Thoughts on Doing Multispecies Ethnography in Kenya’s Maasailand

by Gabriella Santini (she/her)

PhD Student at University College London

gabriella.santini.21(@ucl.ac.uk)

Anthways, 2024 © Gabriella Santini

As anthropology tries to reach beyond the study of humans, researchers are expanding their field of attention to non-human species, including animals, plants, cyborgs, and earthly processes. But how does one really do multispecies research? I asked myself this question upon arriving in the field. Full of concepts and theoretical ideas, but lacking a methodological toolkit — or perhaps the experience — I ventured out to Kenya’s savannah in search of an answer.

Preparations included re-reading a book I read in my undergrad to refresh my memory: Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment (2000). Ingold has conducted fieldwork amongst the Saami of north-eastern Finland and has written extensively about their relationship with reindeer. Interestingly, he extends social reasoning to reindeer. Unlike many social scientists, who he claims have little regard for animal behaviour, he concerns himself with animal sensibilities. Working with herders in Kenya on human-animal relations, I considered that Ingold’s research with herders in Finland might offer some insights into conducting anthropology beyond the human. 

It took a while before I started noticing the entanglements between all earthly beings in the savannah. I was too focused on my research aims and collecting the data I needed to go back home to begin writing my thesis. After a while though, I began to notice the playful monkeys using my tent as a trampoline, I noticed an irritated elephant glaring at safari vehicles as it crossed the road with its calves and saw hyenas patiently waiting for their turn once lions finished feasting. I also began to notice the rebellious behaviour of local community members, taking risks and going against conservancy rules. Humans and non-humans alike create a niche for themselves in the unforgiving savannah. Yet, as Ingold points out, niches are not fixed, predetermined positions, but emerge from ongoing practices and engagement of living beings within their environment. Sometimes, organisms might even challenge our understanding of the world by evolving to occupy different niches — what ecologists refer to as niche differentiation. 

My research looks at herd(er)-lion dynamics. Drawing from the field of environmental anthropology and adopting a multispecies approach, I look at how people and wildlife shape each other and their environment. Particularly, I explore the strategies herders and lions have developed to live with each other in the savannah ecosystem. At times, lions prey on Maasai livestock, resulting in frustration and economic loss among herders. What are the reasons lions do so, and what strategies do Maasai livestock owners use to protect their livelihood? To gain some insight, I conduct ethological studies of lions with audio playback experiments.¹ A fundamental element of more-than-human anthropological work is recognizing animals as agents with social behaviours, able to make their own decisions about how to thrive in a given environment. The aim of these audio playback experiments is to explore lions’ responses to anthropogenic sounds in hopes to better understand their behaviour around herd(er)s and in turn, inform conservation interventions aimed at reducing human-wildlife conflict. Surprisingly, it was not the dozen sets of playback experiments that taught me the most about lion behaviour. It was rather an unusual event that stood out of the ordinary. 

One evening, while out patrolling for lions, we get a call from a nearby ranger that two prides have been spotted hunting buffalos. The two prides each manage to make a kill, capturing both a mother and its calf. We arrive on site as the sun is rapidly descending on the horizon. We spot several tourist vehicles in the distance and approach the scene impatiently. We see in our headlights the two prides, the Engiyoni and the Isiketa prides, each feeding on their respective carcasses, less than 200 meters apart from each other. The rangers and safari guides are both puzzled and full of excitement. Safari vehicles are circling the two prides, providing the tourists with a better view of the feast. Rangers and safari drivers are exchanging theories they have about the event. How can this be? How can two different prides hunt together? What will happen next? Will they fight? Have they hunted together deliberately? 

Half an hour after watching the two prides feast on their respective catches, the Isiketa pride which was feeding on the calf, in one sudden movement, left their carcasses and moved along to join the Engiyoni pride which still had plenty of meat left to feed on. The merging of the two prides came as a surprise to researchers, rangers and safari drivers alike. They told me they had never witnessed such an event before; they were all stunned. I felt fortunate to witness it too. How can this happen? It has never happened before. One researcher for the Mara Predator Research Project told me that this event has given them a clearer picture of these lions. “It has challenged what we thought about lions. We know now how far the Engiyoni pride can go outside their territory, into Isiketa pride territory. It would be interesting to do DNA testing to see if they are related.”

In a way, this unexpected event taught me more about lion behaviour than my carefully planned studies. Animals, like humans, can act in ways that are out of the ordinary, unusual, and sometimes even improvised. Playback studies remain a rigid way of analysing lion behaviour because they apply laboratory-like methodologies to an environment that we cannot control. As such, I began to wonder if adhering to my research protocol vehemently caused me to overlook the lion’s other curious behaviours. So, how does one do anthropological research with the more-than-human? I argue that letting non-beings challenge how we think about them; to see them as agents creating their own narratives; and rewriting the stories we tell about them. But most importantly, as advocated by Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret (2016), we must allow animals to be actively interesting. By stunning a multitude of researchers and conservationists who have been following these lions for quite some time, they effectively challenged assumptions experts held about them. 

Humans and other organisms engage in a continuous process of adaptation and improvisation. This unusual event was a reminder of the importance of understanding our relationship with the environment as dynamic and relational. As anthropologists, it is our work to consider ways in which humans and non-humans actively shape and transform their environment through everyday practices, rather than simply adapting to pre-existing ecological conditions. Doing anthropology beyond the human is to make other beings interesting and to “holding open the possibility that surprises are in store, that something interesting is about to happen” (Haraway 2015, 10). While I continued with my playback studies and adhered to my initial research protocol, I approached my studies with a renewed curiosity and spent a lot more time engaging with lions in a playful way — like playing a game of hide and seek with a shy lion who did not want to be observed… the lion won and we finally gave up. This event also questioned my positionality as an observer of the observed. I no longer saw myself as the expert, gazing at lions and waiting for them to offer me expected reactions. Instead, I began to see lions as collaborators; we think in attunement with each other and are co-creating knowledge through our regular interactions.
As Donna Haraway (2015) writes about Despret’s work with ornithologists, like Amotz Zahavi, animals and scientists “do something, and they do it together. They become-with each other” (6). One can achieve this, not by doing research on animals but rather with them. It may require us to unlearn what we know about these non-human beings and to give them more scope to how we observe and understand animal knowledge.

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