Ethnobotanical knowledge acquisition during daily chores: the firewood collection of pastoral Maasai girls in Southern Kenya

Researchers considering children’s traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) highlighted the importance of examining children’s daily activities as empirical contexts for its acquisition. Many of them evaluated children’s TEK acquisition linearly as gain or loss, and paid less attention to the adaptive nature of this knowledge system and the social relationships arising from its acquisition processes. This study approaches children’s TEK acquisition considering these abovementioned aspects. I utilize pastoral Maasai girls’ firewood collection as a case study, and analyze the personal, interpersonal and cultural institutional aspects of girls’ Ethnobotanical knowledge (EK) acquisition within this chore.

Participant observation and unstructured interviews were used for data collection. I joined 12 girls (6 to 15 years old) on day trips for firewood collection, and documented their participation and performance during this chore. I observed interactions among girls and between girls and women concerning this activity, and investigated girls’ perceptions of local wood species via their descriptions. I also informally interviewed 15 women, between 20 and 80 years old on their evaluation of the wood species to be used as firewood.

Current diet change and gender-age roles in chore participation in Maasai society require females to continually participate in firewood collection. Within this social context, girls intensively participated in day trips of firewood collection during the long-term vacation in the dry season. They collected a sizable amount from 24 plant species, and generated EK through personal sensual experiences, such as fragrance, hardness, and heaviness of different wood species. They acquired local taxonomy and terminology of different wood species, and learned others preferences for wood species used as fuel through interpersonal communication. These personal and interpersonal aspects, together with current diet change and division of labor within gender-age roles in Maasai society, provide EK with multi-dimensional meanings in current subsistence strategies.

Results of this study show that girls acquired EK with multi-dimensional meanings through daily firewood collection, which cannot be only evaluated in a linear manner. Future studies focused on children’s TEK acquisition should consider the personal, interpersonal, and cultural institutional aspects of this adaptive knowledge system and children’s roles within it.