I
To be honest, I always thought of pastoralists I met as working people. That’s because my grandmother, Ruby (Simpson) Roe,worked for years on the assembly line of Ford Motor Company in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Working, hands-on labor is what she did. To be sure, most herders I met in Botswana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe didn’t dress like her, talk like her, live in a house like hers, but in these eyes of mine they were all working people.
This means the gorge rose when I first read ghastly exoticism of Moravia’s Which Tribe Do You Belong? Ditto Naipaul, who was no better than Ruark about colonial Kenya or Monsarrat about colonial Botswana (ick to all that). Better to talk to Bessie Head face to face (I did) or read in one sitting that great, great, great workers’ novel, God’s Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène (translated by Francis Price).
I don’t wear this background as a badge of merit, but offer it by way of explaining why I’ve also found some academic studies of pastoralists to be alien and alienating. There herders are portrayed as anything but working people by virtue of unique behavior and incommensurable world-views. Now, I get the part that these practices are not the same as on automobile assembly lines of the 1940s to 1960s, and yes, I also get the irreducible particularity of Being. But, folks, their working hands and their working eyes after the hauls!
II
All this is my long way of reinforcing the importance of staying open to thinking differently about herder behavior we know. True, we are very good at critiquing those glossy pictures of smiling Maasai jumping into the air while holding their cellphones, but pointing out (as if it mattered just as much) that the beads they being worn came from the likes of Eastern Europe or elsewhere. I think we are less adept in making lateral connections, e.g., where young herders wait around like urban gig workers elsewhere.
Instead of talking about grazing practices, herd mobility, shortage of herder amenities, overall poor living conditions and their marginal social status, I want to argue that it is easy and useful to shift the terms of reference even slightly. For example, think of practices as performance, mobility and herding itineraries as travel, scant amenities as the role of, say, everyday music while herding, and all that poor or picturesque clothing as, well, fashion of its own. To do so means we end up describing “scenes” more than “issues”. Think, e.g., of the frequently narrativized “downtown” scenes for transiting arts, music and lifestyle alternatives, where that “alternative” carries a quite different valence that the “marginal’s” of too many pastoralism studies.
So what? In shifting the policy and management focus from issues to scenes, we are explicitly shifting to a central focus on what have called frictional, improvisational contact zones that everyday pastoralism shares with other scenes organized around (alternative) performances, travel, music and fashion.
III
Now, if we stuck with “pastoralism” alone as the unit of analysis, we’ve been trained to think of these contact zones as the decreasing space between two blades of modernity’s scissors: One blade is everyday pastoralism commodified by really-existing markets and state interventions; the other blade is everyday pastoralism disciplined into categories from outsider officials, academics, and experts. Not much of a future if the contact zones don’t control the blades.
But it’s never been a matter of control. The contact zones I am talking about are a response to the scissors cutting one way only. And how do we know that? Because pastoralism is, to use the phrase, an “infrastructural form”; it is a scene-making device that is exceptionally adept at rendering all that unromantic, unsentimental dust and sand and dirt in herding photos alive with relations and affordances that necessarily extend beyond market and state.
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Source. I shamelessly borrow (the errors are my mine alone) from Jennifer Park (2026), “index Magazine and the Downtown Interface: Art, Music, Fashion, and Indie Publics in 1990s New York,” Fashion Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1362704X.2026.2712394
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 