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Chapter 4: Keeping the Rhythm, Encouraging Dialogue, and Renegotiating Environmental Truths: Writing in the Oral Tradition of a Maasai Enkiguena
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Chapter 4 Keeping the Rhythm, Encouraging Dialogue, and Renegotiating Environmental Truths Writing in the Oral Tradition of a Maasai Enkiguena Mara Goldman Accounts of a “real” world do not . . . depend on a logic of “discovery,” but on a power-charged social relation of “conversation.” The world neither speaks itself nor disappears in favour of a master decoder. The codes of the word are not still, waiting only to be read. . . . [T]he world encountered in knowledge projects is an active entity. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, andWomen Metumo ildoinye, kakai tumo iltunganak Maasai proverb: “Mountains don’t meet, but people do” Understanding change and continuity in African environments has always involved storytelling. As scholars of African history, anthropology, and geography have well illustrated, history has shown a disproportionate privileging of a particular kind of story: the heroic tales of Europeans and Americans exploring, studying, managing, and otherwise “knowing”Africa. | Mara Goldman The narratives inspired by such adventure-cum-science kept African people and African voices out of the story despite the reliance of many of the authors on African informants, African laborers, and sometimes African writers , intellectuals, and politicians for the stories they were transcribing for a global audience.1 As African historians have argued, the methods and epistemologies of such “scientific” narratives were “largely divorced from any notion that Africans could themselves comprehend, interpret, and narrate their worlds in a usable manner.”2 Indeed, the “‘science’ of such studies was substantially constructed around the notion of the absence of indigenous intellectual and scientific authority” (White, Miescher, and Cohen, African Words, 4–5). And I would add that such stories were also proposed as finished products—truth statements aboutAfrican environments and societies. As the challenges to such colonial narratives has grown over the last century, so have the questions regarding the types of narratives that should be constructed about African environments: by whom, for whom, with what methods, and in what formats? These questions are not new, having been raised by historians, anthropologists, and African intellectuals and authors for quite some time. As Ngugi eloquently argued in 1981 in Decolonizing the Mind, the very language that African literature is written in is important and has been debated by African writers with earnest since the beginning of the end of the colonial era. Ngugi’s own choice to write only in his native tongue was a strong statement about the importance of language and presentation in expressing African ideas, knowledge, and stories, that is, in talking about African environments, both natural and social. Even translated into English, Ngugi’s writing overflows with and very much depends on African (Kikuyu/Swahili) words, proverbs, and storytelling techniques. These techniques not only give voice to his ideas and knowledge but also provide a rhythm to the story. In this chapter, however, I am less interested in African written literature than I am in African oral expressions, expressions that may or may not be recognized as literature but can play a powerful role in shaping knowledge production and power relations. I am interested specifically in how we (as scholars interested in human-environment relations in Africa) can draw from such traditions or forms of knowledge expression and negotiation to talk about, debate, and present knowledge on African environments in a way that reflects the very multiplicity and complexity inherent in such knowledge. This focus reflects my own desire to find both an indigenous format to reflect indigenous knowledge constructions in the places where I work and a style to reflectmultiplicityandcomplexityinknowledgeaboutnatural-socialsystems in the written work I produce.As such,this chapter reflects several important [44.204.94.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:11 GMT) Keeping the Rhythm, Encouraging Dialogue | shifts within the social sciences to embrace the multiplicity of knowledge, the complexity of natural-social systems, and the role of performance in shaping not only knowledge expressions but also power relations and knowledge constructions.3 The increased interest in the performance, meaning, and complex relations tied to spoken statements (between different speakers and the audience, for instance) reflects a move toward a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of oral literature and its role in society.A focus on “the relation between performer and audience in the moment of the performance ”highlights the“interactive dimension between texts”(i.e., the written form of spoken statements; Furniss and Gunner,Power, Marginality, 2) rather than seeing the text or narrative as truth in and of itself. Much of the work in political ecology on African environments has...