Cattle Brings Us To Our Enemies Chapter Summary

In his book “Cattle Brings Us to Our Enemies”, McCabe does a 16-year stint in East Africa, specifically in Northern Kenya, doing research on the Turkana. He does this through STEP, the South Turkana Ecosystem Project. In “Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies”, McCabe follows four families through his years in Kenya and notes how they live in a very demanding environment. He uses ecological data to analyze how and why the Turkana people make decisions about their everyday life. McCabe focuses on four main areas of study: how the Turkana survive and adapt to a stressful environment by nomadic pastoralism, how the techniques used to extract resources and manage livestock modify the environment, the effects of the environmental and cultural practices have on

Hodgson has been working in Tanzania for 20 years, since 1985. She first worked in the Catholic Diocese of Arusha in the Arusha Diocese Development Office and later taught at Oldonyo Sambu Junior Seminary. She worked with Maasai in a religious context and so was led to her research. She wrote her book “The Church of Women” after noticing the gendered differences in evangelization. In her book Hodgson first addresses the history of Maasai religious practices. Women were imperative to most religious ritual and even nonritual practices. Their God was often referred to with female pronouns, though a certain level of gender fluidness was apparent. She then chronicles the history of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or Spiritans, in Tanzania. She interviews three American missionaries who worked with the Maasai in three different time periods. With the interviews Hodgson comprises the history of the approaches taken to evangelize the Maasai. She uses the next two chapters to compare men and women’s responses to the missionaries, following three communities. She ends the book with an exploration of this new Maasai Catholicism, a mix of Maasai and Catholic ritual and spiritual practices the Maasai have