Maasai perspectives on modernity: narratives of evolution, nature and culture

Abstract

The narrative of evolutionist modernity is a former scientific theory which has fuelled and legitimized deeply harmful imperialist hierarchies, but increasingly influences how Maasai make sense of modernity. Borrowing from narratology and building on twelve years of intermittent ethnography in East-African Maasailand, I respond to recent calls for cognitive justice. Firstly, I contribute to insight in how Maasai, as Indigenous Southern people, conceptualize key scientific concepts such as modernity, as to further the availability of their understandings as partners in the dialogue of theory building. I especially regard continuities and shifts in their uses of nature/culture and Culture/culture dichotomies. Secondly, I disclose, question and deconstruct the continued centralization of Eurocentric narratives and modernist assumptions in academic sense-making, as this unreflexively denies the gradual difference and continued entanglements of scientific, ex-scientific and non-scientific narratives, and the need to include Southern experiences and knowledges to make science a truly global knowledge system.