Paper short abstract:

Conservation in Tanzania's promotes co-existence between people and wildlife, while conservation dispacements of local people continue. This presentation considers this conservation contradiction in relation to community-based movements for land rights and self-determination

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary conservation in Tanzania revolves around the idea of promoting co-existence between people and wildlife, focusing especially on landscapes outside of the country's world-famous national parks. At the same time Maasai communities in Ngorongoro face renewed threats of evictions, while conservation-related displacement and dispossession continues throughout the country. This current contradiction is the latest in a series, consistently reiterated in relation to spatialized legacies of colonial conservation and related land laws.

These legacies are at the heart of contemporary land rights movements, which seek to put land and natural resources more in the hands of local people and to revitalize and refine community-based modes of environmental care. The goals of these movements reflect the recommendations of the Presidential Land Tenure Commission of 1994 and related movements for consitutional reform today

This presentation considers the challenges of these interrelated movements to conservationists and social scientists alike. It emphasizes that meaningful conservationist support for coexistence will entail a reckoning with the inherited separations and segregations of colonial conservation, as well as the political ecology of wildlife tourism. It will simultanously require reconsidering the traditional role and position of Anthropologists as privileged interpreters and anaysts.