Placing Nature(s) on Safari

Introduction

Safari, as a tourist practice, orders the Tanzanian landscape in its movement across it. Taking into account a more broadly multisensory understanding of tourism (Crouch and Desforges, 2003; Edensor, 2006) and recent calls for investigations of technology in tourism (Franklin, 2004; Van der Duim, 2007), this study examines how various techniques and technologies of safari—and their subversion by local actors—actually create place and nature in Tanzania. A review of the tourism literature exposes the need for research that links mobility and tourist studies, specifically in the creation and erasure of place, however static or transitory the apprehension might be. This article therefore first delves into a theoretical discourse on place and natures, both human and nonhuman, and the particular ways in which both are established on safari.

Details from ethnographic and semistructured interviews in and around Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) in Northern Tanzania support the assertion of safari as a place (re)making endeavor. Conducted in 2006, my “mobile ethnography” (Büscher and Urry, 2009: 105) of the tourism industry included participant observation at Adventure Safari (AS) tour company (all company names are pseudonyms), one of the biggest safari companies in the country; the tourism-focused Maasai cultural bomas of the NCA, a site of both nature conservation and human habitation; and public campsites and lodges in and around the NCA. These data are supplemented by semistructured interviews conducted with visitors, safari driver-guides, AS employees, safari company representatives, NCA worker-inhabitants, and key governmental officials.

Through these data, I argue that place and nature—human and nonhuman—are fashioned in safari’s movement across the landscape. Place is produced via interconnected processes of emplacement, erasure, traversal, and categorization. The tourist places created and recreated in part by wageni, or visitors, as they are called in Tanzania (the Kiswahili term watalii, or tourists, is rarely used), produce a nested topology of place. From the park and lodge to the road and vehicle, these interventions into the landscape order and define nature—from the general, imagined nature of the internationally known park to the individual, multisensory experience of nature from the vehicle—on safari in Ngorongoro. Key to creating a topology of place on safari are various technologies of automobility, which facilitate and subvert the place-making of multiple actors.

Safari industry participants are not alone in ordering place and nature through safari in the NCA. The Maasai who inhabit this park-like multiple land-use area consistently challenge these tourism orderings with their own version of place-ness that undermines and circumvents tourist places. The Maasai subvert safari in their own demonstrative and subtle ways. Taken together, these conflicting assertions of place—established and perpetuated by safari participants and Maasai residents—produce what I call an “imbrication” of place. ¹ Rather than focusing only, or even primarily, on visitors’ creation of fluid tourist places, this study seeks to address the multiple actors involved in the dual production of places and natures on safari (Cheong and Miller, 2000). Place, as ascribed via various technologies of automobility, springs not only from visitors’ imaginings and practices but also from locals’ assertions and circumventions of, and challenges to, safari. This results in the dialectical imbrication of place in the NCA, a process founded conceptually in theories of tourism, mobility, nature, and place.

Ordering place and nature through automobility

Safari, the Kiswahili word for journey, implies perpetual mobility; it is movement across space that intimates movement back in time. Safari can best be understood through Franklin’s assertion of tourism as a “process,” a “way of ordering the objects of the world in a new way” (Franklin, 2004: 278–279). I begin by arguing that a processual and multisensory understanding of tourism should form the basis for conceptualizing safari in Tanzania. I go on to examine the mobility paradigm and the ways in which automobility facilitates the production, and consequent “imbrication,” of place on safari. Finally, by taking place and nature as fluid entities performed on tour, I review the foundation by which they are created and contested through safari.

