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?

What happens to marginalized groups from Africa when they ally with the indigenous peoples' movement? Who claims to be indigenous and why? Dorothy L. Hodgson explores how indigenous identity, both in concept and in practice, plays out in the context of economic liberalization, transnational capitalism, state restructuring, and political democratization. Hodgson brings her long experience with Maasai to her understanding of the shifting contours of their contemporary struggles for recognition, representation, rights, and resources. Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous is a deep and sensitive reflection on the possibilities and limits of transnational advocacy and the dilemmas of political action, civil society, and change in Maasai communities.

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

This book focuses on the strategic manipulation of ethnic identity by the Mukogodo of Kenya. It is about how Mukogodo people changed their way of life to a radically different one, that is their change as Maasai people, giving them a new way of living, a new language, and a new set of beliefs.

This book assesses the causes and consequences of environmental change in East Africa, asking whether local African communities are sufficiently resilient to cope with the ecological and social challenges that confront them. It focuses on the savannahs of the Baringo-Bogoria basin, and the surrounding highlands of Kenya’s northern Rift Valley that form the social-ecological system of the specialised cattle pastoralists and niche agricultural farmers who occupy these semi-arid lands. Historical studies of resilience spanning the past two centuries are linked with analysis of current environmental challenges, and the ecological, social, economic and political responses mounted by local communities. The authors question whether the most recent challenges confronting the peoples of eastern Africa’s savannahs – intensified conflicts, mounting poverty driven by demographic pressures, and dramatic ecological changes brought by invasive species – might soon led to a collapse in essential elements of the specialised cattle pastoralism that dominates the region, requiring a re-orientation of the social-ecological system. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

An interdisciplinary collection, Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights examines the potential and limitations of the "women's rights as human rights" framework as a strategy for seeking gender justice. Drawing on detailed case studies from the United States, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, contributors to the volume explore the specific social histories, political struggles, cultural assumptions, and gender ideologies that have produced certain rights or reframed long-standing debates in the language of rights. The essays address the gender-specific ways in which rights-based protocols have been analyzed, deployed, and legislated in the past and the present and the implications for women and men, adults and children in various social and geographical locations. Questions addressed include: What are the gendered assumptions and effects of the dominance of rights-based discourses for claims to social justice? What kinds of opportunities and limitations does such a "culture of rights" provide to seekers of justice, whether individuals or collectives, and how are these gendered? How and why do female bodies often become the site of contention in contexts pitting cultural against juridical perspectives? The contributors speak to central issues in current scholarly and policy debates about gender, culture, and human rights from comparative disciplinary, historical, and geographical perspectives. By taking "gender," rather than just "women," seriously as a category of analysis, the chapters suggest that the very sources of the power of human rights discourses, specifically "women's rights as human rights" discourses, to produce social change are also the sources of its limitations.

Drawing on archival sources as well as her extensive fieldwork in Tanzania, Dorothy L. Hodgson explores the ways identity, development, and gender have interacted to shape the Maasai into who and what they are today. By situating the Maasai in the political, economic, and social context of Tanzania and of world events, Hodgson shows how outside forces, and views of development in particular, have influenced Maasai lifeways, especially gender relations.