Bisa explanations to the why questions of life often occur after consultation with elders or with those with similar experiences. In 1973, I was present when an elderly man told of his mauling by a lion. The encounter occurred as he was warming himself by a fire outside his field hut; the deep claws marks were clearly visible on his back and chest. When asked what might have brought on this attack, he demurred and said that he would wait “respectively,” for that revelation would come in time. Subsequent information, including that a lion had previously killed his “sister” and that the game scouts were stymied in following the lion’s spoor, confirmed that this was no “ordinary lion” but one “sent by a sorcerer” (nkalamo yakutuma). These combined with other events fingered an aberrant relative as the likely sorcerer, who eventually consented and repented as lives, with retained memories, resumed.

Lions continue to maul occasional humans, one of the last being a scout in May 2005. In recounting his story, this scout never claimed it as a “sent lion” (how could he without losing face?), but several of his acquaintances gave plausible theories as to who might have controlled and sent this lion in retaliation. The scout’s main puzzlement was why this lion had attacked him while he was sleeping in the bush surrounded by other members of a larger poacher patrol unit, then stalked and followed him as he went through several wildlife camps in subsequent days, before finally breaking down the door and cornering him in his own household. Another scout shot this aged lioness as she was atop her victim with her worn teeth and emaciated jaws surrounding his head. (Yes, I saw the indents of its teeth.)

I appreciate MUWINA’s contribution about the dilemmas of translating terms and the ways these idioms may be used by local speakers. When I asked residents about their meanings of “ifilingwa waLeza” several gave their meanings as Muwina notes, “created by God.” Yet in my conversations with a past chair of the Munyamadzi Community Resources Board (CRB), he said that the term meant “created by God” and extended that by including the idea that these were “God’s gifts.” The idea of “gift” implies reciprocity and a relationship; a connection which, with my writer’s license, I was hoping to convey in the conciseness of my paper.

ANNEAR asks about the “emic forms of social expressions” and what they might mean, if anything, to the “uncomprehending outsider.” Here’s a recent incident that suggests a prospective role. In 2004, safari hunters apprehended several villagers and their dogs in hot pursuit of game. The offenders were brought before the CRB and the wildlife scouts, where, together with safari operators, a decision was made that dogs in that vicinity were too plentiful and must be killed (“cropped”). The following year after the villagers were notified of this unilateral decision, the scouts, supplied with fuel and ammo by the safari firm, allegedly killed 63 dogs. This incident caused such an outrage that the local safari manager agreed to pay over one million kwacha (about $250) of compensation to their owners. The manager gave this sum to the wildlife Unit Leader to dispense to the dead dogs’ owners, each amount depending on the size of the dead dog. In 2006, the manager and villagers complained to me that the Unit Leader had “eaten” (or “trousered” — both local expressions) those funds; and no one, for varied reasons, seemed willing to bring him to book. None of the dead dogs’ names appeared on my list in the paper, yet the meaning of some of the survivors’ names reflects this incursion.

I greatly appreciate GAROON’s insightful extension of the British idiom of “poaching,” as it helps to explain many activities that take place as residents seek out and exploit opportunistically chances to experience the “good life” (“goot milile”) as they appear. In this, the Unit Leader was onto something that many others seemed begrudgingly to respect.

I wish to thank all respondents for their contributions.

A brief note by way of background: my recent research investigates health effects of CBNRM implementation in a Game Management Area (GMA) on the western border of North Luangwa National Park – a GMA historically populated by Bisa. Over the last few years, I’ve had the great fortune of getting Stuart’s feedback on my project. His innovative work has been an inspiration, and I’m happy to have the chance to discuss it here (though as other respondents have noted above, I can’t possibly do it justice in a few hundred words).

A number of the responses to Stuart’s essay have focused on frequently challenged divisions, such as those between “human” and “nature” and “wild” and “modern.” I’d like to focus on another trope that’s emerged, one often employed in demarcating the physical and social geographies of the Luangwa Valley: the dichotomy between “inside” and “outside” knowledge and actions.

Critiques of models like CBNRM often draw this boundary, particularly with reference to the ways in which “expert” or “scientific” knowledge is “imposed” on residents of places like the Munyamadzi. Such critiques often portray these discourses and practices as impenetrable and unalterable, especially from the perspectives of residents. At the same time, these arguments tend to circumscribe the mobility of people, things, and ideas.