Although structural accounts of tourism have historically dominated the field of travel research (MacCannell, 1976, 2001; Smith, 1978; Urry, 1990), tourism has more recently been characterized as ordered by a “complex mesh of humans and non-humans” and their associated actions and intents (Franklin, 2004: 279). Van der Duim (2007) examines these “processes of association” through the notion of “tourismscapes” (p. 962), inviting studies of tourism-related technologies and techniques to further investigate the notion of tourism as ordering (Edensor, 2001; Franklin and Crang, 2001; Urry, 2000). I take the broad notion of travel as ordering and processual, and the suggestion to study travel technologies as necessary, for an investigation of safari culture in Tanzania. Most academic analyses of tourism or safari in East Africa employ a management or development perspective (Akama, 2002; Eagles and Wade, 2006; Kweka et al., 2003; Wade and Eagles, 2003; Wade et al., 2001) rather than a tourism studies approach (Lacey and Peel, 2012; Middleton, 2004; Norton, 1996; Salazar, 2006). This article therefore attempts to fill a gap in the tourism literature regarding safari, and safari mobilities, in East Africa.

Seeing tourism as a “connected rhizomic entity” based on process and performance allows the privileging of all participants (Franklin, 2004: 285, emphasis in original). Tourismscapes are produced not only by the physical products of the tourism industry but also by the complex power arrangements among tourism agents, visitors, and locals (Cheong and Miller, 2000). One must be conscious and careful, however, not to reproduce the us/them binary employed in structuralist accounts of tourism; what occurs on safari is a constant, continual negotiation among multiple actors and institutions. In examining the multisensory and multiactor “imbrication” of place via safari, this study also acknowledges recent calls to move away from the tourist gaze and toward a more corporeal, bodily experience of travel (Edensor, 2006). The ethnographic detail that follows therefore attends to the corporeality of safari and the diversity of participants engaged in performing place and nature in the NCA. Especially through safari, technology increasingly mediates the perceptions and bodily experience of these various actors (Crang, 1997; Crouch and Desforges, 2003).

Although it is one of the many important technological systems employed on tour, social studies of tourism have historically ignored the concept of automobility (Crouch and Desforges, 2003; Urry, 2000). Incorporating mobility is now “crucially significant” (Rojek and Urry, 1997: 10), and the development of a “mobilities paradigm” is essential (Büscher and Urry, 2009), for understanding cultural production (Clifford, 1997; Gilroy, 1993), especially on tour. Fundamental to the emerging mobilities perspective, automobility takes into account the “technical and social interlinkages” (Urry, 2004: 26) of a dominant and increasingly pervasive system (Böhm et al., 2006; Featherstone et al., 2004) that encompasses maps, vehicles, road use, and nearby places of tourism business (Urry, 2004, 2006). Given its reliance on mobility, the employment of deeply familiar technologies of automobility is the key to safari (Edensor, 2007).

Maps have become “fluid and relational entities” (Rossetto, 2012: 29) with nuanced social histories and a multitude of contemporary implications (Del Casino and Hanna, 2000) that “mediate people’s experience of space as spaces mediate people’s experience of maps” (p. 33). On safari, however, the map is less of a guide than a souvenir object, a virtual space that enables a “dwelling in” (p. 29) only post safari. The safari map therefore facilitates, and inadvertently challenges, spatial awareness and placing via safari. Much like cartographic practice, the road and automobile have also sculpted safari’s social and physical realm (Chiteji, 1980; Merriman, 2009; Volti, 1996). As passengers, visitors feel many of the familiar complex sensations of more routine roadway travel (Edensor, 2003). Yet the interplay between the known and unknown allows visitors to move beyond the “enveloped space” (Merriman, 2009: 591) to perceive the mobile place of the car, rather than experience the generic nonplace of much travel (Augé, 1995). Place and space, as “fundamental constructs in tourism studies” (McCabe and Stokoe, 2004: 601), therefore form the basis of safari practice.

Following Adler (1989) and Jamal et al. (2003), I characterize tourism and its associated technologies as “performative” of space, and therefore place and nature (p. 145). Examinations of the experience of and identification with place (Lane and Waitt, 2007; Li, 2000; McCabe and Stokoe, 2004), bodily apprehensions of place (Crouch and Desforges, 2003), and meanings of place (Lane and Waitt, 2007; Young, 1999) provide a fertile foundation for this study. Lefebvre (1991) defines the “representation of space” as the layering of culture and its attributes atop space to give it meaning. This representation can be understood in the way that space dwells in the mind, its modes of signification, and the mechanisms by which language interprets space—in essence, as “place.” Extending Lefebvre, I see place as not only represented but also performed by a variety of actors who together produce an “imbrication” of place on safari.

