Dorothy Hodgson

Like her colleagues among cultural anthropologists, Dorothy Hodgson tries to understand how global forces shape the everyday lives of specific people – in her case, the Maasai in northern Tanzania. For more than two decades, she has tried to put herself as close as she can to the place where social change, ethnicity, and gender come together. A speaker of Maa, the Maasai language, Hodgson has written about the impact of various development schemes on the Maasai, about the interaction of the Maasai with Catholic missionaries, and is completing a book about the indigenous rights movement in Africa.

Central to Hodgson’s work is a determination to understand and depict the Maasai as real people with complex individual and collective lives – with decisions to make about daily work and play, about children and families, work and education. She hopes to overcome stereotypes about the Maasai – some complimentary, some degrading, all misleading.

“To mention ‘the Maasai,’ as I have discovered in conversation after conversation about my research, is to invoke for most people images of warriors, of men herding cattle, of proud patriarchs,” Hodgson wrote in the introduction to Once Intrepid Warriors (Indiana University Press, 2001). “But it also invokes comments on their ‘cultural conservatism,’ ‘unwillingness to change’ – Maasai are icons of ‘primitive,’ ‘pre-historic,’ ‘traditional’ Africa.”

But these coffee-table book caricatures had little to do with the actual Maasai Hodgson has encountered. In the mid 1980s, as a development worker in Tanzania’s Arusha Region, she was intrigued by the ambivalence the Maasai showed toward government and church-sponsored development projects, and troubled by the tensions she observed between men and women, parents, and adult children. At the time, she put all this down to a lack of development initiatives. But she has come to believe that 80 years of development effort – by the British in colonial times, by the Tanzanian government, and various international aid agencies since – have, with some exceptions, made things worse, undermining rather than improving Maasai lives and livelihoods.

Hodgson’s second book dealt with the encounter between Maasai people and American Catholic missionaries, the Spiritans, beginning in the 1950s. In The Church of Women (Indiana University Press, 2005), Hodgson reported that although the missionaries very specifically targeted men in their mission work, they were to their reluctant surprise, vastly more successful with women. Few Maasai men felt drawn to Catholic masculine ideals and expectations. In contrast, Maasai women, according to Hodgson, saw their involvement in the church as a way to enhance their already significant spiritual power and moral authority.

In recent years, Hodgson has studied and worked with the international indigenous people’s movement. Her upcoming book, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous, scheduled for publication in 2010, studies how issues of culture, power, and history have shaped the involvement of Africans in the indigenous rights movement, primarily through the experiences of Maasai activists and  organizations. Her longer-term project involves a study of how women of various ages, classes, in rural as well as urban, locations have organized themselves into formal and informal associations, their agendas, and institutional structures.