Girls’ Ways of Learning, Developmental Trajectories, and Life Histories

Following the same approach as Chap. 6 , this chapter delves into girls’ learning-by-doing processes within daily activity settings. It showcases girls’ intentions and efforts in contributing to their families, extended kin, and friends, and their exercise of self-reliance through cooperation and negotiation with various social members for positive change. The construction of girlhood human-biota intimacy reflects their active roles and agency in local subsistence and family life, a process that is both playful and creative. These developmental features are evident in girls’ ethnoknowledge learning, as detailed through their ongoing sensorial and emotional daily experiences. The reality of Maasai girls’ lives seen here contradicts current development and foreign aid discourses portraying girls and women in small-scale societies as powerless victims of local patriarchy systems.