Personal Statement

I lived until the age of 18 in Lacey, Washington, a small town made up mostly of the strip malls and fast food restaurants that line Interstate 5 from Portland to Seattle. Very few of my high school classmates left this town, and instead moved back into the service industries and lower rungs of state bureaucracy where their parents had worked before them. For those of us who wanted to leave, the only routes, at the time, seemed to be the military or higher education. Since, by middle school, I had been tracked into college prep courses, I assumed that I would go to college but did not know where or what to study.

In our garage, my grandfather kept back issues of National Geographic dating to the 1920's. The summer before starting high school, he paid me to dust them and it was then that I discovered something called "Anthropology" which, when studied, appeared to lead to a more interesting life in a more interesting place. For my Freshman Physical Science course's "SCIENCE CAREERS DAY," I wrote "Anthropology" down as my career goal, though I knew nothing at the time about the discipline besides the name.

I likewise chose a college which I knew nothing about - Lewis and Clark in Oregon - because the brochure mentioned that there were several dozen overseas programs available through the school. Though I could have gone to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, Australia, Korea or many other countries, I decided to apply for Kenya because the year before I had read a book about nomads and the program included a unit on nomadic pastoralism and ecology.

After rereading this book much later, I discovered it to be an incredibly sappy, melodramatic and condescending account of the lives of indigenous Australians and other nomadic peoples. When I was seventeen, though, the plot of the book - mainly, that humans have an innate desire to wander the earth, in the same manner the Aborigines retrace the paths which their ancestors sung into existence at the beginning of time - seemed quite compelling and true. I was fixated on nomads for the rest of my undergraduate career; however after my stay in Kenya for 7 months in 1990, the nature of my interest changed.

The event that both altered my perspective on nomads, and also led to an eventual decision to pursue a graduate degree in Anthropology occurred while driving north past Mt. Kenya with an American instructor who had lived in Africa for 25 years. After descending from the rich, green highlands into a hot arid plain of acacia trees, scrub, and dry river beds, from the car window there appeared cattle kraals made of thin branches and thorn bush, small boys herding goats, sheep and cattle, and the squat, dung-walled, oval houses belonging to the Samburu communities who occupied the area. The instructor stopped the truck, took in the view, and then announced quite dramatically, "These people have lived like this for 6000 years."

Everything about that statement was false. The communities currently occupying that area had not been there 600 years, let alone 6000. Additionally, the people who I met in Northern Kenya, though definitely poor, had fully "modern" lives. They wore jewelry reconstructed from 35 mm film canisters and shoes from old tire treads. They voted in elections and kept up with national news. I had watched men mix vats of fluorescent green chemicals with which to vaccinate their cattle. I had seen women cook with tin pots and tea kettles and kids on their way to school with exercise books and soccer balls made from plastic bags.

At that moment, I was confronted with a glaring contradiction between what I observed - that is, an encounter with modernity as complex and confusing as that which I had witnessed in my own culture - and what I, along with many other of my fellow travelers to Africa, often want to believe - that somewhere out in the world there are people who represent what humans beings were meant to be, what we used to be, and what we have lost. What I gained from that moment was ultimately an appreciation, instead, for what people really do with their lives - how they manage the economic, political and social transformations that are occurring, and have always occurred, in their local communities. Moreover, I developed an interest in how groups of people are made to stand for something else, like a concept, an ideal or, perhaps, a fear. This interest has switched over time from a focus on how Europeans and Americans use images of African communities representationally (the idea of the 'noble savage,' for instance) to, as I explain in my proposal, a concern about how communities use debates over children to represent conflicts in other areas of social life.

In the summer of 1994, I had the opportunity to travel to Tanzania on an SSRC Predissertation Grant to begin to establish affiliation, research clearance and possible fieldsites. I have also made contacts at the district level with officials and academics in the area. Though I already speak Kiswahili, the national language of Tanzania, I also have made arrangements to study Maa, the language of the Kisongo Maasai and WaArusha who live in the district in which I will be working. I am looking forward to working in Tanzania not only because of its political stability and unique history as a nation, but also because of the opportunity to generate information about children and education in pastoral communities there, a topic which is still under-researched despite the restructuring of national curriculum in recent years.

Proposal

This research begins with the assumption that communities often use children's activities as powerful symbols in larger debates over identity and social change. Despite their position at the very bottom of a social hierarchy based quite rigidly on age and sex distinctions, Maasai children in Monduli District, Tanzania contribute in important ways to Maasai economic life, not only in terms of the labor hours they provide towards production but also in their pivotal and unique position as learners and possible transformers of culture. As such, this research will show that implicit to the socialization of children is an often unspoken recognition by local communities of children as receptacles of tradition. This recognition often manifests itself in conflicts over how children are taught and what children do. My research will argue that, in many respects, conflicts over children's work and education are also conflicts over a community's self-definition and attempts at continuity.

The Maasai are a valuable case study for an analysis of the relationship between children's activities and larger forces. Often considered resistant to primary education, described as unwilling participants in the commercial and political life of the colony or nation-state, and held up as bearers of a "conservative commitment" to a cattle-keeping tradition (Gulliver 1969), the Maasai have long been a focus of academic, administrative, and fictional accounts of life in East Africa. In part, this literature suggests that Maasai identity is founded upon the premise of pastoral specialization - that is, being "people-of- the-cattle" in opposition to agriculturists or hunter-gatherers (for example, Jacobs 1965; Galaty 1982; Waller 1976).

