Abstract
Indigenous peoples such as the Batwa in Uganda are predominantly seen as marginalised groups, leaving little room for foregrounding their power, influence and involvement in tourism and development. Inspired by Foucauldian discourse theory and Actor-Network Theory [ANT], we use the concept of relational agency to analyse how the Batwa contribute to conservation and tourism development, and deepen our understanding of agency in the context of the Batwa at the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (Uganda). Based on this conceptualisation we analysed the dominant (academic and non-academic) discourses on the Batwa in the light of in-depth ethnographic research to seek for alternative Batwa realities. Whereas scientific, NGO and governmental literature predominantly reduced the Batwa to marginalised, poor and oppressed victims of development, our ethnographic research observed the Batwa as a vibrant community that deploys expertise on forest ecology, tourism entrepreneurship, organisational capacity and political activism. With such insights we discuss the consequences of agency reduction and the ways to take the Batwa’s situational agency into account. Highlighting the multiple realities of Batwa-ness provide a starting point of relating with the Batwa in ways that acknowledge them as agential, rather than only marginalised.
Highlights
The position of indigenous people in conservation and development debates is highly polarised
Our main contribution in this paper is to present an alternative analysis of the Batwa situation that pays attention to the complexities and re lations that produce the multiple realities of the Batwa, other than sin gular accounts of seemingly passive victims of conservation and development processes
In this paper we critically analysed the claim that the Batwa are the most marginalised people in Uganda
Summary
The position of indigenous people in conservation and (tourism) development debates is highly polarised. We analyse the dominant marginalisation discourse in the light of ethnographic obser vations to highlight the agency of the Batwa in conservation and tourism processes at Bwindi. As an exception to much of this literature, Kajobe (2007) acknowl edges the Batwa’s vast knowledge of stingless bees and Tajuba (2015) describes how Batwa have conserved their forest culture amidst the strong waves of modernity and development. Drawing on these few accounts, our assumption is that the dominant discourses on margin alisation may have overlooked other co-existing Batwa realities and. We explain how various forms of agency can coexist in mul tiple enactments simultaneously producing both discursive and situa tional agency
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