Although Augé (1995) notes the increasing presence of interchangeable nonplaces, such as hotels and airports, in the lives of many travelers (Merriman, 2004), the exoticization of such locations via safari prevents the creation of nonplaces in Tanzania. Following Merriman (2004, 2009), and Thrift (1996), this study instead sees place as ordered through a process of perpetual remaking via mobilities rather than through a place/nonplace binary. The places of safari are produced, in part, by the spectacle of nature (Urry, 1990), so that place and nature are performed together in interesting and evocative ways (Rojek and Urry, 1997).

Safari tourism in Tanzania revolves around nature-based visits to protected areas such as the Serengeti National Park and NCA. Jamal et al. (2003) see nature and landscape as “the Other” with which visitors interact (p. 145). Rather than taking nature to be the extraordinary “other” in a standard tourism dichotomy of viewer and viewed, however, I view nature and wilderness as socially constructed (Cronon, 1995; Fullagar, 2000; Markwell, 2001; Schama, 1995) and culturally specific (Cochrane, 2006), constantly contested, and reworked. By taking nature to be (re)produced by culture, it becomes possible to study not just the cultural production of nature destinations in tourism (Urry, 1990) but the very consumption and production of nature by tourism (Markwell, 2001).

Norton’s (1996) examination of safari in East Africa describes nature as delineated by marketing that depicts a romanticized, primitive Africa. This “categorical lumping together of wildlife, landscape and ‘primitive’ people” (Little, 1991: 152) produces a safari-specific imaginary (Salazar, 2012). Nature on safari within the NCA therefore encompasses both wildlife and wild lives: the seemingly anachronistic nonhuman nature of African animals and the apparently primitive human nature of African people. This study examines the perpetuation and performance of such socially constructed natures through safari’s movement across the landscape and the related emplacement, erasure, traversal, and categorization of place in the NCA. Mediated by various technologies of automobility, safari participants and Maasai worker-inhabitants experience such natures and places corporeally, through multiple senses. The ensuing negotiations between participants and nonparticipants produce a dialectical “imbrication” of safari’s places: the park, lodge/camp, road, and vehicle. These contemporary patterns of safari, rife with contradicting notions of nature and place, have developed from a history of imperial exploration and colonial travel.

Historical and contemporary safari

Modern safari tourism to Tanzania is rooted in the imperial practices of the nineteenth-century portered safaris of Livingstone and Stanley (Bull, 1988). Because access was limited and European-style travel was cumbersome and expensive, exploration and hunting dominated safari during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Peters, 1891; Bull, 1988; Herne, 1981, 1999). At the conclusion of World War I, Tanganyika passed from German to British governance, and safari became popular among European colonials and wealthy Americans into the 1940s. Throughout the 1950s, American safari films—from King Solomon’s Mines in 1950 to Hatari! in 1959—helped to democratize safari (Hays, 2009; Staples, 2006). In fact, “the annual number of visitors to the park rose from four hundred to fifty-two thousand” (Shetler, 2007: 211) between 1956 and 1972. Within a decade and a half, the Tanzanian safari had come to resemble mass tourism.

Safari culture spread beyond East Africa during the 1970s, highlighted by the popularization of “safari suit fashion” in the United States. In the 1980s, increasing numbers of safaris involved high-end luxury tours to East Africa, to be replaced in the 1990s and 2000s by safaris to private reserves, such as the Grumeti Reserve in Tanzania, and niche tourism, such as one Christian-themed safari company I encountered (Hays, 2009). Safaris can now be made to a variety of African destinations, though East Africa remains a widely popular region because Serengeti National Park and NCA are located in northwest Tanzania (Moffett, 1958; Tanganyika Government, 1957). The NCA, created in 1959 from a portion of the Serengeti, is a multiple land-use protected area where wildlife and local human inhabitants coexist (Iliffe, 1979; Kijazi, 1995). To reside there year-round, the Maasai of the NCA cannot cultivate and must maintain only a sedentary herding lifestyle.

