Maasai

What constitutes poverty? How do notions of poverty and, conversely, of wealth become constructed and change through time? And who decides who is poor, and is in the position to suggest remedies? Building on a relatively long tradition of in-depth anthropological and historical ...

In Ephesians 5:21, Paul enjoins all Christians to live in mutual submission to each other out of reverence for Christ. In the verses that follow, Paul describes what this mutual submission should look like in practice. Some interpreters neglect the intimate connection which Eph 5:22-6:9 shares with the preceding verses in chapter 5. Indeed, the mutual submission of verse 21 is not only the conclusion of the 5:1-21 but is the foundation and title of 5:21-6:9. Failure to recognize this has led some to mock the very idea of mutual submission between husbands and wives. In the real world, this too often serves to justify unjust oppression and silencing of women within the Church. This article attempts to correct these errors. It also examines these issues in the context of Maasai culture and the traditional Maasai value of enkanyit (honour, mutual respect). A more careful exegesis of Ephesians 5 demonstrates that mutual submission provides the way for relational harmony between husbands and wives.

This paper examines the use of visual methods in geographical field research, and in
particular photo-elicitation. The technique involves photos, videos and other forms of visual
representation used in an interview, with informants asked to comment on the images. The
aim is to promote more direct involvement of the informants in the research process and to
encourage and stimulate the collection of quantitatively and qualitatively different information
to that obtained in conventional interviews.
The potential and limitations of this technique in the field are investigated, describing
and discussing photo-elicitation data collection in the Maasai village of Mkuru in northern
Tanzania to explore the use and preservation of natural resources. Results and methodological
insights from the fieldwork are presented and discussed.

Chapter 2, Section 7(3), of the Kenyan constitution, of (The Re public of Kenya 2010) stipulates that the state shall develop, promote and protect the diversity of languages of the people of Kenya. Although this statement has no direct implication to the language of education policy in the Kenyan system of education, their implementation will largely affect the language policy in education. This paper explores ways in which the constitution can be used as a catalyst in the promotion; developments, protection of indigenous languages and at the same time use them as medium of instruction in schools in Kenya.

This study compares and contrasts recent and contemporary nuptiality among Maasai men of Kenya and Tanzania, and represents the first cross-national comparable data set on Maasai marriage (n=2,394 men aged 20 and above). By comparing nuptiality between Kenyan and Tanzanian Maasai, this study examines marriage among the Maasai in particular and rural sub-Saharan African populations undergoing socio-economic change in general. Maasai men marry later, on average, than the national average in both Kenya and Tanzania, and the age at first marriage appears to be declining. Relative to national levels, polygynous marriages account for a significantly higher proportion of Maasai marriages. Country-level differences in entry into and type of (monogamous or polygynous) marriage are described and explanations sought. The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania are arguably the best-known pastoralist population in the world, and the current study represents an opportunity to update and review the body of evidence linking pastoralism with polygyny. Linkages between socio-economic divergence and nuptiality are identified, with specific reference to uptake of formal education.

What is being done against the Maasai community in Ngorongoro is blatant discrimination which pave way for a serious humanitarian crisis.  I am not sure the President, Her Excellency Samia Suluhu Hassan is aware of the disturbing state of affairs in Ngorongoro. These Tanzanians have been the custodian of natural resources in that area for more than 2000 years, but today they are being humiliated, isolated and being made to look like a laughing stock for sustaining their traditional way of life. The distressed Masai community in Ngorongoro are currently denied access to basic services strategically.

In the thirty-two years since Lamin Sanneh published Translating the Message (Orbis Books, 1989), there has been a growing awareness of the importance of vernacular languages in Christian life and practice. But it is often still assumed that Christian theologizing is not legitimate unless it is in a European language. In much of Africa, theological education only takes place in the languages of the colo-nizers-English, French, and Portuguese. This can result in African churches that are ill-equipped to speak relevantly to African situations, as leaders are trained to read, teach, worship, and pray in a foreign language, neglecting their own. Authentic African Christianity requires theologizing in local African languages and invoking God in the names of God in those languages. Though (ironically?) written in English, this paper examines what elements of a vernacular theology might sound like for the Maasai and Samburu peoples of East Africa, exploring the Maa and Sampur names for God and discovering insights for World Christianity as well.

