Market women in a Central African forest reserve: Engendering wildlife commerce and conservation

Lesley Lynn Daspit, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography of women's participation in wildlife commerce and conservation in the Dzanga Sangha Reserve (RDS), Central African Republic. It is based on eleven months of fieldwork in the town of Bayanga using the marketplace as an entry point for understanding the connections between women, environment, and the economy. A multi-methods approach is used to examine the gendered nature of commerce and conservation including participant observation and interviews with market women, hunters, town elders, women's organizations, and Dzanga Sangha Project (DSP) personnel. Overall, I situate wildlife commerce within the context of the bushmeat trade; the commercialized hunting and trade of wildlife. Market women's roles in this commodity chain of wildlife are framed with theories from feminist political ecology and borderlands. I examine how wildlife commerce and conservation become gendered processes through the everyday practices of individuals. These understandings are nuanced through conceptualizations of the RDS as a borderland space in which multiple physical and symbolic borders simultaneously influence and create gendered meanings. I contextualize the market women's commerce against ethnographic accounts of African rainforest economies and regional histories. Next, I describe Bayanga's marketplace and the positions of bushmeat sellers; featuring histories of individual sellers that highlight their varied commercial relationships to wildlife. Throughout, I describe the multiple border crossings bushmeat sellers engage in daily including: forest-town, masculine-feminine, and indigenous-migrant. The forest-town border is further explored through investigations of women's participation in wildlife conservation and rural development as mediated by the DSP. Finally, I provide a quantitative analysis of changing bushmeat markets in Bayanga over a 15-year period. In this dissertation I document how an environmental issue becomes gendered. I describe the position of women who are bushmeat sellers in Bayanga's market, detailing how their position in the commodity chain of wildlife moves beyond gender to other social differences. I further demonstrate how environmental management becomes a gendered process as the protected area borders articulate with local borders and meanings used to define human-wildlife relationships. Thus, women's participation in wildlife commerce and conservation is simultaneously shaped and defined by the interplay of border zones within a protected area.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Remis, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Wildlife Conservation|Cultural anthropology|Womens studies|Gender studies

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