There’s no doubt that a lot of imposition and circumscription is going on in Zambian GMAs. The Zambian Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) has (as Stuart’s richly illustrated in his work) taken a hard line on “poaching,” defined as the illegal hunting of wildlife. Zambian wildlife policing too often relies on coercive investigations, abusive interrogations, and extrajudicial punishments.

I argue that these often draconian enforcement efforts, coupled with the introduction of CBNRM, have fostered “poaching” of another sort. This is the “poaching” that occurs between humans and other humans, as they compete for the resources that CBNRM implementation (alongside other processes) has made available. While this “poaching” is not always illegal, or even illicit, it does involve various impingements on and infringements of property claimed by others. These daily occurrences instantiate Michel de Certeau’s observation that “everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”

GMA residents are constantly maneuvering to secure resources, hoping not just to survive, but also to thrive in an environment that constantly shifts in response to their efforts. Such maneuvers certainly include residents’ movements in and out of physical localities: Valley and Plateau, village and town, upcountry and capital. But they also encompass people’s navigation of shifting social spaces, delineated by their ideas and experiences of kin, kith, and community. And these ideas and experiences are themselves in continual flux.

As a result, we should bring a critical eye to analyses that present the discourses and practices of CBNRM as fixed in time or place, or as unresponsive to the competing – or, importantly, collaborative – discourses and practices of the people on whom we often assume CBNRM is unilaterally “imposed.”

While GMA residents are almost always playing with a decked stacked heavily against them, they are certainly capable of taking (by playing) a trick or two. Figuring out how these dynamics unfold is vital to understanding how conservation and development efforts are changing the practice of everyday life not just in Zambia, but globally.

no “nature” exists outside the morality of the human community, for reciprocal obligations extend outward from the village embracing other forms of life as well as spirits. The bush becomes responsive and responsible to residents as their ancestral spirits reside there as former embodiments of the current community. Causality embedded in moral principles and human intentionality are the bedrock explanations for why “good” and “bad” things happen; the latter might happen even to “good” or innocent people because someone, somewhere has violated ethical expectations and norms. The “how” and the “why” questions of life are often embedded in the same search.

One possible reading of this is that moral concern is taken to be both “reciprocal” and “human.” In other words, there is no nature/human divide because all of it is human, encompassing human ancestors, etc.; and there is no community/other divide because all belong to one community.

But this runs counter to two (other) common conceptions of moral regard as (1) incumbent on an agent regardless of the “patient’s” mutual capacities (children, the relatively incompetent, disadvantaged, or powerless) and (2) directed at others even if they are conceived as “radically” different (human strangers, other species).

But I am not sure that my reading of the passage was what was intended … maybe even the opposite. Clarification or comment would be appreciated.

The view that conservation and development can and must be apolitical in objective and method must be challenged.

Stuart translates ifilingwa waleza as “God’s gifts” suggesting a utilitarian and anthropocentric African view of nature. However, in my understanding the best rendering should be “created by God” Ifilingwa means created not “gift”. The Bemba and Tonga use a similar term. In Tonga hilengwa Leza and in Bemba, iflilengwa Lesa refers to the natural world and things beyond the explainable. Ukulenga in Bemba is to create, to cause, to bring into being. An old Tonga song has the line wakalenga masamu, in praise of Leza, the Tonga term for God as “the one who created trees.” It is a term used to explain broadly the origin of things especially animals, plants, rivers and used to explain away occurrences that defy the natural or “freaks of nature.” Thus, this term is not limited to the animal world but applicable to humans as well such as Albinos or people born with deformities. The Tonga use great caution when approaching hilengwa Leza and often leave them untouched for fear that doing so would create cosmological imbalance. The notion then, that this term means “God’s gift,” supporting an anthropocentric view seems misplaced. However, the article highlights the environmental challenges in Africa.

As Dr. Marks has noted in his work, a major conservation and development strategy employed by the Bisa and their neighbors as well as others dependent in part on wildlife in southern Africa is community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), also known as community-based conservation (CBC). The main idea behind CBNRM/CBC projects is that local communities would get the rights to the benefits from natural resources and, as a result, they would be more willing to conserve them. This is in contrast to the approach in which the state (i.e. the government) controls natural resources and the benefits from those resources go to the government or to private companies that get leasehold rights from the government.