Grounded in scholarly analysis and personal reflection, and drawing on a multi-sited and multi-method research design, Momentous Mobilities disentangles the meanings attached to temporary travels and stays abroad and offers empirical evidence as well as novel theoretical arguments to develop an anthropology of mobility. Both focusing specifically on how various societies and cultures imagine and value boundary-crossing mobilities “elsewhere” and drawing heavily on his own European lifeworld, the author examines momentous travels abroad in the context of education, work, and spiritual quests and the search for a better quality of life.

The focus of this paper is with how the Maasai are positioned or 'placed' in biodiversity conservation, development and safari tourism. It is in these particular contexts that the Maasai are frequently rendered passive by conservation and development expertise and  tourism practices. Based on readings of colonial, post-colonial and contemporary research on the Maaisa,  as well as on interviews with local people around Kimana in Kajiado, Southern Kenya,  the paper surveys how aggregate and frequently reductive framings of Maasainess have been and continue to be constituted and resisted.

Roque de Pinho, J. and Galvin, K. 2015. “Maasai Voices on Climate Change (and other changes too)”: Participatory video and communication about environmental changes in the East African rangelands. In: Metodologias participativas: Os media e a educação. Brites, M. J., Jorge, A. and Correia Santos, S., eds. Pp. 235-248: LabCom Books.
  http://www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt/book/139

My master thesis investigate human wildlife relationship between Maasai people and local wildlife. The work analyse both socio-cultural aspects connected to wildlife, through the study of traditional folktales,  and both historical and political history of conservation, in order to frame the Maasai relation with wildlife. My thesis focus specifically on key socio-ecological species as elephant, lion and hyenas and their changing representation into wildlife folktales of the Maasai. This work has relevance because interesect, social, cultural, political and ecological aspects connected to Maasai-wildlife relations to have a comprehensive and deep perspective on human-wildlife conflicts in Kenyan Maasailand.

Human mobilities, whether horizontal or vertical, internal or boundary-crossing, are infused with cultural meaning, manifested in metacultural discourses and imaginaries. While cultural elements clearly have an impact on people’s mobility, the way people move across borders also exerts strong influence on their culture and society. Studying the interaction between culturally rooted imaginaries of mobility and real physical movements, a relation coloured by global media images as well as personal accounts, helps us understand the multiple meanings behind contemporary migratory phenomena. Cultural anthropology, as a discipline situated between the social sciences and the humanities, is ideally suited to analyse critically the complex dynamics between mobile cultures and human mobility. This article, based on longterm fieldwork in Tanzania, exemplifies what an anthropological take on the interplay between culture and mobility may look like. Placed in their wider historical and socio-economic context, I discuss migratory movements and their cultural representations in Tanzania. An analysis of the ethnographic data reveals how imaginaries and social relations concerning mobility are materialized, enacted and inculcated. The particular case of the Maasai people, who are entangled in an intricate web of cultural mobilities, illustrates the complexity of the issues at stake.

This book was re-issued in paperback in 2016.

This monograph is a shorter and revised version of my D.Phil. dissertation of the same title (University of Oxford, 2002). It examines Maasai-British relations in colonial British East Africa (later Kenya), land alienation, forced moves, the Masai Treaties (aka Agreements) and non-violent resistance - events which have repercussions to the present day. The author set out to seek Maasai oral testimony, and has interwoven this with information from archival and other secondary sources.

Reviewers say:

"This is an exceptional book. While the contours of the two Maasai moves in Kenya - 1904 and 1911 - have been traced in several colonial histories, this is the first work to use oral history, a remarkable achievement as a century has elapsed since the Maasai were shunted into reserves to make way for white settlers. The author ... has reworked her Oxford Ph.D. dissertation to deliver a lively, engaging and erudite account of this colonial tragedy."
Chris Youe
Conservation and Society"

See link to review by Dorothy L Hodgson in African Affairs
Sample chapter available for download

Decades of research on the social dynamics of biodiversity conservation has shown that parks and protected areas have added hardship to rural communities throughout much of the developing world. Nonetheless, some recent studies have found evidence of poverty alleviation near protected areas. To build on these conflicting accounts, I use a comparative, mixed-methods design to examine opportunistic, unplanned, i.e., unscripted, development in indigenous communities near Tarangire National Park (TNP) in northern Tanzania. I ask the questions: (1) How is proximity to TNP related to community-level infrastructural development? (2) How has the process of development changed over time? and (3) How is proximity to TNP related to infrastructure-related social outcomes at the household-level? Results from semistructured interviews show that, compared with distant communities, communities near TNP have developed more extensive education and water infrastructure in the past decade by procuring financial support from a greater diversity of external organizations, including wildlife-related organizations. Correspondingly, household survey results show that education measures are positively associated with proximity to TNP, controlling for other factors. These findings support the notion that development can accrue near protected areas in ways that are diverse, uncoordinated, and opportunistic, and correspondingly distinct from heralded community-based conservation, community-based natural resource management, and integrated conservation and development project initiatives.