As I observed at AS, trips through Tanzania always included visits to both Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater, the primary destination within the NCA. The most economical safaris at AS were 7 or 10 days in length, followed by a trip to the coast; the average length of stay in Tanzania the preceding year was 12 nights (Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism (MNRT) et al., 2007: ix). The majority of visitors to Tanzania that year were from North America or Europe, and 69% of all visitors had arranged for “package” safaris, such as those provided by AS, rather than exclusive, tailored safaris (MNRT et al., 2007: x). Although AS clients sometimes entered Tanzania via Kilimanjaro International Airport east of Arusha, the center of the northern safari circuit, “most tourists who visit[ed] the Northern circuit enter[ed] Tanzania through Namanga,” the closest overland border crossing from Kenya (MNRT et al., 2007: xi). After van transport from the airport or border crossing, extended-cab Land Rovers or Land Cruisers were visitors’ bases of operations for the duration of their safari. Loaded into their safari vehicles, safari driver-guides shuttled passengers to and from Arusha and the northern parks. Serengeti and Ngorongoro, together with two smaller national parks—Lake Manyara and Tarangire—form what is commonly known as the “northern safari circuit.”

Although a circuit implies circularity, there is no loop among these protected areas. The paved road that begins at Arusha branches northwest toward the NCA and passes through the northern tip of Lake Manyara National Park. In the NCA, it becomes a treacherous series of red clay switchbacks that reach through a heavily wooded escarpment to the southern Ngorongoro Crater rim. A murram road continues down its western side and on northwest to the adjacent Serengeti. For at least one night, clients usually stopped at one of the four lodges or Simba public camp inside the NCA, just off this main road on the Crater rim.

The “game drive,” central to the modern safari, involves safari vehicles traveling park roadways in search of wildlife to view and photograph. A typical AS safari included game drives in Ngorongoro Crater, a visit to an Ngorongoro Maasai cultural boma, followed by more game drives up to and within Serengeti. Stops for uncommon animals, such as lions and elephants, can be relatively infrequent, so much time is spent in movement rather than stasis. Sightings of common animals such as wildebeest, while exciting on an early game drive, can become mundane and worth ignoring later on. Game drives in the NCA often concluded with visits to a Maasai cultural boma to purchase souvenirs before journeying home or on to another park.

Between 2000 and 2005, when the global economy was booming, “the number of international visitors … increased from 501,669 … to 612,754,” representing the growth of more than 22% (MNRT et al., 2007: 2). The tourism export market’s share of the Tanzanian economy was worth US$824 million in 2005 (MNRT et al., 2007: v), leading to a spike in international and domestic investment (Wangwe, 2001; World Bank Group Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, 2006). The year 2006 was a high point in Tanzanian tourism, just before the global recession stalled economies worldwide and limited international leisure travel. President Jakaya Kikwete began his first term of office that year, having campaigned in part on the improvement of Ngorongoro–Serengeti regional infrastructure. It was not until his reelection in 2010, however, that his administration began a concerted effort to plan and build what has come to be known as the “Serengeti Highway” across a portion of Serengeti park. Given the internationally contentious nature of this issue, the role of automobility in safari must be better understood.

Unlike other modes of tourism, safari is mobility: movement, and its attendant technologies, is the experience rather than the mechanism by which visitors approach experience. In essence, movement acts as destination, so that placings stem from their intimate relationship to mobility. Place and nature, produced as lived experience for all involved in safari, are made and remade by participants and subverted and challenged by area Maasai.

(Re)Producing place on safari

Place is produced on safari through four primary processes: emplacement, erasure, traversal, and categorization. Multiple actors are involved in each of these place-making practices: government officials, safari driver-guides, safari travelers, and resident Maasai. With the help of technologies of automobility, significant acts as well as everyday occurrences constitute these processes as they produce place and nature on safari.

