. . .social figures
. . .witnesses-protagonists
. . .contaminated imaginaries
1. Social Figures
We consider a timeless model of a common property resource (CPR) in which N herdsmen are able to graze their cattle. The model has been constructed deliberately along orthodox economics lines. . . .We begin with a timeless world. Herdsmen are indexed by i (i = 1, 2, …, N). Cattle are private property. The grazing field is taken to be a village pasture. Its size is S. Cattle intermingle while grazing, so on average the animals consume the same amount of grass. If X is the size of the herd in the pasture, total output – of milk – is H(X, S), where H is taken to be constant returns to scale in X and S.
Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury: 221 (internal footnotes deleted)
After such bruising abstractions, it’s a wonder more readers don’t rush to the anthropological literature for descriptions of really-existing pastoralists and their herding practices.
The methodological problem, though, is that there’s really-existing, and then there’s really-existing. There are pastoralists interviewed and quoted. Then there’s the social figure of the pastoralist, a composite assembled by a researcher to represent the typical features of the pastoralists that have been studied.
All well and good, if you understand that the use of social figures extends significantly beyond the confines of anthropology or the social sciences. Social figures “potentially have all the characteristics which would be considered character description in literary studies,” notes a cultural sociologist, adding, “unlike ideal types, for example, which are written with a clear heuristic goal in a scientific context, social figures can also appear in public debate or be described in literary texts.”
So what? “For theorizing, this means. . .attention must be paid to a good figurative description: Is the figurative description vivid, descriptive and, as a figure, internally consistent? Does it accurately reflect the social context to which it refers? Therefore, the criteria to assess quality in theorizing must be complemented by literary criteria.”
And one of those literary conventions helps explain why the social figure of the pastoralist today is frequently compared and contrasted to the social figure of the pastoralist in the past. “[T]here are often antecedent figures for a social figure. . .The current social figure can then be understood as an update of older social figures.”
A small matter, you might think, and easily chalked up to “this is the way we do historical analysis.” It is not, however, a slight issue methodologically, when comparing your pastoralist interviewees today with the social figures of pastoralists in the past ends up identifying “differences” that are more about criteria for rather than empirics in “really-existing.”
Source. T. Schlechtriemen (2023). “Social figures as elements of sociological theorizing.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2281233)
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2. Witnesses-Protagonists
I
In my reading, narratives of pastoralism divide into three major types. There are the studies of pastoralism long past. I think of Wilfred Thesiger, though I’ve also read anthropological studies from the 1950s and 60s that share a nostalgia for pasts not threatened by modernizing pressures.
The second group of narratives is everything that Thesiger and colonial-era anthropologists are not. To cut the long stories short, today’s pastoralists are imbricated through and through by overlapping settler-colonial, racial and global capitalisms. There is a deep irony in that these thorough-going critiques of capitalism end up shadow pricing a past thought to be outside the cash-nexus.
The third group is for me more interesting and recent. It seeks to stand in the pastoralists’ marginal(ized) positions and from there observes and comments on the dominant economies and politics at the center. Some of this effort draws pastoralists to the center by demonstrating how their practices and ways of thinking are shared by, if not have positive implications for, center-based economics, banking, and pandemics (I have in mind the recent work of Ian Scoones and his PASTRES colleagues at IDS Sussex).
II
Here though I want to focus on a fourth group of narratives, and frankly one I don’t even know exists. Certainly it is not full-blown or distinct as the preceding three. This group of narratives are those where contemporary pastoralists are “witnesses-protagonists,” much along the lines of the character, “witness-protagonist,” found in certain period-specific novels.
III
In her 2024 Modern Language Quarterly article, “On the Origins of the Witness-Protagonist,” Anastasia Eccles gives examples of novels where such characters are found. For our purposes, these are less important than the features she ascribes to this type of character:
This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. . . .
The witness-protagonist took shape during a period of mass revolution abroad and democratic mobilization in Britain in which constituencies lacking formal recognition claimed the power to remake the structures of collective life. These historical developments turned the phenomenon of “unwarranted” participation into a pressing matter of public debate—and a basic condition of modern political subjectivity. The characters considered here tend to strike readers as illegitimate subjects who do not quite fit into or live up to their assigned roles. Instead of anchoring the whole, as we might expect protagonists to do, they call the form of the whole—its boundaries and its internal arrangement—into question. In their curiously unstable narrative position, they illuminate the formal conditions of democratic agency. . . .
Such a figure thus embodies the apparent paradox of a peripheral center or a major minor character. . .
The witness-protagonist, then, is a character whose status in the novel as a whole is somehow in question. We might say that these characters pose problems of or for form, insofar as form is taken to mean some principle of underlying fit or coherence among the novel’s parts. The signs of this problem are evident in the commentary surrounding these characters, which so often takes the form of a struggle to fix or locate or categorize a figure who does not quite behave like a normal protagonist. . . .
If the novel form projects an imagined community or potential body politic, these novels draw attention to that community’s grounds and limits. By focusing on characters whose station in the novel is anything but secure, they underscore the contingency of any particular arrangement of the collective. . .
Accessed online through https://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-abstract/doi/10.1215/00267929-11060495/385703/On-the-Origins-of-the-Witness-Protagonist?redirectedFrom=fulltext
I don’t know about you, but I suspect I’m not the only one who sees pastoralists s/he has studied or read about in terms of: being at the margins, but still difficult to locate with respect to the dominant narrative; not like the usual protagonists at the center, but still clearly a center of gravity interacting with that bigger narrative; but so insecurely so as to call into question the dominant narrative(s).
IV
An example is a 2023 Annual Review of Anthropology article, “Financialization and the Household,” by Caitlin Zaloom and Deborah James. Although not explicitly in the preceding terms, the quote below captures this sense of speaking substantively and interactively about the center from the perspective of householders, including rural and poor households at the margins:
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-100947
Imagine if the very first article you ever read about global financialization began with the preceding quote. Imagine that those articles you actually have read on global financialization must now be re-read as slightly-off-center by comparison. What you thought was the plot all along isn’t the plot with which you could have started.
Source. Ian Scoones (forthcoming, 2024). Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World. Polity Press.
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3. Contaminated Imaginaries
I have in mind those who regret the passing of pastoralism as if it were a singular institution with its own telos, agency and life-world. It wasn’t and it isn’t. When was the last time these people asked herders their political party affiliation? When was the last time they treated the pastoralist as neoliberal citizen?
I also have in mind those long-trough narratives of depastoralizing, deskilling, and disorganizing the imagined pastoralist life-world, leaving behind all but corpse-pastoralism, flogged by conflicts, mummified by inequality, buried at the sea of liquid modernity, dissolved by the quicklime of disaster capitalism and speculative finance, always harboring worse to come. In these narratives, any pastoralists who survive are like feisty little tardigrades, those near-microscopic (another “marginal”!) organisms that survive in the most hostile environments on the planet.
I also have in mind the hangover notion that policy and procedure are at every turn subordinate to state power, that politicians and officials are nothing but the state’s secretariat to capitalists, that capitalisms have entirely colonized every nook and cranny of the life-worlds, and that we have surrendered our minds entirely to politics, such as they are.
Last, I have in mind the remittance-sending household member who is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an African rangeland than was Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe, when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans). You can stipulate Asia begins here and Africa ends there, but good luck in making that stick within and across national policies.
Methodological upshot: It cannot be said often enough that you mustn’t expect reproduction of the same, even when it’s reversion to the mean (Anderson 2020).
Source: Perry Anderson (2020). “Ukania Perpetua.” New Left Review (accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii125/articles/perry-anderson-ukania-perpetua)
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Related blog entry:
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 