I
In my reading, narratives of pastoralism divide into three major groups. There are the studies of pastoralism long past (think: Wilfred Thesiger). 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 is everything that Thesiger and colonial-era anthropologists are not. To cut this long story short, today’s pastoralists are imbricated through and through by overlapping settler-colonial, racial and global capitalisms. There is a deep irony in the fact that the 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. The literature here seeks to stand in the pastoralists’ marginal(ized) positions and from there speak to the dominant economies and politics at the center. Some of this 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
I want to focus on a fourth group of narratives, and frankly one I’m not sure exists like the others. Here the 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 character type (I quote at length):
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 we’ve 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, though still clearly a center of gravity interacting with that bigger narrative; but so insecurely as to call into question the dominant narrative(s).
IV
An example I have in mind is that of 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 up to this point on global financialization now must 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.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 