Wildlife Management in Tanzania: State Control,Rent Seeking and Community Resistance

Despite a decade of rhetoric on community conservation, current trends in Tanzania reflect a disturbing process of reconsolidation of state control over wildlife resources and increased rent‐seeking behaviour, combined with dispossession of communities. Whereas the 1998 Wildlife Policy promoted community participation and local benefits, the subsequent policy of 2007 and the Wildlife Conservation Act of 2009 returned control over wildlife and over income from sport hunting and safari tourism to central government. These trends, which sometimes include the use of state violence and often take place in the name of ‘community‐based’ conservation, are not, however, occurring without resistance from communities. This article draws on in‐depth studies of wildlife management practices at three locations in northern Tanzania to illustrate these trends. The authors argue that this outcome is more than just the result of the neoliberalization of conservation. It reflects old patterns of state patrimony and rent seeking, combined with colonial narratives of conservation, all enhanced through neoliberal reforms of the past two decades. At the same time, much of the rhetoric of neoliberal reforms is being pushed back by the state in order to capture rent and interact with villagers in new and oppressive ways.     

Where the heart is: home space transitions for residential college students

Home and the transition to adulthood are related temporal and spatial constructs. Building upon Kenyon’s [1999. “A home from home: Students’ transitional experience of home.” In Ideal homes? Social change and domestic life, edited by T. Chapman, 84–95. New York: Routledge] categorization of physical, social, personal, and temporal elements of home for college students, we analyze survey responses from 256 students at a 4-year U.S. residential college in order to uncover how perceptions of home-like spaces change as students move from pre-college homes, through on- and off-campus home spaces, and toward imagined future homes. Our quantitative findings show that the four home elements matter differently across time and type of home, supported by qualitative findings wherein students articulate how they conceptualize similarities and differences between the different home spaces. This study adds to ongoing conceptualizations of the transition to adulthood as placed (for four-year residential college students especially), and as fluid and multilayered in terms of social actors’ views of their past, present, and imagined future homes and accompanying identity transitions.     

Monastic archives and the law: legal strategies at Farfa and Monte Amiata at the turn of the millennium

This article investigates two controversies that reveal the deeply intertwined nature of legal strategies and archival practices at the monasteries of Farfa and Monte Amiata around the turn of the millennium. It argues that the protagonists of these cases, abbots knowledgeable in law and the history of their monasteries, pursued markedly historical legal strategies: legal strategies that looked to, manipulated, and, above all, contextualized, archival documents in order to make legal arguments. This sheds light on early medieval monastic legal culture in north-central Italy and provides insights into the rationale for monastic forgeries of documentary materials at Monte Amiata.     

The stubborn persistence of the anthropology of religion

Klass, Morton. Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. xiv + 177 pp. including references and index. $49.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Reynolds, Vernon and Ralph Tanner. The Social Ecology of Religion. Oxford University Press, 1995. viii + 322 pp. including index. $39.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Holm, Jean and John Bowker, eds. Attitudes to Nature. London: Pinter Publishers, 1994. xii + 172 pp. including index. $45.00 cloth, $16.00 paper.