The social origins of natural resource conflict in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

The dissertation is an historically rooted study of the struggles over national park land and resources between Meru peasants and a state bureaucratic class in Tanzania. I conducted the research primarily in two Meru villages near Arusha National Park in Tanzania's northeastern highlands over a twelve-month period in 1989 and 1990.;In the dissertation, I link two bodies of theoretical literature: the critical study of landscape and nature representation; and peasant protest and resistance. Accordingly, I examine the genesis of the national park idea in relation to changing European conceptions of landscape and society-nature relations during the transition to industrial capitalism. Representations of nature took on powerful symbolic importance in the colonization of Africa. National park and conservation laws became integral to European attempts at cultural and economic hegemony. Consequently, Africans were denied access in Tanzania in the name of wildlife and forest conservation. The enforcement of conservation laws has been a perennial source of conflict between the peasantry and the state, and has been one focus of resistance to state appropriation of peasant household resources.;The study historically contextualizes the words and actions of Meru peasants in order to interpret the political meaning of the illegal resource uses which plague the park. It links contemporary conflicts over land and resource access to colonial conflicts. Arusha National Park lies entirely within the area claimed by the Meru as customary lands and was used as a grazing commons and for minor forest products until the colonial government, for the purposes of nature conservation, outlawed most human activities. When the independent government took control of Tanzania, it adopted the colonial conservation laws intact.;On Mount Meru, what was once an important landscape of production for Meru peasants has been transformed into a "landscape of consumption" for largely European tourists. The conservation laws are resisted partly because they violate Meru village moral economy and sever the Meru's historical, cultural and material links to the mountain. Actions that are categorized by the state as criminal are, from the perspective of Meru peasants, a defense of customary rights of access.