Maasai

The hungry lions were eagerly anticipating the arrival of the wildebeest on their annual migration to the green pastures of the Maasai Mara.

Maasai craftswomen in the hills outside Nairobi, Kenya, and craft workers in Nepal make products for one store in the city, called Ten Thousand Villages. It is part of a national non-profit chain started by the Mennonites, a Christian denomination. The organization works with artisans in 35 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to make sure they get a fair price for their products.

A new mobile phone app using satellite images is helping Maasai cattle herders in Kenya find rich pastures and water in their drought stricken terrain. The device also tells them places to avoid to reduce encounters with wild animals.

Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve normally has almost as many tourists as wildebeests for the annual great migration of wildlife from Tanzania.

Another way tourists move beyond the pretour narrative during the tour stems from the sheer materiality of being there, engaging in the practice of the tour, enacting the itinerary, and moving through the site, be it a Maasai compound, a Balinese dance performance, a five-hundred-year-old castle in Ghana, or an 1830s Abraham Lincoln heritage site. To perform the site is to inscribe the pretour narrative within the body of the tourist.

According to anthropology professor Peter Rigby, the Maasai's resistance to Westernization and their reluctance to enter the market system is ethnosuicide.