CHAPTER 1:

Research Methods

This study considers a wide range of issues characterizing the geographic space of the East Africa Region, including history, ideological and ethical systems, conservation and development policies and strategies, ecological degradation and human impoverishment, gender divisions, sociopolitical structures in East Africa and globally, the international dominance of capitalist economic and cultural models, the sustainability of capitalism, the role of colonialism and neoimperialism in Kenya and Tanzania historically, and the history of dominant forms of resource utilization in East Africa. The broad-based nature of this thesis and the magnitude of the subject create certain limitations from the outset. Given the nature and the scope of this study, an in-depth, critical analysis of all of the issues shaping the realities of the East African geography will be difficult. Therefore, I will concentrate on the connections between degradation, impoverishment, and wealth manifested in the socioeconomic, political, and cultural relationships between "the North" and "the South," namely between Europe and America, and Kenya and Tanzania. My thesis will focus on the interaction between power dynamics and the history of conservation and development in East Africa.

The nature of this study creates other problems as well. Traditionally, the geography of East Africa has been studied on narrowly focused levels of particular cultural and ecological processes. Conservation issues have been approached traditionally from a biological perspective grounded in the natural sciences, while development issues have been approached from political and socioeconomic perspectives. Only in the last 10 years have conservation and development issues, degradation and impoverishment dynamics, people and the environment, been considered together, as they interact with each other in a dynamic relationship in East Africa. The role that international power dynamics and socioeconomic systems of domination play within the context of East African geography - especially in the postcolonial era - has been even less documented. This creates several difficulties for the presentation and material contained within this thesis, including the problem of gathering relevant and applicable information, the establishment of a working theoretical perspective, and the resulting validity of the position of this thesis. These issues will be addressed presently.

This study is based partly on first-hand observations and experiences I had during the 4 months of academic study and independent traveling I spent in East Africa during the spring of 1996. My experiences in Africa relating to this study were recorded in the form of 500 pages of fieldnotes and journal entries, 900 photographs, several personal interviews with individuals involved in community-based conservation strategies and indigenous views of conservation and sustainability in their lives, numerous drawings, a cumulative paper dealing with issues of conservation and development in East Africa, and personal experiences of East Africa in the urban and rural environments and in all of the major ecosystems (savanna, acacia woodlands, desert, coastal tropical and mangrove zones, coral reefs, alpine moorlands, montane forests, etc.). Because I stayed in East Africa for a limited period of time, the firsthand information and experiences I accumulated are only partially effective in validating the broad-based claims and arguments contained within this thesis. However, in the context of this study, my primary information draws on texts dealing with the geography of East Africa on a number of levels. These "texts" include sources I have researched in libraries across the country and internationally, and in bookstores in America and in Kenya and Tanzania. Primarily, these "texts" are taken from academic journals and essay collections, although they also include newspaper articles, book reviews, and promotional information on conservation and development programs. These "texts" also include sources I have researched on the World Wide Web (such as Web pages), and through a number of search engines including ProQuest and CARL Uncover.

For the purpose of this study, my personal experiences in East Africa provide a basis of support for my claims and assumptions by reinforcing the validity of positions and observations made by authors of the "texts;" my personal observations and experiences act more as a reinforcement of textual positions than as the primary source of informational authority. Nevertheless, within the context of the framework of "texts" that help form the basis of my positions and arguments in this study, the validity of my thesis must be considered, because much of the structure of the thesis is based on second- and third-hand sources. The judgments, generalizations, and biases of the authors of the "texts" - including me as an "author" of my experiences and writings in East Africa - make corroboration of my analysis of power dynamics, conservation, development, degradation, and impoverishment in East Africa problematic, especially because issues of power, domination, conservation, and development have not been well-documented or quantified in relation to each other in East Africa. I have attempted to overcome these problematic aspects of the texts, to a certain extent, by referring to texts which deal with different aspects of East African geography, primarily based on first-hand scientific and sociocultural experiences of the authors. However, even in the case of texts which deal with less direct experiences in East Africa or approach issues of power, conservation, and development from theoretical perspectives, the sources consistently evidence the existence of certain themes within the greater context of East African geography. In addition, some of the texts are based on focused quantitative studies - of tourist visits to national parks and reserves and the capital produced therein, of the distribution of wealth from agricultural activities or from the tourist industry, etc. - and taken together, these can suggest important "facts" about realities within the geographical framework of East Africa. Furthermore, an analysis of certain commodities (such as ivory, wheat, etc.) and of physical events and spacing (of the city, of people in urban and rural areas, etc.) - which is attempted throughout this study - can reveal the existence of certain dynamics played out between people and the environment in the context of power relations, conservation and development strategies, and the existence of degradation, impoverishment, and domination in Kenya and Tanzania. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that in relation to this study - and to a certain extent in relation to any study addressing these subjects on such a broad scale - there are significant limitations that emerge out of the lack of extended, first-hand studies and observations on my part; there is clearly much room for further study and analysis of the geography of East Africa combining a number of perspectives and fields of academic studies, and this thesis can only offer critical analysis of the texts and of my own experiences based on these limitations to the validity of the work as a whole.