CBNRM in southern Africa projects were based on a number of assumptions. First, it was assumed that southern African governments would be willing to devolve authority over wildlife resources to the district or local level and would enact legislation to make this possible. A second assumption was that government authorities would be willing to consult local people and have them be involved in planning and decision-making. Third, it was assumed that if local people had the rights over wildlife resources and received the benefits from them, they would work to conserve them. It was also assumed that local people would reduce the pressure on wildlife resources and therefore the numbers of wild animals would increase.

It was also assumed that if local people were able to have access to wildlife resources, they could get meat, materials, and other benefits. Local communities could contract out the rights to wildlife to private companies who then paid them for the right to bring in hunters or tourists. These companies would sometimes employ local people as guides or safari camp assistants. The clients of the companies would also purchase products from local people, including handicrafts, thus enabling them to generate some income.

Some of the social and natural scientists working on CBNRM projects, including Dr. Marks, realized early on that the promotion of biodiversity conservation could have significant impacts on human populations. Human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) are a major issue for rural peoples such as the Bisa. An increase in the number of large mammals such as elephants or lions was not always viewed all that positively by the Bisa and their neighbors. There were incidents where local people were killed or injured by wild animals. A position taken by Bisa was that if the government of Zambia was going to promote CBNRM in the Manyamadzi Corridor, then efforts would have to be made to compensate people for wildlife-related damages.

As Dr. Marks has emphasized in his work, CBNRM projects have had their downsides. There were situations where safari operators took advantage of local people and did not provide the benefits that they claimed they would. Concerns have also been raised about the equity and gender impacts of CBNRM projects. Some of the CBNRM projects in southern Africa saw the benefits flow to district-level authorities rather than local communities.

Another important issue raised by Dr. Marks relates to the ways in which knowledge and information relating to wildlife is conveyed from one person to another and from one generation to the next. As he points out, much human communication is done through speech and language. Parents teach children about how to act through modeling behavior and by correcting them. The young also learn social and technical skills in cultural contexts in which direct information is transferred to them, as occurs, for example, during initiation ceremonies. Conveying of information can also include facial expressions, such as raised eyebrows or pursed lips. Hand gestures are sometimes used by people to communicate information to other people. This is done, for example, by hunters when they are sneaking up on prey and want to communicate to their fellow hunters what the animal that they are targeting is doing.

Training of Bisa young people in hunting is described by Marks (1976:86, 127) in his ground-breaking book Large Mammals and a Brave People. Unlike the Ju/’hoan San of Namibia and Botswana, where most of the young are no longer learning how to hunt and track (see Biesele and Barclay 2001), the Bisa learn to hunt through the lineages of which they are a part. Liebenberg (2001), working among the !Xoo San of Botswana, has underscored the importance of tracking animals. Knowledge of tracking is useful not only as a means of finding prey, but also learning about the presence of predators or of government officials such as game scouts out looking for people engaged in illegal hunting. Tracking knowledge, therefore, can increase both subsistence and social security.

Bisa and other southern African peoples share information about their habitats and the organisms and materials in them. They provide people with updates on resource abundance, distribution, and quality, and they note the land use patterns of other groups utilizing those resources. Information on the state of the environment or the presence and activities of other people is used to assist people in decision-making. As Stuart Marks illustrates so well, decision-making about such issues wildlife resource utilization, common property management, mobility, and participation in government projects and programs is based in part in part on people’s experiences and their culturally transmitted knowledge about the history of places and events that took place on the landscapes in which they reside.

References Cited

Biesele, Megan and Steve Barclay. 2001. Ju/’hoan Women’s Tracking Knowledge and Its Contribution to Their Husband’s Hunting Success. In African Hunter-Gatherers: Persisting Cultures and Contemporary Problems, J. Tanaka, M. Ichikawa, and D. Kimura, eds. African Study Monographs, Supplementary Issue 26:67-84.

Liebenberg, Louis. 2001. The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. Cape Town: David Philip.

Marks, Stuart A. 1976. Large Mammals and a Brave People: Subsistence Hunters in Zambia. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press.

I agree with Tom Johnson and David Gordon that Marks portrays Valley Bisa people as living in a present that is unnecessarily divided from the past. Without the incorporation of previous economic, social, and political events and processes, they might be read to be powerless victims of a transgressing neoliberal conservation regime. I do not believe this is Marks’ intention. His valuable fieldwork insights derived from listening carefully over many years of fieldwork show people who actively express themselves and their frustrations through a variety of media. He highlights one such locally comprehensible vehicle that carries such social meaning: animals.

