Forest Politics in Kenya's Tugen Hills

LÉA LACAN is a postdoctoral researcher in environmental anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany and a member of the Global South Studies Center (GSSC). She currently works on the 'Rewilding the Anthropocene' project in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area in Southern/Central Africa.

• IntroductionPART I: Making the forest: from a colonial resource to modern forest landscapes1. Improving the forest and its inhabitants: colonial state power and local resistance, 1895-19632. The post-colonial forest and the Kenyan state, 1963-2002PART II - Living with the state forest: economic livelihoods under and beyond state control3. Forest livelihoods in Talai and local dependency on forest resources4. Beyond state control: forest use at the margins of legalityPART III: Living and becoming with the trees and the landscape: an intimate and political forest 5. Ecological knowledge in Talai: human-sylvan engagement, attunement and care6. Bridging generations: a forest of transmission and belonging7. Political forest: claim-making and reappropriating the forest in KatimokConclusionGlossaryAppendix: Plants in and around Katimok and their description

Forest Politics balances a wealth of ethnographic and historical detail with conceptual clarity and innovation, and an attention to the stakes for forest residents of the dynamic human-sylvan assemblage that exists in Kenya's Katimok Forest. The result is a moving portrait of a set of communities, their histories, and their entanglements with forests, reconstructed through careful and sophisticated interdisciplinary methods, that resonates with and informs global conversations about space, knowledge, history, power, and the methods required to inform our study of these intersecting phenomena.