Cartography plays a distinctive role in the processes of emplacement and erasure by imposing distinctions between nature and culture (Burnett, 2000; Carter, 1996). The map is an accoutrement of automobility that exudes an air of “virtual” rather than actual automobility (Miller, 2006), connecting the periphery to the center and “play[ing] a role in the production of tourism spaces” through representation (Del Casino and Hanna, 2000: 24). A popular map for sale by NCAA in 2006, Tourist Map of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Roodt, 2006), shows an intricate web of roads, walking trails, cultural bomas, campsites, lodges, and places of interest layered atop satellite imagery of the NCA. However, roads and places not of interest to visitors—or open to tourism—are missing, such as the highland road to Empakaai Crater through Sendui village. The map does not locate or name several of the nine Maasai cultural bomas lining the road between Ngorongoro and Serengeti. Emplaced by the map, certain locations are granted greater status and permanency than those with no cartographic emplacement.

Linked closely to the mechanism of emplacement is the process of erasure. In late July 2006, Misyam, one of the nine Maasai cultural tourism bomas in the NCA, was purposefully destroyed by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (the NCAA is the protected area’s governing body) as punishment for not having completed an environmental impact assessment and because, boasted an NCAA official, “if there are too many [tourist bomas] it destroys the effect.” At Ndemwa cultural boma, I met a driver-guide from Cheetah Safari who had seen Misyam burning. Pounding his fist into his palm, he angrily exclaimed that “it is wrong of the government! These people are poor!” A second driver-guide, from Safi Safaris, joined in the conversation.

“This burning of houses, it is not allowed!” he fumed … Wageni had seen, and stopped, and asked “what is going on?” … The man from Cheetah Safari interjected: “Really, if they were going to do this they should have burned the place in the night, when the wageni couldn’t see.”

In this act of violent erasure, the local government exercised its power to destroy residents’ temporary homes and sources of tourism income. The angry safari workers were indeed appalled by government’s treatment of the Maasai, but they agreed that the process of erasure should have been kept outside the tourist gaze. Thus was Misyam, a place of meaning for both visitors and Maasai, physically erased from the landscape.

Connected to emplacement and erasure is traversal, in which the continual crossing of park boundaries—or the prohibition from crossing—gives the protected area its place-like and wilderness connotations. In the NCA, various gates are regularly traversed by visitors: the primary Lodoare entrance gate south of the Crater escarpment; the two Ngorongoro Crater gates, Seneto on the west rim and Lemala on the east; and the Naabi Hill entrance gate in the southeast of the Serengeti. The actual border between the NCA and the Serengeti, however, is only vaguely marked with a rickety metal sign above the road, indicating more the boundary of Maasai influence than that of non-human nature; the Maasai, unlike safari participants, cannot cross into Serengeti and are limited in their access to Ngorongoro Crater. By crossing park and Crater boundaries via official gateways, travelers reinforce their power to designate wild nature(s) and inadvertently emphasize how such access segregates.

Visitors and resident Maasai also recognize or ignore, respectively, the more menial borders of the road. While traversing the landscape of Serengeti and the NCA on safari, driver-guides are required to abide by the strict official driving guidelines (Roodt, 2006; Tanzania National Parks Authority (TANAPA), 2006). Driving off-road in the NCA is both prohibited and unusual, as the Crater is quite small and carefully monitored, and the heavily traveled NCA–Serengeti road allows for no shortcuts across the rough and rocky terrain. Visitors are prohibited from leaving their vehicles except at officially designated sites, such as picnic areas, scenic overlooks, camps, lodges, or the tourism-based Maasai cultural bomas. The “natures” of wildebeest and rhinoceros inside the Crater and of the apparently wild Maasai outside the roadside bomas are physically beyond the boundaries of safari—the edge of the road—even though imagining such natures is its focus.

