With his recent book Imposing Wilderness, Roderick Neumann joins a growing number of political ecology scholars in exploring the causes of dislocation of Africans and conflict between nature preservation and traditional land use patterns. His central argument is that we need to locate the origins of these conflicts in fundamentally contradictory notions of the "natural" African landscape and the appropriate role of humans in that landscape. Neumann argues that Europeans--the British and Germans in particular--conceptualized "nature" as being free from people and human-caused change. By removing people from the landscape, it becomes natural (and worthy of viewing by white tourists). Humans belong in the landscape only in so far as they are conceptualized as primitive-hunters and gatherers, not agriculturists or herders. These ideas led European conservationists to promote the dislocation of Africans--in Neumann's case, the Meru of Tanzania--for game preserves and later national parks. In making his post-structuralist argument, he uses historical documents and interviews with local residents. Imposing Wilderness is a brief and clearly written account of the rise of protected areas from the early colonial period through the post-independence period.

For the colonial period, at least, his argument is convincing. But if we apply Neumann's logic to post-independence Tanzania, we might expect a return to a more African conception of land use. In fact, only after independence does the Tanzanian state turn the Mt. Meru area into a national park. Clearly, first world influence did not disappear with independence and, arguably, pressures from the World Wildlife Fund and others played an important role. Neumann suggests, moreover, that the creation of national parks in the post-colonial period might have been promoted by linking notions of what it meant to be a modern nation-state and wilderness preservation. As he presents it, this argument feels a bit ad hoc and remains undeveloped.

This book follows many of the themes that Neumann developed in an outstanding series of articles that have contributed to the development of the political ecology school. Some of these articles have been the mainstay of graduate courses in political ecology for nearly a decade. In part because of these articles, however, this book covers relatively little new ground. The book's main interest lies in a set of theoretical ideas and empirical points rather than a coherent whole.

One particularly interesting assertion he makes is that, during the colonial era, arguments over game preserves and national parks were primarily disagreements between conservationists in the metropole-in London-and colonial administrators living in Tanzania. Conservationists saw the landscape as wild and primitive and worthy of preservation while colonial officials worried that moving more Africans off the landscape would only create unrest and destabilize British control over the territory. Absent from these discussions were Africans. Ultimately, conservationists won, suggesting that ideas at the metropole were more important than colonial administrative needs.

Neumann makes an interesting empirical observation as well when he notices that Meru property rights slowly eroded rather than being taken explicitly in one fell swoop. The state and local residents constantly negotiated and renegotiated property rights. Some of the local residents' rights disappeared at the hands of capital city decision makers as land protection was beefed up repeatedly several times during the twentieth century. But much of the negotiation went on at the local level, between park administrators and guards, often independently and in contradiction to legislation and high-level administrative rules. For example, the legislation that created Arusha National Park explicitly maintained a right-of-way for local residents through the park, yet in recent years local park officials have closed the path to residents.

Although this continual negotiation is clearly important for the maintenance of any Meru access rights, de facto or de jure, the logic of particular administrative developments and the erosion of local rights seem to have more to do with economic or administrative incentives of the state than with European notions of nature. Similarly, local claims to the national park lands and resources and protection from marauding animals that destroy crops seem to have clear economic foundations. Neumann frequently reaches for political economic or state building explanations, yet he leaves these explanations undeveloped both empirically and theoretically. Political economy is clearly central to his story, even perhaps undermining premises, but we don't really learn about the linkages between the political economy and conflicting notions of nature and land use. Still, Neumann covers vast territory and this book is a pleasant read, but one is left with a desire for more theoretical development and empirical detail.

Cassandra Moseley
Department of Political Science
University of Florida