The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) creates opportunities to
address the effect of small arms and light weapons (SALW) proliferation on pastoralist communities in The East and Horn of Africa region and elsewhere. Policymakers and advocates can use the ATT to limit the risks of diversion of guns and ammunition to militias, gangs and cattle raiders. The ATT also offers a framework to encourage security forces to follow international human rights and humanitarian law in pastoralist communities.

The various ways in which peoples and places around the globe are represented and documented in popular media have an immense impact on how tourists imagine and anticipate future destinations. Even though tourism discourses take a variety of forms, visual imagery seems to have the biggest influence on shaping tourists’ pretrip fantasies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper illustrates the dynamic processes of cultural tourismification in Tanzania’s so-called “northern circuit”. In many parts of the world, famous nature documentaries, mainstream Hollywood entertainment, and semi-biographic films about this region have become fashionable icons for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, often reinforcing a perfect nostalgic vision of the black continent as an unexplored and time-frozen wild Eden. While tourism representations have overwhelmingly focused on wildlife, an increasing demand for “meet-the-people” cultural tourism is increasingly bringing local people into the picture. Interestingly, locals are commonly portrayed while engaging in vibrant rituals or in inauthentic, staged poses wearing celebrative costumes. As an example, the paper discusses how the romanticized image of the virile Maasai warrior, dressed in colourful red blankets and beaded jewellery, has led to a true Maasai-mania that is profoundly affecting the daily life and culture of Maasai and other ethnic groups.

Global Missiology 18/2 (April 2021):  12 pages
http://www.globalmissiology.org

ABSTRACT
Conversion is part of Christianity’s DNA. Scholarly discussions about the meaning(s) and nature of Christian conversion perhaps reflect a popular—and historical—confusion about conversion vis-à-vis proselytization (e.g., Goodman 1994; Cornelli 2017, 413). Nonetheless, proselytization and conversion are not the same. Culture plays an important role in proper Christian conversion because this conversion, or “the turning to Christ what is already there” in the words of Andrew Walls, takes place within the context of culture. By contrast proselytization is the mere exchange of one human culture for another and was rejected by the Apostles. Because “the gospel enriches the culture,” in African contexts “Christianity should strengthen and reaffirm one’s African identity” (Falconer 2015, 161). After exploring these themes, I will propose a model to discuss Christian conversion within the Maa language and culture of the Maasai people of East Africa.

In the last century, mobile pastoralists around the world have transitioned to more sedentary lifestyles. Traditionally mobile people can be both pushed to settle by environmental or political forces, and pulled by new economic activities. While researchers have examined the causes and consequences of growing sedentarization, few contemporary studies have focused on the spatial patterns of settlement. This study examines settlement site selection using GIS and remote sensing techniques to quantify patterns and correlates of settlement location in four Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. We identify landscape scale factors that shape settlement locations and test the competing hypotheses that settlement is associated with: (1) resource access; (2) environmental constraints; and (3) infrastructural amenities. Spatial models offer support for each hypothesis, with slight variations. However, a combined model offers the greatest predictive power suggesting significant het-erogeneity in site selection and/or a transition in selection criteria over time. These findings characterize a poorly understood aspect of the settlement of mobile groups, and point to new questions regarding the spatial drivers and consequences of sedentarization.

No tots els somnis únicament es somnien, en Rafael Balaguer sap que a vegades es viuen. Aquest llagosterenc, astronòm membre de l’Associació Astronòmica de Girona, ho va descobrir a peus del Kilimanjaro, al nord de Tanzània, a les terres dels  massais, contemplant l’impressionant firmament que s’estén damunt la sabana africana, acompanyat de membres d’aquesta tribu mítica.

De l’experiència n’ha sorgit un llarg article publicat a les pàgines centrals d' "AstronomíA", la revista de referència dels afeccionats a l’astronomia a Espanya, i també una intensíssima nostàlgia d’Àfrica. Un continent que en Rafael afirma que fascina i que et fereix perquè en la seva atmosfera es percep l’essència de la nostra espècie. I que si ens enamora i ens commou tan profundament és degut a que, al capdavall, també nosaltres en som fills.

