an education in the midst of a culture caught between the past and the future, she seeks to empower and support her students as they struggle to define their own fates. Cutler soon learns that behind their shy smiles and timid facades, her Maasai students are much stronger than they appear. For them, adolescence requires navigating a risky world of forced marriages, rape, and genital cutting, all in the midst of a culture grappling with globalization. In the face of these challenges, these young women believe education offers hope, and so, against all odds, they set off alone―traveling hundreds of miles and even forsaking their families―simply to go to school. Twenty years of involvement with this school and its students reveal to Cutler the important impacts of education across time, as well as the challenges inherent in tackling issues of human rights and extreme poverty across vastly different cultures. Working alongside local educators, Cutler emerges transformed by the community she finds in Tanzania and by witnessing the life-changing impact of education on her students. Proceeds from the sale of this book support education for at-risk Maasai girls.

Only the Mountains Do Not Move

Only the Mountains Do Not Move
Author: Jan Reynolds
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781600608445

"A photographic essay about the Maasai people in Kenya, traditionally nomadic herders, exploring the contemporary challenges they face focusing on environmental changes such as the overgrazing of land and the threat of wildlife extinction and how the Maasai are adapting their agricultural practices and lifestyle while preserving their culture"--Provided by publisher. Includes Maasai proverbs. Suggested level: primary, intermediate.

Staying Maasai?

Staying Maasai?
Author: Katherine Homewood
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2009-02-08
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0387874925

The area of eastern Africa, which includes Tanzania and Kenya, is known for its savannas, wildlife and tribal peoples. Alongside these iconic images lie concerns about environmental degradation, declining wildlife populations, and about worsening poverty of pastoral peoples. East Africa presents in microcosm the paradox so widely seen across sub Saharan Africa, where the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations live alongside some of the world’s most outstanding biodiversity resources. Over the last decade or so, community conservation has emerged as a way out of poverty and environmental problems for these rural populations, focusing on the sustainable use of wildlife to generate income that could underpin equally sustainable development. Given the enduring interest in East African wildlife, and the very large tourist income it generates, these communities and ecosystems seem a natural case for green development based on community conservation. This volume is focused on the livelihoods of the Maasai in two different countries - Kenya and Tanzania. This cross-border comparative analysis looks at what people do, why they choose to do it, with what success and with what implications for wildlife. The comparative approach makes it possible to unpack the interaction of conservation and development, to identify the main drivers of livelihoods change and the main outcomes of wildlife conservation or other land use policies, while controlling for confounding factors in these semi-arid and perennially variable systems. This synthesis draws out lessons about the successes and failures of community conservation-based approach to development in Maasailand under different national political and economic contexts and different local social and historical particularities.