Naturalizing Collaboration

By the mid-1970s, the last strongholds of postcolonial, white, and male-dominated research garrisons in places such as the Tanzanian Serengeti experienced an unprecedented inflow of women researchers with credentials in their own right, either as independent researchers, or as parts of collaborative couples. Many of them came to work on big cats. Based on archival research, interviews, and the close reading of wildlife monographs, this chapter discusses a twofold shift that occurred in both research practices and research questions after more women and couples started to research lions in the Serengeti. A new emphasis on the role of collaboration between individual adult lions required long-term team observations and allowed for a ‘naturalization’ of cooperative fieldwork practices between research partners. At the same time, individual lions, females in particular, like the women who studied them, attained a greater role and perhaps more ‘agency’ in the accounts on their lives and their prides.