I
Something Saverio Krätli pointed out to me has provoked me into more thinking. Let’s just say that governments and their donors are quite willing to distinguish pastoralists from pastoralism when their saving pastoralists means destroying the latter’s ways of life, e.g., sedentarize these herders as a way of bringing them more fully into modernity’s fruits of development.
What if from the outset the priority unit and level of analysis were, instead, their systems/societies and not pastoralists as individuals?
One immediate response is to counter–as do many critics–that the systems and societies are fast disappearing into history. History for me, however, is not that backward flying Angel who sees only the mounting wreckage of the past behind. Face forward means asking what are we missing that is right in front of us when it comes to seeing pastoralism, even today, as more than the individuated and individuating.
What’s in front of us, I submit, is the variety of pastoralisms. The twofold negative narrative–to government officials, the societies are still more backward, while to the critics they are irretrievably disappearing–is not the only way to see what is going on. Since it appears to need repeating, what is underway is complex enough for multiple interpretation, including full-blown counternarratives (like that recently identified and published by the PASTRES initiative or in my own infrastructure work).
II
Below are four other “system-level” examples of reframing (culled from previous blog entries with full references).
1. Scenes, not issues. Instead of talking about grazing practices, herd mobility, shortage of herder amenities, overall poor living conditions and their marginal social status, think of their practices as performance, their mobility and herding itineraries as travel, their scant amenities as the role of, say, everyday music while herding, and all that poor or picturesque herder clothing as, well, fashion in its own right. To do so means we end up describing “scenes” more than “issues”. As in, e.g., the frequently narrativized “downtown” scenes for the arts, music and lifestyle alternatives, where that “alternative” carries a quite different valence that the “marginal” of many pastoralism studies.
In shifting the policy and management focus from issues to scenes, we are explicitly shifting to what have been called frictional, improvisational contact zones that everyday pastoralism shares with other scenes organized around (alternative) performances, travel, music and fashion. That this analytic shift complicates official and academic policy narratives about pastoralism is a welcome one in my view. How so?
If we stick with the conventional view of herders as their own unit of analysis, we’ve been trained to think of informal 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 really-existing officials, consultants, and social scientists.
The contact zones I am talking about, however, are a response to the scissors cutting one way only. Whether the zones are formal or informal is not the point. 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 photos of herds and herders alive with working relations and affordances–a shared repertoire of practices and atmospheres–that necessarily extend beyond market and state. (One of the great virtues in looking at pastoralist practices at the event and situation level is that policy scenes can turn just as center-stage as discrete policy issues or processes.)
2. Mobility is more granular and fine-grained. Mobility is special because its associated practices are best understood as the interconnections and their different configurations managed spatially and temporally by herders for what are still called the factors of livestock production (land, water, labor). Livestock “moving between different sites with variable forage resources within a mosaic of harvested crop fields, open pastures and thickets” necessarily refers to more than the uni-directional interconnection of livestock and herders moving from a ‘here’ to a ‘there.’ Shifts in reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivity are also being managed as part and parcel of “mobility”.
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, as livestock and herders move along the itinerary, if there is one.
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 mobility as shifting interconnectivities over time and space are to my mind central. Practically, the notion of mosaic complexifies analysis–but usefully so. How? Because it is now “mobility with respect to the mosaic(s) of interest,” not just: “mobility as a response to task environment variability.” So what? The mosaic is the intervening template–if you will, the scene–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. The methodological problem of “pastoralists” as a social figure.
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 bloodless 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: Pastoralists are interviewed and quoted; societies and systems aren’t. The follow-on compromise is to treat the pastoralists studied as one or more social figures, a composite assembled by a researcher to represent the typical features of pastoralists who have been studied or not.
A problem arises because use of social figures extends significantly beyond the confines of anthropology and 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 longitudinal 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.” Beware any benchmark of “pre-capitalist” pastoralism!
4. When government’s recurrent cost budget is the informal sector. Humor me and start with current debates over periodizing World Wars I and II. It’s one thing to adopt the conventional periodization of the latter as 1939 – 1945. It is another matter to read in detail how 1931 – 1953 was a protracted period of conflicts and wars unfolding into and from a central paroxysm (primarily but not exclusively) in Europe and the Pacific.
In the latter perspective, the December 1941 – September 1945 paroxysm, with carnage across multiple front-lines, and military engagements both in Europe and the Pacific, was embedded in a longer series of large regional wars. These in turn were less preludes than unfolding processes worldwide. (Think: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the late 1940s Dutch war in Indonesia, the French war in Indochina from the late 1940s through early 1950s, and the Korean War.)
Now, reframe the most recent extended East Africa drought as one such paroxysm, with drought-related conflicts leading up to and following from it. Current emergency management terminology about this or that “longer-term recovery” are considerably problematized when the longer term is one drought unfolding into another and then over again. Immediate emergency response would look considerably less proactive when embedded in a process of recurring response always before the next disaster.
What does this mean practically? One major follow-on is giving renewed attention to government budgets (in the plural) for their recurrent operations in dryland communities. Or more pointedly, you’re looking at the recurrent cost crises of East Africa governments–which, to my mind, far too few critics analyze when fixated on failures of capital development projects and programs for pastoralists (as individuals and as “societies”).
My own view is that you have to have recurrent operating budgets already in place in order to get recurring drought response and recovery more effective on the ground over time. This means opening up our understanding of “government’s recurrent cost budget.”
Networks and communities of pastoralist households already on the ground are the de facto recurrent budget. And this “informal sector as recurrent budget” centers around the fact that when acting like other networks of reliability professionals, teams or groups of pastoralists give ongoing priority to the real-time prevention of other disasters from happening along the way and the need for their improvisational behavior to do that.
III
My own view is that despite the “the mountains of research evidence about contempoary pastoralists,” we are nowhere near a clearer direction as to what needs to be done by way of reliable specifics in national policy and management instead.
Indeed, the second anyone recommends “interventions should heed African pastoralists’ understanding of environmental change and uncertainty and support their approach to dealing with these,” there will be vocal researchers and critics who immediately problematize “which pastoralists and which approaches are we to listen to?” and “how do we listen to them without instrumentalizing those worldviews?” In these and other ways, researching “pastoralists” is a dead-end in ways that researching systems and their practices may well not be.
NB. Two other related “rethinking” blog entries are:
