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Paper short abstract:

An anthropology of conservation that seeks to understand and enact care, justice, and conviviality needs to grapple with the ways that institutions of conservation are entangled with institutions of masculinity.

Paper long abstract:

The Mozambique-South African borderlands comprise one of the most consequential and controversial conservation territories in the world. A century's worth of exogenous conservation initiatives, projects introduced during colonial, apartheid, and post-colonial periods, now comprise a network of state, private, community, and co-managed protected areas collectively referred to as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area. Studies that have charted the "people vs. park debates" in this region have provided key insights into the colonial and racialized dimensions of conservation-related violence and inequities. Yet this work has done little to question institutions of masculinity. I draw from feminist theories environment to assess how key chapters in the one-hundred-year history of conservation in this region are entangled in institutions of masculinity: the white settlers who criminalized the hunting practices of black Africans then picked up the hunt themselves; the tens of thousands of laborers recruited directly through established protected areas to work underground in the gold mines; the retired military officers who became conservation leaders; and the hundreds of "poachers" arrested, even killed, for their involvement in illegal wildlife hunting. These are not only stories about men, they are stories about masculinity. An anthropology of conservation that seeks to understand and enact care, justice, and conviviality needs to much more intentionally grapple with the norms and practices of masculinity.