Based on my experience of East African geography, power dynamics, and research of conservation and development strategies during the 4 months I lived in Kenya and Tanzania, I began this research project by attempting to establish a working theoretical framework for my thesis. As I mentioned earlier, though, this was made difficult by the broad-based approach of this study to the geography of East Africa, especially because few theorists have considered global capitalism, power dynamics, neoimperialism, and the interaction of people and the environment in Kenya and Tanzania. However, Marxian analysis of the first and second contradictions of capitalism (and Marx's theories on commodification, circulation, reproduction, and capitalist self-destruction in general), and the work of O'Connors and other recent, "radical" theorists to apply this philosophy to modern conservation and development issues, provided one source of theoretical knowledge shaping the overall framework. In addition, conservation and development strategies have been analyzed and considered from a number of theoretical positions - such as environmental preservation vs. utilization or state vs. local control of resources - and these help provide a framework for understanding the efficacy of conservation and development programs and how these relate to greater issues of domination and power dynamics on a national and international scale. The work of theorists and social scientists such as Rodney, Davidson, Marcuse, Rawls, Cahn, and Korten (considered in-depth in Chapter 2), help to tie together some of the complex interactions between people and the environment in East Africa and in "North / South" relationships historically.

After compiling a number of theoretical perspectives that reinforce the arguments and conclusions voiced in this work, I began to reanalyze my experiences in East Africa and focus more closely on the process of researching source materials, in the form of texts retrieved primarily in libraries and bookstores, and through electronic servers including the World Wide Web, CARL Uncover, and ProQuest (as discussed earlier). The wealth of research materials that I compiled, and the complexity of the issues connected to East African degradation and impoverishment, convinced me that a purely "traditional" approach to my thesis - as a series of essays or chapters written in a linear, expository approach and presented as a large paper - was not completely adequate to allow for the complex dynamics of the East Africa Region to be fully expressed. I wanted to use a format that would allow me to effectively use photographs, maps, and data charts as graphic aids for the written text of the thesis. I was also interested in presenting my thesis in a way that encouraged the reader to see the connections between various issues and dynamics being considered within the thesis as a whole; I wanted to use a format that expressed clearly the multiple levels of geography in the East African context in relation to power dynamics, conservation, and development issues. For these reasons, I chose to organize and structure my thesis as a World Wide Web document, because this allowed me to make use of graphic aids effectively, and allowed me to create links between particular words, phrases, and ideas in the text so that the reader could more easily make the connection between important issues in the framework of my thesis. I began by writing my thesis as a Mac Word document, and transferred sections of this to "html" documents (while graphic images were transferred to "jpg" and "gif" documents). These were finally linked and compiled together as the whole of my thesis, with introductory pages providing directions and "contents" of the chapters for the reader to investigate. For those readers that prefer the physicality of printed documents, this has also been compiled from my Web documents, as a tangible, bound work for the reader to peruse.

As I acknowledged earlier, the lack of substantial, first-hand experiences of the complex geography of East Africa challenge the authority of this study's conclusions to a certain extent, and it is recognized that further study, analysis, and reinforcement or refutation of the claims made in this thesis are necessary and desirable to provide further insights into the nature of East African interactions between people and the environment, the local people and the state, the national and the international economies, and dominant social forces (e.g. the importance of degradation, impoverishment, exploitation, and neoimperialism) in Kenya and Tanzania and between the "North" and "South" in general. Nevertheless, many of the texts - and my own experiences - provide a combination of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative results that tie together a number of factors in the context of East African geography, and raise a number of much needed questions in the context of an impending human and ecological crisis in Kenya, Tanzania, and throughout the world.

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Send comments to: emmons@lclark.edu