The final process related to the production of place on safari is the practice of categorization. One day at the end of August, while waiting for repairs on my Land Rover, an AS driver-guide asked which boma I recommended that he visit with his wageni. After I listed the various attributes of the eight cultural bomas then open to visitors, he laughed and admitted that he did not know any of the bomas’ names. The fact that these were places of importance to Maasai worker-inhabitants was of no importance to him or, therefore, to the visitors to whom he passed along his (lack of) knowledge. He saw the bomas as a whole, in terms of their functional category, rather than as discrete entities developed by the Maasai for the tourism trade. In much the same way, AS clients whom I briefed prior to safari rarely knew that the NCA was not actually a park but a conservation area. It had simply been lumped into the same group as Serengeti, Manyara, or Tarangire. These protected areas were places significant to safari, but their more specific differences were glossed over through categorization.

The processes of emplacement, erasure, traversal, and categorization work together in the creation, and attendant subversion, of safari places in Tanzania. I take such places to be those experienced and remembered on safari, rather than locations briefly photographed and quickly forgotten on a game drive, for example. I discuss the significant places of safari in terms of a series of place categories that are nested through experience: to be in a vehicle is to be on a road, visiting a camp or lodge, within a park or protected area—each made possible by the interrelated processes of place-making.

A tourist topology of safari places

Through these four processes, travelers to Tanzania create a specific typology and topology of place, reinforced by their safari company and a variety of multisensory experiences. During presafari briefings at AS, company representatives always focused on the parks or protected areas to be visited, lodges or camps to be utilized, route to be taken, and vehicle and driver arrangements of a given safari—groupings that became the most salient placings of safari. These interrelated place categories are marked by specific safari experiences and deeply embedded in particular ways of approaching and apprehending nature(s).

Maasai challenges to safari’s places

The silent challengers to mobility’s dominance and the topology of place created by safari are the Maasai inside the NCA. Their everyday forms of resistance to the omnipresent safari and the particular forms of knowledge it privileges generate an “imbrication” of place. Visitors to Tanzania, together with safari driver-guides, cooks, reservations agents, and other safari workers, empower a type of place knowledge based on consumption (Urry, 1995). In the case of visitors from abroad, it is a temporary, transient knowledge; for safari workers, it is knowledge based on the tourism industry. Resident Maasai, however, embody a deep landscape memory of historical and contemporary places in the NCA (Shetler, 2007). The promotion of consumptive knowledge over local knowledge connotes power relations in which the Maasai are never completely complicit.

The dominance of safari is challenged overtly and covertly via the very processes involved in place-making. Maps bought on safari, for example, appear to simultaneously emplace and erase particular locations in the NCA. In the Ngorongoro region, many of the official place-names were adapted from Maa words (the language spoken by the Maasai inhabitants) whose spelling is not agreed upon. In the New Map of Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tombazzi, 2003), the famous gorge is named Oldupai, though in Roodt’s Tourist Map, mentioned earlier, it is the more familiar Olduvai. Where the New Map lists places like Makomba Peak, Oldoinyo Loolmalassin, Mount Lemakarot, and Loongoka Cultural Boma, the Tourist Map lists these same locations as Makoromba Peak, Lolmalasin, Makarot, and Loongooku Cultural Boma. Residents of this cultural boma maintained that the spelling was actually Longooku, yet a third variation. The complexities of Maa cause seemingly inadvertent, covert emplacement and erasure in the NCA.

The differences between these two maps are not merely semantic and superficial, however, because of the role of the map as souvenir. When written place-names travel abroad—attached to something as historically and socially significant as a map—they develop global meaning (Appadurai, 1986). The place name, printed on a map, seems irrevocable and indisputable. When place-names conflict, however, these differing maps enable an extra-local experience in which the locations within the NCA are vague and interchangeable rather than concrete and knowable. What was once named place then reverts to unnamed or denamed space; the local language thereby confounds more powerful interests that seek to harness and control it and its capacity to designate places.