Names in Zambia and elsewhere are very often given to express a sentiment or mark a moment in time. Just ask Celtel Banda or Gearbox Phiri. Marks makes perceptive use of a series of names given to dogs in 2006. Singly each moniker seems like the product of an individual moment of annoyance, but aggregated as a group they do indeed appear conspiratorial. But, while I find the concept of reading social events through the given names of animals to be intriguing, I wonder just how much we can conclude. If dogs are billboards for advertising anger or sadness, how do we read the many that remain throughout their lives nameless? Is there evidence of dog names that memorialize hunting success and sated appetites? Most germane to this discussion, how do we know that dog naming and other emic forms of social expression are meant to communicate anything to the uncomprehending outsider?

JOHNSON and GORDON mention the history of earlier benefits and challenges of past Bisa middlemen and entrepreneurs in the long distant trades and their losses later under more powerful warlords affiliated withe the Bemba, Ngoni, Portuguese (Chikunda), and Arab states. Through their own studies and those of others, TODD and KOON extend the range of the Bisa experence in southern Africa by showing similar processes elsewhere. CANCEL counsels about some of the difficulties faced by observers in their studies and the decisions they must make to remain judiciously relevant to their various audiences and sponsors. CLIGGETT discusses the inherent problems in interpretations and attemps to move othrs beyond their familiar boundaries. HAHN and PEACOCK note that “walking the walk” of a discipline on the ground is different from the rarified atmospheres of theories and talk of good intentions, while HAHN further reminds us that every century produces its missionaries whose zeal and vision compel them outward onto other social and cultural turf.

This difference between the very human domains of walking and talking, between theory and practice, between what is said and what gets accomplished helps to foreground some quibbles I might pursue with GORDON as he seems to annoint conservation biologists as suitable candidates for this century’s missionaries. Having walked on their walk and spent time in their shoes, I have found conservation biologists to be “camp followers” on the coattails and payrolls of more powerful political and economic sponsors (Chapin 2004-05). Saving biodiversity might be a greater good for us all, yet it is the human costs in its current global practices that show its truncated, reductionist, and ethnocentric format. Their “buffer zones” around “inviolate” national parks are solvent mediators protecting the wilderness of the Northern imagination from the supposedly “cultural chaos” of different values and visions. These “buffers” impose a “catch-22” spaces (Holt 2005) upon their residents as most are kept in cultural, if not identity, limbo as they spiral increasingly downward into despondency and uncertainty.

The irony is that in the recent past, the valley Bisa had the space to create and the will to construct their own management system which they understood and in which they actively participated: this system worked reasonably well to distribute its wealth, and the biodiversity wasn’t mined or denied them as it is today. To resurrect this history is not to claim that these same forms would work today, but to indicate that conditions were favorable to empowering residents as actors and crafters of their own futures. And it is not to claim that “biological diversity rests on cultural diversity” but to assert that biological conservation is, after all, a human construction and cultural enterprise whose dimensions are not dismissed through lack of recognition. Put another way, what is left out of theories and models (those black holes or boxes)remain challenges or become their eventual Trojan Horses (Blaikie 2006). The current academic and donor discourse of conservation and development centers mainly upon the economic, yet while money discourse remains important (both for practitioners and residents in “buffer zones”)this singular concern must not be pressed to the exclusion of other ways of reckoning values and of knowing. Thick history and memory remains in place on the ground and their more meaningful episodes may not be transcribed in archives or through conversations with passing strangers.

To paraphrase Walter Firey (1960), all research and planing is either innovative or conventional; it either builds toward a new social/cultural order or strives to reinforce an existing (status quo) one. For me, the high costs and plights of the Bisa and others indicate the limits of current biodiversity theories and practices on the ground. I think those concerned about the welfare of people, wildlife, and the world we live in can do better. I hope the edited Gordon and Krech volume will address many of these issues and I look forward to reading and learning from them.

Some references:

Blaikie,P. 2006 Is small really beautiful? Community-based natural resource management in Malawi and Botswana. World Development 34 (11):1942-1957.

Bowker, G.C 2005. Time, money, and biodiversity, pp 107-123 in A Ong & S.J.Collier (eds) Global Assemblags: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. Maiden, MA:Blackwell Publishing

Chapin, M. 2004 A challenge to conservationists. World Watch (Nov-Dec issue):pp 17-31 and Responses from readers World Watch (Jan-Feb issue): pp.5-20.

