I Want Your Skull. I Need Your Skull.

...And another week goes by. As you can probably tell by the fact that I've completely fallen off of the face of the blogosphere (yeah that's right you can fall off of something which has no spatial referent...hot damn!) in the past week, I was in the field again. This time, I went with David to some group ranches in Southern Kajiado district, which like Kitengela and Narok are Maasai Communities which border a wildlife park. In this case the park in question is Amboseli national park, which is a bit smaller than either Maasai Mara or Nairobi National Park, and which is notable for having a TON (or if you really want to nitpick MANY TONS) of elephants and a spectacular view of Mt. Kilimanjaro (Amboseli, like Maasai Mara is right on the Kenya-Tanzania border). However, when I was there, I wasn't able to get a good shot of Kili (as the locals call it) and we didn't get into Amboseli proper. The main thing we did while we were there was go to several community meetings that Shauna BurnSilver, another ILRI affiliated PhD student was holding in the area. Shauna is in the process of completing a dissertation in the field of Human Ecology on mobility and diversification among Maasai pastoralists in several group ranches in Kajiado district. In a follow-up visit last year, Shauna held a number of focus groups in her study communities, on the topic of the major development issues facing these communities; the leading issues that group participants brought to light were the breeding of drought-resistant cattle, the subdivision of group ranches, and diversification of Maasai livelihoods away from pure pastoralism. The purpose of the community meetings to address these issues, using the findings of Shauna's research (and other work by ILRI researchers in the fields of vetrinary sciences, ecology, and economics) in order to help inform household and community-level decision-making processes. I'll probably talk at more length later about why this is an interesting cool model for doing research, but suffice to say that it was another compelling example of how to do work that is both theoretically compelling and meaningful to the community that is the subject of the research.

But that is another post for another today. In spite of the lack of touristy pursuits on this trip, I was able to take lots of photos, which I leave you with now. Look for a bunch more actual, real posts this week.