Tots els afeccionats a l’astronomia que habiten latituds boreals, anhelen viatjar a l’hemisferi sud per observar els prodigis del seu cel de nit, i aquesta ambició personal absolutament corrent que l’astrònom llagosterenc pretenia satisfer aprofitant el seu viatge, va esdevenir una experiència singular gràcies a l’atzar i també a la seva avidesa de coneixement.

Els massais són un poble ramader i guerrer, i aquesta fama i la seva bellesa, va fer que a l’època colonial algú els definís com apol·los amb cara de diable. Diuen que no treballen la terra per no ferir-la i que la seva societat és igualitària, democràtica i amb una enorme llibertat sexual, encara que també cruel i masclista en molts aspectes. Els massai són valents i gelosos de la seva independència i del seu estil de vida, i diuen que si se’ls empresona moren de tristesa i que probablement per aquest raó mai van ser perseguits pels esclavistes.

El que en Rafel va descobrir, compartint observacions nocturnes amb els joves guerrers que custodiaven el campament, és que el seu déu, la divinitat que habita en totes les coses i que anomenen Ngai, el situen a Orió, a la constel·lació del nostre gran caçador, i també que identifiquen les Plèiades perquè anuncien l’època de les grans pluges i  que a la Via Làctia l’anomenen Nkurrei, que justament significa camí. El camí pel qual el deu Ngai va conduir els ramats a la terra i el que ara recorre per transitar dels volcans al firmament. I també que a les espectaculars galàxies visibles des de l’hemisferi sud i que nosaltres coneixem com els Núvols de Magallanes, els massai els anomenen “Ngare”, que en la seva llengua significa aigua. La qual cosa no deixa de ser un meravellós exemple de lirisme intercultural.

Explica en Rafael, que ja pràcticament de matinada, quan la llum de Venus es va dibuixar nítidament a l’horitzó, li varen relatar la llegenda d’un vell pastor massai que estimava les estrelles com si fossin el seus fills i la seva relació amb Kileken, el nom que ells atorguen a aquest planeta que vinculen íntimament al pasturatge; no en va Venus és present a l’alba, quan es treu el ramat, i al capvespre, quan es recull.

En Rafael afirma sorprès, que es sap molt poc de l’astronomia i de la cosmologia massai i jo diria que experimenta l’excitació del llegendaris exploradors que s’endinsaven pel continent africà a la recerca de l’origen del Nil. La qual cosa a aquestes alçades de la història del turisme podria semblar inversemblant.

Segurament no ho és, perquè tot i que disposem de viatges organitzats per poder passejar les nostres bermudes pel racó més remot del planeta, ens segueix resultant enormement difícil escoltar als nostres congèneres.

Ressenya de l'article publicada per Enric Ramionet al diari "El Punt", el dia 6 d'agost de 2005.

A la revista "Nostra Nau" es va publicar l'article "Rere les passes de Ngai" complet.

The ability to communicate effectively in an individual‟s own language not only connects a person to his/her ethnic group but also helps in identity shaping and cultural preservation. The tribe, with which an individual identifies, in a great majority of cases, is always his/her tribal name. Before the colonial rule spread across Africa, indigenous cultural heritage was passed throughout generations by language; which was integral in affirming and maintaining the well being and a strong sense of generational identity. It bore complex understandings of indigenous cultures, environment, traditional and ecological knowledge. It connected an individual to his ancestral land. With the decline of their language and culture, the Ngasa – A nearly extinct indigenous folk found on the slopes of Eastern Kilimanjaro has missed the wealth of evidence that once supported their community. Since Tanzania is not a monolingual society, the Ngasa people have has gradually abandoned their diminishing language and adopted the language and cultural roots of the dominant Chagga, Pare and Swahili speech communities - thus losing their feelings of pride and self identity. While English and Swahili enjoy de facto official status, Tanzania's 1984 constitution neither establishes an official language nor protects indigenous languages in the country.

In the world of development there are many different aspects of a society that need to be analyzed before any development efforts can be made. In a socio-cultural analysis it is important to examine the education system, how political decisions are made, what their main source of livelihood is, along with many other factors. Two of the elements of a socio-cultural analysis that are becoming increasingly important in the development world are religion and gender relations. These are two parts of development that are extremely intertwined and essential to examine because they are instrumental factors in whether or not a society is capable of reaching its full potential. In Maasai culture their devotion to spirituality greatly affects the opportunities that Maasai women will have access to.

