Safari tourism and the struggle over markets, land rights, and culture in northern Tanzania
BENJAMIN GARDNER is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, where he teaches global studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies. He is also the chair of the African Studies Program at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.
Based on more than two decades of engagement with the Maasai, this
study is a landmark in a new kind of ‘living geography’ in which
people play the starring role. Conservation efforts that consist
primarily of enclosure and dispossession have led the Maasai to
become the unlikely cheerleaders for neoliberalism and the hostile
detractors of even the best-intentioned efforts of the Tanzanian
state (and those of the earlier, less well-intentioned British and
German colonial governments) to protect the Serengeti as a world
treasure. When such treasures are sequestered for the enjoyment of
even the most ecofriendly tourists—to say nothing of wealthy trophy
hunters from the Middle East—they have been fiercely resisted by
the proud people who have tended this part of the Serengeti for
centuries. Selling the Serengeti is itself a gem of a book, one
that Gardner has polished and passed on generously to a world in
need of its marvels.
*Paul Farmer, Koloktrones University Professor of Global Health and
Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School*
Based on more than two decades of ethnographic research, [Selling
the Serengeti] is a rich chronicling and sophisticated analysis of
on-going everyday and historic struggles over identity, culture,
and resources in a neoliberal age...The specific points of Loliondo
are intriguing and important for understanding how neoliberal
conservation processes are unfolding in other parts of Tanzanian
Maasailand and beyond. The book will thus appeal to a broad set of
readers interested in the effects of conservation, tourism, and
neoliberalism on communities and landscapes across Africa.
*African Studies Review*
Gardner delivers a timely text focusing on the cultural politics of
safari tourism among the Maasai people of northern Tanzania.
Offering a pensive approach to the juxtaposition in which the
Maasai find themselves, the author takes readers through two
decades of how such competing forces shaped cultural belonging and
citizenship among this indigenous African people...The stories are
vivid and plentiful throughout.
*Choice*
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