Recent literature, however, has begun to emphasize the fluidity of the Maasai economy, pointing out that many Maasai are not now, nor have they ever been, engaged solely in pastoral production and consumption, especially during economic and ecological crisis (Spear & Waller 1993; Berntsen 1979; Knowles & Collett 1989). In the context of my case study, the ethnically mixed communities of Northern Monduli District are places in which the 'pawning' or loaning of children's labor between the Maasai and neighboring WaArusha farmers has been a common way of diversifying production, ensuring survival during crisis, and securing loans since the 19th century. Furthermore, in the 1990's, as Maasai lose grazing land through encroachment by cultivators and as terms of trade weigh more heavily in favor of agricultural production, impoverishment is leading to the sale of livestock and the inability to pursue cattle-keeping as a viable means of subsistence.

My research will straddle both sides of this debate, arguing that the Maasai have undergone profound socio-economic transformations, especially in the last century, but at the same time continue to maintain an understanding - though perhaps conflicting or contradictory - of what "being Maasai" means and how to ensure cultural continuity. Moreover, I assume that even if circumstances make it practically impossible to be pastoral producers, this economic ideal still plays a meaningful role in how Maasai see themselves and how they choose to raise their children.

I will therefore address the following questions: 1) What are Maasai conceptions of children and childrearing and how, if at all, are they transformed with changing adult livelihoods, inter-ethnic relations, and structures of education? 2) How and when do conflicts over Maasai children become metaphors for discussions of larger issues such as relations with other Maasai, non-Maasai or the State? 3) Finally, how can adult and non-Maasai accounts of Maasai children be set against a childs daily activities and behavior? What events, individuals, places and experiences shape children's days? What social or economic limitations do they face? What do children do (and think they are doing) versus adult depiction, opinion and reconstruction of child life?

This research, then, will be an attempt to address the issues of socialization, economic contribution and organization of production from the perspective of culture. These issues have been addressed on numerous occasions from a wide variety of perspectives: studies of socialization from cultural and social anthropology (Raum 1940; Read 1960; Levine & Levine 1977; Schildkrout 1979; Riesman 1992), quantitative accounts of children's economic and social 'value' (Aries 1962; Arnold 1971; Zelizer 1985; Reynolds 1991; Nieuwenhuys 1994) and structural analyses of cultural and social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Willis 1977; Katz 1991; McGaffey 1982). All of this scholarship indicates that children in and out of Africa are both important and active participants in the production and reproduction of their communities. Furthermore, it suggests that children's daily activities help to mediate social transformation (see, for instance, Katz's 1991 study of the changing nature of Sudanese children's environmental knowledge).

My research, then, treats organization of production as a key factor in the socialization of children and, additionally, assumes that while social categories of age help to manage production, other factors play an important role in what children learn about and through work. These factors include macro-level forces such as national education and incorporation into the market economy, but also, at the most micro-level, variance in the abilities and experiences of individual children.

At the same time, my research examines not just social institutions but ideas about those institutions. By focusing on the ways in which people teach their children about social life, the kinds of knowledge that communities deem crucial for children to learn, and the sorts of struggles that ensue when multiple parties are involved in the bringing up of children, I hope to touch upon such issues as the relationship between society and cultural forms and the ways in which local communities deal with tradition, modernity and change.

The methodology of this project will entail, first, a description of children's activities and environment through structured observations and an analysis of kinship and residential networks to describe the relationships that form the social parameters of a child's world. I will additionally carry out interviews with boys and girls, emphasizing how they describe their activities and how they actually carry out tasks and/or play. I will use this information, as well as baseline socio-economic data generated through a survey of households, as a context for describing the social and economic relationships that support both parental and community decisions about what children should do and how they should learn.

I will juxtapose these accounts of children's daily life with interviews of Maasai adults. These interviews will concentrate on understanding Maasai conceptions of childhood, socialization and tradition. Because the Maasai may not have terms for these specific abstract nouns, I will focus instead on their expectations of children, their portrayal of appropriate and inappropriate learning, their perceptions of boys and girls' activities, and their remembrances of their own childhood in order to understand what shapes adult decisions and discussions about children and cultural continuity. In addition, I will conduct interviews with teachers, administrators and local politicians about their views on education and socialization practices in Maasailand to help place local level discussions on childhood and child-rearing in the broader context of Maasai engagement with non-Maasai institutions.

Lastly, I will look historically at education and child life in Maasailand through archival research in relevant regional, national, and missionary archives. Here I will review pre-independence accounts of education in the former Maasai District, as well as attempt to locate possible court cases involving disputes over Maasai children. This archival research, as well as the interviews with Maasai adults about their own childhood, will help situate my study of socio-economic transformation in time. I am most interested in documenting changes in the formal and informal education of children beginning from the period of British colonial rule, since it was at this point when Maasai in Tanzania became more full incorporated into the primary education system and other state and mission structures (Germany relinquished Tanganyika as a colony to Britain at the end of World War I).

As explained in my personal statement, I began making arrangements for research in Tanzania, as well as for the study of Maa (a language not taught in the United States), with the help of an SSRC Predissertation Grant during the summer of 1994. At the University of Dar es Salaam, I have spoken to the chair of the Department of Sociology, Dr. Maghrimbi, about affiliation with the department. Dr. Joe Lugalla has agreed to sponsor me and Dr. George Malekela has expressed interest in aspects of my project having to do with Maasai children and school absenteeism. Dr. Ndagal a, the Commissioner of Culture at the Ministry of Education and Culture, an anthropologist who has worked for fifteen years with Monduli Maasai, was extremely useful in helping me to clarify my project conceptually. Also, Reuban ole Kuney of the Training for Rural Development Center in Monduli will help me in establishing local connections in Monduli District. I hope that the fieldwork involved in this research will provide the base for an eventual career in research on children's issues for child advocacy and policy purposes.