"For centuries a pastoralist lifestyle dependent on transhumance was intrinsic to the Maasai. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Maasai pastoralist system is breaking down. Either as a consequence or as a driver of this phenomenon, land use change, in the form of settled agriculture, is rapidly occurring. This thesis produces a time-series map of the change of area under cultivation over the period 1987-2005 using satellite images processing techniques. The vector output is then combined in a Geographical Information System with data collected from a case-study village and resource locations in the area. A comparison is made between the results that the GIS yields and those of People’s Problem Perception Mapping (PPPM). This combination of methodological techniques aims to provide an analytical tool for the production of a comprehensive overview of both human and resource related drivers of livelihood and land use change within the Burko hunting area contained within the Monduli District, Tanzania. This report argues that such an integrated overview of the area, in terms of the problem perception of the community, the recent changes in land use and the actual location and availability of resources, is vital for successful future management strategies whose aim is to encourage sustainable development and maintenance of biodiversity within the area.

The results show that five of the six villages show significant net agricultural expansion during this period. The main driving factors identified by the Maasai are drought, hunger, reduction in herd sizes and observation of other tribes. Socio-political driving factors were not mentioned by the participants but are evident in the visible effects of a history of land alienation, of recent forced sedentarisation and also of the sociopolitical as well as natural climate during the 1980s which is the decade in which the majority of participants started cultivating.

It is recommended that the Maasai first need to work together on solving their common resource issues, as they would plan cattle movement, in their meetings. Once they have decided what action they are prepared to work together on for the area, they then need to approach the appropriate Government agencies and Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) for assistance. It is recommended that the NGOs working with the Maasai in this area adopt the PPPM as a way of identifying what resource issues need assistance and what the most appropriate assistance would be. If repeated, PPPM can act as a means of measuring the success of the assistance as perceived by the Maasai. Finally, all the stakeholders involved in the southern area of the Burko counting Block need to work together and their respective claims/needs should then be incorporated in the land use zoning plans. One possible solution might be to build upon the use of the GIS system in this thesis, adding in a complete dataset of resource, adding in a complete dataset of resource locations."

In the developing world, traditional social networks of exchange and reciprocity are critical components of household security, disaster relief, and social wellbeing especially in rural areas. This research asks the question: How are traditional social networks of exchange related to emerging household strategies to diversify livelihoods? Within this context, this study uses a mixed methods design to examine the character of inter-household exchanges of material goods (IHE) and the association between IHE and livelihood diversification, in ethnically Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. Findings show that IHE are both evolving and declining and are negatively associated with livelihood diversification.

Exploitation of soda deposits by foreign companies at Lake Magadi, Kenya, is the focus of one of many long-standing grievances in the Maasai community which stem from land and other natural resource alienation in the colonial era. A British company was allowed to mine soda in this corner of the former Southern Maasai Reserve as the result of a clause in the 1911 Maasai Agreement or Treaty, made between representatives of the Maasai community and British government. But there is compelling historical evidence to suggest that it had no legal right to do so. This article examines the early history of the East Africa Syndicate and Magadi Soda Company’s activities in British East Africa, the circumstances in which they obtained their early leases, and connections between these and the Maasai Agreements, signed within days of each other. It traces the continuities to the present day, against a backcloth of historical and contemporary protest, placing these events in the broader historical context of early land policy, the resignation of Sir Charles Eliot in 1904, and protest in the 1930s against the Native Lands Trust Ordinance, gold mining and other commercial activities in ‘native reserves.

2017 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Hon. mention; 2018 AES Senior Book Prize, Hon. mention.


“Janet McIntosh's book Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans is a major ethnographic achievement…far more than a contribution to the field of critical whiteness studies, Unsettled promises to have a long-lasting impact in fields as diverse as postcolonial African studies, sociolinguistics, and the anthropology of subjectivity…Unsettled demonstrates an extraordinary level of intellectual maturity and sophistication, and establishes a high standard for any anthropologist seeking to elucidate the connections between race, inequality and privilege.”
-2018 AES Senior Book Prize Committee.


“Richly nuanced, theoretically sophisticated, and utterly compelling. A major scholarly achievement.”
-Richard Schroeder, author of Africa after Apartheid: South Africa, Race, and Nation in Tanzania. 


“Janet McIntosh lifts the debate on belonging. Her vivid portrait shows how twisted memory does not necessarily undermine sincerity of feeling. Her notion of ‘structural oblivion’ and her magnificent demonstration of the plurality of whiteness offer keys to understanding the vicissitudes of belonging in the present-day world.”
-Peter Geschiere, author of The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe.


