Doctoral Dissertation Research: Producing Pastoral Power: Youth and the Cultural Politics of Education and Conservation in Tanzania

这个博士论文研究改进项目将有助于了解非洲的保护和资源管理如何影响青年的政治行动。本研究通过比较研究马赛族青年的教育、土地和权利，探讨坦桑尼亚的政治，并试图回答以下问题：1)什么因素对青年运动的起源最重要的贡献？2)争夺土地和其他自然资源控制权的斗争在哪些方面是农村青年政治联盟和行动的惯用语？3)为了挑战长辈的权威，年轻人使用了哪些权利话语和政治策略？本研究认为：1)教育机构的性质，如社区、州和教会学校；2)景观的历史，特别是土地被商品化和异化的方式，如小农农业移民、大规模商业农场或国家保护区；3)权利与血统以外的担保人的联系，如国家、国际法或社会运动；以不同的方式表达，培养挑战长辈权威的政治经济体系的年轻人。虽然这三股力量在坦桑尼亚北部的两个地区，即洛里昂多和蒙杜利发挥作用，但每个地区的情况都有所不同。通过教育机构的地理特定历史，土地动态，以及以普遍公民和民主化，民族自治或跨国土著权利的语言构建马赛政治，本研究将展示青年如何既能产生新的自然，民族和政治话语，又能被它们所产生。通过将东非的青年历史与环境政治联系起来，该项目将为重新思考非洲的民主化、当地资源冲突以及不断变化的代际和种族政治提供基础。这些问题是关于非洲社会和政治变革的理论和政策辩论的核心。通过说明土地斗争、教育和政治战略之间的相互关系，本研究将揭示年轻人如何以及为什么越来越多地处于区域、国家和国际政治的中心，以及影响他们不同轨迹的地理和历史条件。本研究的结果将展示为控制物质和象征资源而进行的地方斗争如何重新配置代际关系和性别关系，并影响政治动员的模式。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究生涯。

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement project will help to understand how conservation and resource management in Africa influences political action by youth. The research explores politics in Tanzania through a comparative study of education, land and rights among Maasai youth and seeks to answer the following questions: 1) What factors most significantly contribute to the genesis of youth movements? 2) In what ways is the struggle for control of land and other natural resources an idiom of political alliance and action by rural youth? And 3) What rights discourses and political tactics are employed by youth in order to challenge the authority of elders? This study argues that 1) the character of educational institutions, e.g. community, state, and church run schools, 2) the history of landscapes, specifically in the ways that land has been commodified and alienated e.g. small-holder agricultural migrants, large scale commercial farms, or national conservation areas, and 3) the linking of rights with a guarantor other than lineage, e.g. the state, international law, or social movements, articulate in different ways to produce youth who challenge the political economic system on which the authority of elders rests. While these three forces are at work in two regions in northern Tanzania, Loliondo and Monduli, locality makes a difference in each case. Through geographically specific histories of educational institutions, land dynamics, and the framing of Maasai politics in the language of universal citizenship and democratization, ethnic autonomy or transnational indigenous rights, this study will demonstrate how youth are both productive of new discourses of nature, nation, and politics, as well as produced by them. Through linking the history of youth and environmental politics in East Africa this project will provide a foundation for rethinking democratization in Africa, local resource conflict, and changing inter-generational and ethnic politics. These questions are central to theoretical and policy debates about social and political change in Africa. Through illustrating the interrelations between land struggles, education and political strategy, this research will shed light on how and why youth are increasingly at the center of regional, national and international politics and the geographical and historical conditions that influence their different trajectories. The results of this study will demonstrate how local struggles for control of material and symbolic resources reconfigure generational and gender relations and influence patterns of political mobilization. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.