The politics of gender, ethnicity and development images, interventions and the reconfiguration of Maasai identities in Tanzania, 1916-1993.

Abstract

I combine cultural, historical and political economy approaches in my dissertation to explore the intersection and interconstruction of gender and ethnicity, and to demonstrate how they shaped and were shaped by the shifting meanings, uses and effects of development. By examining the political-economic objectives and cultural images which shaped the development interventions of first the British, then the Tanzanian state and non-governmental organizations (NGO's), I demonstrate how these interventions valorized particular masculine constructions of Maasai ethnicity. I then explore the lived experience of contemporary gendered-ethnic relationships through detailed ethnographic data from three Maasai communities with different historical experiences of development. The first section of the dissertation, based primarily on archival materials, explores the historical relationship between the British colonial state and the Maasai in Tanzania. Most broadly, I examine how and why the concept of development emerged during the colonial period in Tanganyika as part of the imperial project of imposing a modernist order on the perceived chaos of the natives. Within this framework, I analyze how the formation of ethnic identities as categories of control was crucial to the colonial quest for order and therefore intimately intertwined with and affected by shifting agendas of development. Both development and the configuration and contested imposition of particular ethnic identities were fundamentally gendered processes, with profound, although unexpected and uneven, effects on local gendered relations of power. Part Two of the dissertation examines how development has been appropriated and recast as the legitimating project of the post-colonial nation-state, shaping both the gendered politics of ethnicity among Maasai, as well as relations between Maasai and other ethnic groups, and Maasai and the state. Using ethnographic and historical data from three Maasai communities, I analyze how the contemporary gendered politics of ethnicity disenfranchise Maasai women from certain economic and political rights, while simultaneously enabling them to assert power and seek solidarity in alternative forums such as the Catholic churches. Finally, through narrative analyses, I explore how Maasai men and women have been negotiating the contradictions produced by development and modernity.