Emplacement is further accomplished when local inhabitants and workers assert their spoken place-names as the more accurate and relevant within Ngorongoro. These area Maasai challenge the dominance of the map as an accurate translation of their deep knowledge of specific places. Several young men at Irkeepusi cultural boma mused, for example, that the word Ngorongoro could have come from the Maa word korongoro, meaning cold place, while Empakaai might have originated from the Kiswahili phrase mpaka wangu, my border. These worker-inhabitants implicitly contested the pervasiveness and power of official place-names by asserting (however quietly) their own deep knowledge of place.

The third process of place-making is that of traversal. For the Maasai, movement has been severely curtailed over time. They are not permitted to enter the Serengeti and can no longer dwell inside Ngorongoro or Empakaai Craters. Unlike visitors from abroad, who must traverse the NCA to give it place-meaning, the Maasai provide place-meaning by remaining contained within. The transgressive acts of traversal tried by the Maasai involve, instead, challenges to the boundaries of tourist roadways. During the high tourist season, from June to August, Maasai residents routinely walked in roadways, flagged down passing vehicles, and sought to sell goods and pose for pictures in the road. Nature on safari, as previously explained, was expected to reside beyond the boundaries of the road; the Maasai, as representatives of the primitive nonhuman wild nature of the NCA, circumvented this division.

The final mechanism of “placing” involves the categorization of place. Much as visitors perceived cultural bomas to be interchangeable and their residents to be anonymous, boma Maasai viewed visitors as equally nameless and represented primarily by their vehicle. At each of the eight or nine bomas, Maasai worker-inhabitants referred to the day’s boma visitors not as individual people but by the number of cars that had stopped on the road. Boma visitors paid per vehicle, so the number of automobiles was more relevant than the number of visitors. These NCA residents, however, understood that there was variation among most of safari’s places, including the meaning of the park, the role of lodges, and the function of tourist roads. Through these four processes, then, local residents subverted the embedded placing of park, lodge, road, and vehicle.

If the Maasai are less likely to categorize safari’s places, they still recognize the power and importance of such places in their everyday lives, and in inadvertent and subtle ways, subvert them. For example, although agriculture just outside the NCA can be intensive, it has long been prohibited within. During an informal interview, an NCAA official revealed that resident Maasai were starting to farm, which was “causing a lot of problems” because it was “not at all compatible” with wildlife. Farming in order to produce food for the table, a seemingly apolitical act, succeeded instead in drawing attention to the Maasai and erasing (at least in part) the wild nature emplaced into the protected area by safari.

In the nested topology of safari places, the camp or lodge is also a significant place category. To area Maasai, it represents a place of potential opportunity and employment, not rest and relaxation. For example, a worker-inhabitant whom I met at Irkeepusi cultural boma had a second job cooking at a nearby lodge. While visiting Seneto cultural boma, another young man requested assistance in finding a job at a second NCA lodge.

The manager was “this South African woman like you” [white]; maybe I could introduce him to her. He really wanted a job in reception. He had very good skills, he was from the area and knew English, so “could you please ask them to give me a job?”

The lodge is not simply a place of and for safari; as this young man’s request reminds us, the lodge is also a place of employment. To the Maasai who sleep and eat outside the lodges, not inside, these places represent sources of income more than they do places enabling access to nature-as-view.

Nature is also approached on safari via the road and vehicle, two primary accoutrements of automobility and the two final places of safari. As I have explained above, the Maasai challenge the movement of the road by posing and selling on it, by bringing their apparent “primitive” nature into the unnatural place of the road.

On the corrugated, rocky road between Simba public camp and Seneto cultural boma, near the western entrance to the Crater, Maasai children ran down to my car or jumped on the edge of the road, in unison, to get my attention. I stopped a few times to take photos of the landscape, and a group of kids … came running down the hillside to me, shouting “picha” [picture] and “hela” [money].

