| This dissertation examines the historical, political, and social context of wildlife conservation and utilization in Zambia from the time the British South Africa Company first arrived in what is now Zambia until the turn of the millennium. I track changes in policies from a purely exclusionary stance, to superficial concern with involving rural people in the middle of the last century, to what we now know as community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). I do this from an anthropological perspective that also focuses closely upon some of the ideas about the "other" that have informed how these conservation policies have developed, and continue to develop. I conclude that many of the wildlife policies that exist in Zambia today, are based upon a shared sense of the "other" that has informed wildlife conservation policies since early last century. While who the other is may change over time, how the other is perceived---as childlike, incapable of making rational decisions, and needing outside intervention---has not. As a result, CBNRM programs in Zambia today, tend not to function as an emancipatory tool for rural dwellers, but rather as a way of co-opting rural assistance in managing resources at discount prices. This is not to say, however, that these ideas, repeated in history, never emancipate. Rather, using evidence from one rural area in the Southern Province of Zambia, I show that given a particular political economic context, relations of power can be reversed, and these same ideas can emancipate the typically less powerful. |
