Presentation short abstract

Drawing on 2024–25 fieldwork and using storytelling as method, this presentation examines how food and care practices evolve within shifting cultural, social, and gendered dynamics in a predominantly Maasai village in Tanzania’s Simanjiro District.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the relational, lived, and situated nature of food practices among the Maasai of Terrat Village in Simanjiro District, Tanzania, foregrounding how everyday engagements with food become sites of resilience, resurgence, and relational care in the face of socio-environmental and politico-economic change across Maasailand. Bringing together insights from anthropology, cultural geography, and feminist studies, and foregrounding indigenous knowledge, the paper shows how food is enacted across social, spatial, and ecological terrains, offering an alternative lens on pastoralist life that challenges dominant development narratives and ecological simplifications.

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2024-25 and using food stories as an ethnographic and creative method, the study contributes to broader conversations on relational carescapes enacted through situated food practices. Although Terrat has frequently been examined through the lenses of land tenure, conservation, and socio-ecological resilience, everyday food practices remain underexplored despite their centrality to negotiating shifting livelihoods under political pressure toward sedentarisation, expanding individual mobility, and ongoing cultural transformations. Through three situated narratives—olpul meat camps, loshoro as a distinctive milk-based practice, and pilau as a new, communal ritual food—the paper illustrates how Maasai communities sustain reciprocity, gendered responsibilities, and place-based ethics amid ongoing pressures on land, mobility, and biodiversity.

The paper argues that food stories offer a grounded, integrative lens for understanding evolving Maasai foodways. A relational conception of care—caring with or caring together—reveals both the possibilities and tensions involved in sustaining food, relationships, and community life amid socio-environmental and economic change.