Holt, F.I. 2005 The Catch-22 of conservation: indigenous peoples, biologists, and culture change. Human Ecology 33:199-215.

Firey, W.I. 1960. Man, mind, and land: a theory of resource use. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe.

I think Marks is right to see the dichotomy between the world of nature and the world of the human as a Western construct. But it isn’t clear to me that “wild” animals have disappeared from human life in, say, modern North America. Non-domesticated animals recede or vanish from human settings for two reasons: either they are hunted out of existence, or they are unable to adapt to human-transformed environments. Where hunting is prohibited — or, even more effectively, given up — many non-domesticated species move into those transformed environments with alacrity. Some of these are perceived as pests (rats and mice), but others are tolerated as guests or fellow citizens.

Sinton notes the persistence of an extensive “wild” fauna in an urban area of Massachusetts. In my neighborhood in the middle of an average urban area in Durham, North Carolina, characterized by house lots averaging about a quarter of an acre and some sequestration of green space in small parks and watershed areas, I encounter seven species of non-domesticated mammals — gray squirrels, chipmunks, cottontails, gray foxes, raccoons, opossums, and white-tailed shrews — on a daily basis, along with some less common or less visible mammal species and a large number of birds. Half a mile outside of town, one regularly sees white-tailed deer and woodchucks. Canada geese and beaver have returned as a regular feature of the suburban landscape, and coyote and black bear sightings are becoming frequent. Most of the species lost in this area since 1492 are either very large mammals (elk and forest bison) or animals that could not adapt to widespread deforestation (e.g., the largest woodpeckers and the passenger pigeon). Suburban North Americans routinely encounter more medium-sized to large wild animals than was the case fifty years ago.

The characterization of domesticated animals as “pets that bear our marks” seems to me to embody the same sort of mistaken distinction between the wild and the civil that Marks rightly repudiates in other contexts. All terrestrial animals bear our marks in one way or another. Wherever modern human beings have lived, they have transformed the landscape and the ecology. Where humans are an ancient component of the fauna (Africa and South Asia), most of the Pleistocene megafauna managed to adapt to our evolving presence early on and are still hanging on today. Where modern humans appeared as sudden intruders, the largest megafauna became extinct: moas in New Zealand, aepyornis and giant lemurs in Madagascar, mammoths and woolly rhinos in Europe, ground sloths and mastodons in North America. Domestication is one way of adapting to the human presence. Wild horses and cattle are extinct and wolves are barely holding on, but dogs are fantastically successful and horses and cattle flourish and co-evolve with humans. The deer, opossums, and raccoons in the backyard, the mice in the pantry, and the cage-bred tigers and lions in the zoo represent other modes of co-existence.

I think it is misleading to draw symbolic oppositions between domesticated and non-domesticated animals, or between alienated industrial Westerners and “indigenous peoples” who know how to fit into nature. We all live with non-human animals that have adapted to the human presence in various ways. They and we have been changed by our co-occupation of the same areas. If we want to continue that co-existence, we need to draw on everybody’s experiences of the various ways in which it can be successfully maintained.

Concepts of environment, conservation, and sustainability, as Marks points out, produce some of the most conflicted debates between differing worldviews (i.e.: people). Conservationist agendas typically undermine local people’s livelihoods; the Valley Bisa are just one example, out of so many, of a population suddenly being declared “a problem” to the environment by outsiders. Northern Hemisphere tourists in search of an ancient, pristine “nature” will spend thousands of dollars for a one week sojourn in Disneyland style African huts (equipped with plumbing and screened windows to keep malaria baring mosquitoes at bay) and tremble with excitement at seeing a lion lounging in the afternoon shade. Next door, a local family living in the buffer zone to that pristine nature, sleeps in real mud-brick, grass roofed houses with no mosi-netting, draws milky grey water from a shallow well, and buys food with the ten dollars earned from selling tourist crafts (in a good week), instead of provisioning themselves through farming and hunting – since those activities, they have been told, disrupt the pristine nature.

The struggle for all of us – researchers, policy makers, conservationists, and a concerned public – depends on “broadening our common understanding of what ‘sustainability’ of life might [really] be about.” I come back to my earlier point: we need excellent interpreters to make foreign/ exotic people and places more familiar- and thus less easy to dismiss- to Northern Hemisphere actors who knowingly or not, frequently undermine local populations’ ways of being human.