Presentation short abstract

I examine tour-guiding as a critical yet precarious labour in the production of the ‘wild’ within Maasai Mara safari tourism. I consider how conservation-driven economies create precarity for guides, revealing frictions and entanglements in the commodification of nature and accumulation of capital.

Presentation long abstract

In the savannas of the Maasai Mara, the labour that animates this landscape and sustains its image as a global ‘wilderness’ often goes unnoticed. I argue that tour-guiding is a critical form of work that actively produces this space as a site of experience. Beginning with the safari, I focus on the image of the Land Cruiser as it cuts across the landscape and the driver-guide as central objects of inquiry. Starting here allows me to examine the marginalisation and exploitation of tour guiding within the safari tourism economy. As conservation-based tourism gains prominence in the economic strategies of states like Kenya, new frontiers of nature are created, even as sites of capital accumulation and profit extraction emerge in geographies and landscapes often considered peripheral. Yet, the forms of labour that make these experiences possible remain unconsidered. ‘Wilderness’ conceptualisation packages territories as consumable landscapes of experience that attract investments driven by economic interests, international networks, and moral claims of nature conservation. These dynamics shape how tour-guiding labour is contested, negotiated, unpredictable and rendered precarious even as investments in conservation-based tourism grow. I approach these frictions and discontinuities to explore the complex entanglements involved in producing the experience of the wild. I ultimately argue that conservation needs to come to terms with the forms of labour it continuously reproduces, renders precarious and ultimately requalifies as its accumulation of capital and territory continues to unfold in southern contexts.