To these young Maasai, the road was a place of commerce, not an entry point to wild

nature. Resident Maasai further challenged the dominance of the road and vehicle by illegally emplacing Misyam cultural boma, and, as one boma chairman explained to me, moving Seneto and Irkeepusi cultural bomas to locations adjacent to the road to facilitate visitors’ access. The mobility of the roadway had transgressed its own boundaries, confounding visitors’ expectations about movement and the constancy of place.

By attempting to commandeer attributes of automobility like the road and vehicle, these local Maasai sought to redirect traffic, to encourage vehicles to stop along a place dedicated to movement. Safari goers and driver-guides were thus subtly urged by the Maasai to leave the place of their vehicles. The cultural bomas were nameless places of primitive human nature to safari visitors; to worker-inhabitants, they were places of commerce, built to sell souvenirs. Individuals whom I encountered at several bomas acted as extra-local traders, making trips into Arusha and occasionally Nairobi and returning to the NCA with goods to sell. By flagging down safari vehicles and utilizing roadside bomas as nodes of trade, these Maasai inhabitants could assert a modicum of control over their livelihoods. They thereby denied movement its primacy in Ngorongoro, appearing to challenge the “placing” of road and vehicle engendered by the constant mobility of safari.

Ultimately, an “imbrication” of place is enabled by this dialectical interaction between Maasai and safari, between Maasai and visitor. Via the very same processes of place-making, the topology of safari places and the particular natures they create are called into question by Maasai living in the NCA. In some ways, these residents are complicit in safari, seeking to promote commerce and gain financially from trade with visitors from abroad. However, in their assertions of local knowledge, and their challenges to the role and significance of the park, lodge, road, and vehicle in creating wildlife and wild lives on safari, the Maasai establish their own versions of place and nature. Place, never a constant, is imbricated on safari by the continual layering and overlapping of meanings apprehended and established by safari participants and Maasai.

Conclusions

Nature on safari in Tanzania, as I have demonstrated in this study, is produced and consumed through a variety of touristic acts (Markwell, 2001). Such acts involve a range of corporeal encounters and multisensory moments gathered from a “mobile ethnography” of safari (Büscher and Urry, 2009; Crouch and Desforges, 2003; Edensor, 2006). Drawing on these ethnographic and interview data, and taking travel as performative, ordering, and processual (Franklin, 2004; Franklin and Crang, 2001), I have argued that place and nature are produced, and place ultimately imbricated, on safari.

Such ordering involves the bundled functioning of four specific processes that together enable the creation of place(s). First, the process of emplacement allows safari participants and resident Maasai to give meaning to otherwise unplaced spaces. Erasure, the second process of place-making, permits various actors to ignore, rename, and even destroy specific places in the NCA. The third process, that of traversal, involves movement across imagined or material boundaries to produce particular places. Finally, safari creates place through the process of categorization, in which participants see places as types rather than unique locations.

These processes of place-making produce a topology of safari places in the NCA. This examination of various technologies in and of travel (Franklin, 2004; Van der Duim, 2007) focuses in large part on the role of automobility, especially the map, road, vehicle, and tourism business, in producing places and natures on safari. Going on safari to Ngorongoro, Tanzania entails perpetual mobility; it is a process that orders the landscape by movement across it. Nested within the place of the park are the lodge, campsite, road, and vehicle, in which visitors apprehend human and nonhuman natures as, respectively, imagined, viewed, approached, and sensed—in curtailed and proscribed ways.

The dominance of these placings is at times subtly or blatantly subverted, however, by the Maasai residents of the NCA, promoting a dialectical relationship between safari participants and area Maasai. Their conflicting actions result in the reinterpretation and continual “imbrication” of safari places. As in all touristic processes, it is essential to recognize the importance of local knowledge, memories, and imaginaries of place and nature because they assert themselves into tourism’s orderings at fascinating and occasionally inopportune times. The varied perspectives of less willing participants (Cheong and Miller, 2000), of residents like the NCA Maasai, help us to apprehend the complex processes of tourism ordering and to understand the creation of places and natures on safari in the NCA as messy, deeply ambivalent, dialectical processes of “imbrication.”