Landscapes of conservation: History, perceptions, and practice around Tarangire National Park, Tanzania

This dissertation explores and analyzes the interaction of conservation and communities at the edge of a protected area, Tarangire National Park, in northern Tanzania. Northern Tanzania is home to some of the world's most well known protected areas. I use a rich multi-sited ethnography to demonstrate how communities are similarly or dissimilarly interacting with and affected by conservation by bringing to light the stories of those who live on the border of Tarangire National Park: the Maasai, Mbugwe, Iraqw, and Arusha. These stories present a range of viewpoints, understandings, interactions, and perceptions about conservation that enriches the narratives of conservation and helps to create a space that includes a diverse range of people into broader understandings of community.;I present a unique approach to the study of conservation issues within anthropology. Many topics covered in this work are underappreciated or under explored in the conservation literature. Using the lenses of history, language and policy, I present nuanced aspects of human-environment interactions and detail the intersections of these social phenomena. I explore issues of identity, memory, and perception as themes of conservation. I weave the intricacies of creating, dwelling in, and moving through landscapes to domains of power and history. Finally, I explore risk and risk perceptions as a way to access people's knowledge and awareness of and tensions caused by conservation. While a political ecology approach explores human-environment relations and the circuits of power that affect them, this study incorporates a blend of theoretical and data driven analysis which makes it a unique study about human-conservation tensions.;This dissertation presents rich ethnographic accounts as well as broad quantitative data analyses that substantively support qualitative data. The mixture and spectrum of quantitative and qualitative ethnographic analysis pursued in this dissertation are original contributions to environmental anthropology, and are especially unique in cultural anthropology more generally. These pursuits allow me to speak with confidence about how people outside of Tarangire National Park live and contend with conservation.