Mara Goldman (2020) uses storytelling as a method to write and present her research findings. She does this in the shape of a Maasai meeting, featuring herself as one of the many meeting participants. By doing this, she not only disrupts standard academic knowledge production protocols but also explicitly recognizes the role of researchers as co-producers of knowledge. We take inspiration from this, but also give it our own twist(1). We use storytelling as a technique to organize, report and reflect on the co-produced knowledge during fieldwork. We do not erase ourselves from the stories we tell, as if we are detached and objective experts. Rather, we reflect on our role as researchers and include our surprises, our feelings, our struggles and our unfolding understanding. We also draw on “small stories research” (Georgakopoulou 2015) in the sense that we seek to make visible the “small stories” of the marginalized (that often speak of “big issues”) and embrace the messiness and fragmented nature of social interaction and everyday life.

We have crafted three food stories. The first story focuses on the Maasai orpul, a camp or retreat in the forest where only men can go. At orpul, only meat, animal fat, soups and medicinal herbs are consumed, without any other food or water for approximately a month. 

“‘Orpul is a Maasai men's service’, stated an elderly man in Terrat during an interview in October 2024. During these events ‘we share one piece of meat, like the communion in church, until that piece of meat is finished and only then will we eat another piece of meat, together in a circle’. The elder went on to say, ‘When I first went to orpul, my urine didn't reach very far, but after two weeks, it does now!’.”

Excerpt from the orpul food story.

The second food story focuses on burials, a practice historically unknown to the Maasai who used to lay their dead in the bush for wild animals to eat.

“On my first visit to the Maasai community in Terrat village, Simanjiro District, I witnessed a burial practice. Despite what one might expect, this was a very profound, both collective and private, opportunity to collect a culinary story.”

Excerpt from the burial food story.

The third story is about loshoro, a dish made of maize, fermented milk and water. No sugar or salt is added.

“The women described how the Maasai of Terrat embraced loshoro in the 1990s, during a period when severe droughts forced them to rely not only on milk and meat, but also on grains. Maize was brought through trade with surrounding agricultural towns, as one woman explained: ‘We began planting maize in the 1990s after Waarusha taught us how to plough with cattle’.”

Excerpt from the loshoro food story.

These stories are still in the making, and will be co-refined, corrected and adapted after the second fieldwork. To enable this, we are currently planning to hold what we have called “food story meetings” for which we will invite groups of people that are relevant and connected to a particular story, such as men that have gone to orpul and women that cook loshoro. During these meetings we will also report back on Ruth’s early research findings in order to get feedback and ensure that the research is relevant to people’s lived experiences. In this way, “small” food stories will be used  as a method to engage with the relevant “food community”. We hope to explore evolving culinary habits and techniques; to follow food staples and ingredients across spaces, places and scales; to reflect upon their social and material entanglement with a changing environment and society; and to investigate prospective visions that may trouble, or not, the future imaginations of Maasai life in Terrat.

(1)In fact, some of us have already used storytelling in their work. Ruth participated in a research storytelling training in 2022 as part of a convivial conservation research project (John 2022), whereas Chiara previously reflected on “fictional vignettes”, or the creation of short stories to implement the heuristics for the arguments that the author wishes to raise (Rabbiosi and Vanolo 2017).

References

Georgakopoulou, A. (2015) Small stories research: Methods–analysis–outreach. The handbook of narrative analysis, 255-271. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Goldman, M. (2020) Narrating Nature: Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing. The University of Arizona Press.

John, R. W. (2022) Living with elephants in the villages near Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. https://digitalmedia.sheffield.ac.uk/media/Living+with+elephants+in+the+villages+near+Selous+Game+Reserve+in+Tanzania/1_thi58k5f.

Rabbiosi, C. and A. Vanolo, A. (2017) Are we allowed to use fictional vignettes in cultural geographies? Cultural geographies 24(2): 265-278. https://doi.org/10.1177/147447401667306.