“A splendid book, one of the best in the new and growing literature on postcolonial whiteness and in whiteness studies generally.”
-Brett Shadle, author of The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900–1920s.


(Book available on amazon)

Global Missiology 18/4 (October 2021): 2–16.
www.globalmissiology.org

ABSTRACT:
God's communication of his Word to people has always been culturally specific. Rather than falling prey to a feared cultural relativizing of the Christian gospel, the cultural contingency or particularity of divine-human communication entails the importance of contextual realities within different cultures, often represented by their languages. Human contexts should therefore be taken seriously by biblical hermeneutics. Moreover, care must be taken not to denigrate any cultural context due to its alleged inferiority to another, as has happened all too frequently in modern interactions between Europeans and Africans.

The "Maasai and the Bible" project, sponsored by VID International University in Norway in cooperation with Tumaini University Makumira in Tanzania, has taken the specifically Maasai human context seriously in an examination of biblical hermeneutics. The project has resulted in four recent publications studying Maasai reception and hermeneutics of biblical texts. This article introduces that project, reviews its four books, then proposes an enkiteng (cow) hermeneutic as an appropriate approach to Scripture in Maasai contexts.

A B S T R A C T Since the early 1990s, Maasai men living in the Simanjiro district of northern Tanzania have worked as middlemen, buying and selling gemstones at Mererani, the only place in the world where the gemstone tanzanite is mined. While some men have struggled to make it, others have been quite lucrative in this booming mineral trade by gaining access to various forms of capital. In addition, regardless of an individual's success, as a group, tanzanite traders are seen by others in their home villages to possess new forms of capital that carry societal value because they map onto current ideas about success and what it means to " be Maasai ". Through an ethnographic exploration of Maasai gemstone traders in northern Tanzania, this article sheds light on an overlooked sector of the mining commodity chain and examines the economic, social, and cultural forms of capital tanzanite traders possess, mobilize, and are perceived to embody. Moreover, it examines the implications for these new forms of capital in terms of social relations and power structures and argues that capital accumulation and livelihood change is expressed through a unique cultural style with important implications for power relations in Maasai households and communities.

Throughout the developing world, households are diversifying their livelihood activities to manage risk and improve their lives. Many studies have focused on the material causes and consequences of this diversification. Few, however, have examined how diversifying groups establish new patterns of communication and information exchange with others. This paper examines the relationship between livelihood diversification and information diversity among agro-pastoralist Maasai in northern Tanzania, where new mobile phone use is common. Mixed qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis are used to (1) describe how Maasai use phones to manage diverse livelihoods; and (2) assess the relationship between livelihood diversification and measures of information diversity, controlling for other factors. The findings indicate that households use phones in ways that support existing activities rather than transform them and that the relationship between livelihood diversification and information diversity is positive, non-linear, and significant.

We all read, or listen to, scripture through a hermeneutical lens. All such lenses are necessarily tinged by culture. No reading of Scripture is acultural (Ukpong 1995, 6) and “none of us has a neutral perspective on ... the Bible” (Mburu 2019, 22).  For Maasai contexts, a theologically robust process of inculturation necessarily requires a contextual African (Maasai) hermeneutic.  This short paper introduces one such hermeneutical approach built on Maa culture, “*enkitenk* hermeneutics.”

This paper was presented on 4 May 2021 in the “African Biblical and Theological Hermeneutics” PhD seminar presentation at VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway.

citation:  Barron, Joshua Robert.  “Enkiteng Hermeneutics:  Reading the Bible with Maasai Christians.”  African Biblical and Theological Hermeneutics PhD seminar presentation.  VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway, 4 May 2021.

Living alongside predators can entail substantial costs both in terms of livelihoods and personal safety. Negative interactions with predators can lead to negative attitudes and behavioural intentions such as retaliatory or pre-emptive killing. As a result, conservation strategies are increasingly adopting human–wildlife coexistence approaches aimed at minimizing the costs associated with living with predators by providing direct or indirect benefits. This is done in the hope that people will foster positive attitudes and behavioural intentions towards predators. However, people's attitudes and their behavioural intentions are not necessarily linked, and both need to be understood for conservation actions to be effective. We conducted 747 semi-structured interviews with community members in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, to determine which factors influenced people's attitudes and behavioural intentions towards predators and whether the two were linked. Most interviewees (57.52%) h...