When local disasters-averted by pastoralists are not highlighted and instead global disasters not averted, like the climate emergency, continue to take center stage in pastoralism analysis and study, we end up with those development caricatures of herder life-worlds depastoralized, degraded, and destituted, no more than corpse-pastoralism, flogged by herder-farmer conflicts, mummified by inequalities, buried at sea in liquid modernity, dissolved by the quicklime of always-late capitalism, and harboring worse to come.
1. I want to suggest that traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) among some pastoralists is not an existing, let alone evolving, knowledge base as much as it is a sub-set of detection practices activated because drought is always a creeping crisis waiting to happen, if not actually happening.
Knowing-how to identify precursor events to an oncoming drought is a special kind of knowledge and, more, its key is detection–not just identifying but also responding to–those precursors. Detecting when to move herds, detecting where wildlife are, detecting what are better grazing and water options, and detecting how to do all this and more in real time are ways in which the threat potential of dry seasons–and by extension, droughts–are managed.
2. I want to suggest that “land mosaics” are more than primarily a set of property relations, or a set of different species in a habitat, or as a landscape with heterogeneous habitats. Practices associated with herding over time and space are to my mind central.
Livestock move sequentially from here to there, but their inter-relationships with sites along the way are anything but serially uni-directional. Reciprocal (bi-directional) relationships are also much discussed in the literature (the stubble for livestock, the manure for the field). Extensively-raised livestock fattened up at special sites just before sale or slaughter are examples of a mediated interconnection between the herders and that off-take. The grazing itinerary of moving livestock across time and space is a kind of pooled interconnectivity guiding the herders and herds involved. More, shifts in configurations are a centerpiece of mobility discussions in the literature, e.g., improvising and responding opportunistically, case by case, as livestock and herders move along the itinerary, if there is one.
Practically, the notion of mosaic complexifies analysis–but usefully so. Why? Because it is now “mobility with respect to the mosaic(s) of interest,” not just: “mobility as a response to task environment variability.” Again, so what? Because the mosaic is the intervening template for understanding interconnected exogenous and endogenous variabilities, now more granular with respect to practices than the critics’ usual suspects of climate, prices, and conflict.
3, I want to suggest that frustrations are a key variable in analyzing pastoralist development. Take a random walk through the pastoralist literature and you will find: frustrated pastoralists and communities; frustrated politicians in pastoralist areas; security forces frustrated by pastoralists; pastoralists frustrated by security forces; pastoralists frustrated with researchers: and frustrated researchers in pastoralist areas. There are also—well, you get the picture.
Pastoralists are frustrated, researchers are frustrated, NGO staff are frustrated, and so too government officials. In fact, that is how they know they’re connected: They frustrate others and others frustrate them.
So what? To start with, frustration highlights what’s missing in notions of “resilience in the face of uncertainty.” Handling their joint frustrations is what pastoralists, NGO staff, researchers, and government officials are to do between bouncing back and bouncing forward.
This is why it’s such a big issue to determine just with whom pastoralists are in fact interacting and their practices for doing so. Are they actually frustrated with this really-existing government official or that actually-existing NGO staff person? Or is it that the others are more a nuisance for them, if that? Is the researcher actually frustrated with the pastoralists s/he is studying and, if so, in what ways is that frustration keeping their interactions going? Answers to such questions problematize currently popular binaries like caring/not caring and not only notions of caring and private self/public role.
4. I want to suggest that the remittance-sending household member is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an Africa rangeland than was Austria’s Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the district outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans).
It isn’t just that pastoralist households have off-site activities with household members elsewhere who contribute from there to rangeland pastoralist activities. Rather: It’s more appropriate to say that in some cases a great deal of the pastoralism, when it comes to the level of practices, is done off-rangeland just as what was once platform trading on the floor of a stock exchange is now done elsewhere (as in the case today of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange).
KEY UPSHOT: I want to suggest that rather than focusing on RESISTANCE to state-imposed agendas in pastoralist areas, some pastoralist activities are better understood as DEFENSE of existing and emerging practices, and not just in rangelands proper.
NB. Please also consider other ideas in https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/05/11/other-fresh-perspectives-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralism-17-brief-cases-last-newly-added/
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
4 thoughts on “If not corpse-pastoralism, then what are we seeing? Four other suggestions and key upshot for re-seeing what we thought we knew.”