“What if the rise of China,” [Jerry] Zee poignantly asks, “were to be approached literally, through the rise of China into the air?” Amidst official and popular accounts of China’s authoritarian ruling, Zee’s Continent in Dust is a striking example of how to write about China and Chinese politics otherwise. The book focuses on how weather events—specifically, those involving dust, aerosols, and particulate matter—are sites for political breakdown and emergence, revealing that the Chinese political system is anything but static.

Zee opens the book with a story of a resettled ex-herder family, whose herds have allegedly overgrazed pastures in inner Mongolia. This, in turn, has resulted in the spread of dust storms, or “wind-sand” (feng sha 风沙).2 Controlling the dust flow has become a state priority, and so these ex-herders have adapted: having left behind their old jobs, they now drive civil servants across fragile dunes, airdrop seeds, and stabilize sand. These state-contracted environmental engineering jobs, however, are only “semipredictable,” leaving the ex-herders caught in “a state of constantly frustrated anticipation.”

Still, how does this offer new insight into China at large? Because, by following the dust, Zee reveals that the plight of these ex-herders is not because of the popularly accepted idea of “a neoliberalization of the socialist state.” Instead, the wind-sand shows how bureaucrats view ex-herders as both a source of “social instability” in rural frontiers and as an on-demand workforce that can furnish state sand-control programs. In other words, ex-herders represent China’s “experiment in governing,” swept in an atmosphere of “windfall opportunities for work and cash,” a departure from the declining pastoral economy. This story is not about the rise of neoliberal China but, instead, the “delicately maintained condition of quietude” deemed harmonious and stable enough for the Chinese state.3

https://www.publicbooks.org/protean-environment-and-political-possibilities/

Hands-on work is necessary to cultivate the awareness that architecture cannot be contained within the plot of land.

The way I came to this awareness was cleaning the facades of buildings with my own two hands. This work constitutes the ongoing series The Ethics of Dust, which I began in 2008. These artworks emerged from the intersection of architecture and experimental preservation. I wanted to preserve the dust that would normally be thrown out, because it seemed to me, intuitively at first, that this dust contained important information about architecture’s environmental footprint. This dust, which you can see deposited as dark stains on facades, comes in large measure from the boilers of buildings, as well as electric power plants and traffic. The smoke produced as a byproduct when we heat, cool, and electrify buildings is as much a condition of possibility for architecture as concrete or steel. The airborne particles we call smoke or dust are therefore an architectural material. Yet smoke cannot be contained inside the plot of land. To manipulate this material requires new ways of caring for architecture that encompass this larger territory. It invites us to imagine how to care for the atmosphere as an airborne built environment.

https://placesjournal.org/article/repairing-architecture-schools/

What if the built environments of the many different pastoralists include all manner of dust from herding livestock, cooking in the compound, lorries rushing down dirt roads, the ongoing drought, intermittent sand storms and the sudden dust-devils? What if architectural schools are moving from a pedagogy of new construction (think: development) to repair and renovation of the already built? What do these new generations of faculty and students offer by way of advice to really-existing pastoralists today?

One answer from the last citation: “It is important, also, to listen and learn from communities who inhabit the buildings and environments that need repair, because they know best what is broken.” To put it another way, only in a some versions of particulate matter is dust broken.

According to human reason, guided only by the light of nature, these people lead the more happy and freer life, being void of care, which torments the minds of many Christians: They are not delighted in baubles, but in useful things.

Thomas Morton (1637) writing about his experience with Native Americans in his book, The New English Canaan. This was the first book the Puritans banned in America.

It is little recorded that some early English colonists to America either ran away to live with Native Americans or refused to return from captivity when given the chance. One writer put it that these reluctant colonists enjoyed the “most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail upon us”. Famously, an early French Jesuit found Native American customs “afforded me illumination the more easily to understand and explain several matters found in ancient authors”.

Just imagine the entire lot of colonists ran away to live with Native Americans, once realizing both that better practices had already been found and that colonization was altogether a ghastly prospect by comparison. Now that’s a counterfactual!

Sources

Axtell, J. (1985). The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford University Press: New York.

Connolly, C. (2023). “How America’s first banned book survived and became an anti-authoritarian i” (accessed online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-americas-first-banned-book-survived-and-became-an-anti-authoritarian-icon-180982971).

Knox, B. (1993). The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.

A recent version of The New English Canaan in which the epigraph appears can be found at https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/new-english-canaan-part-i

I

The danger in stopping short by organizing around failure probabilities and consequences sundered from each other (the defining topoi of “risk”) is the illusion of control via risk management. Stranded at your cognitive limits, you don’t realize what you have before you are little more than contingencies associated with aftermaths. If you think otherwise, acting as if you had causal understanding means having to ride uncertainty when you think you’re managing risks.

It’s worth asking then what would risk management look like if we started from our cognitive limits rather than assume we manage risk because our certitudes no longer hold. This means having to take seriously our cognitive limits and biases.

For example, the Fundamental Attribution Error has been defined as: The failure to recognize and explain human behavior by reference to situations in which the person finds himself or herself. If so, are appeals to an absolute priority of universal human rights over the irreducible particularities of being an example of mistaken attribution? Or is one human right to commit that error?

II

Spreading risk in investment focuses on whether or not risks are allocated across a diverse portfolio so as to minimize losses or instead is concentrated in one type of investment or risk. This strategy is taken to be a positive if the risks and/or types of investment are uncorrelated.

Even then spreading risk does not automatically make for less uncertainty. Why? Because risk is a very old, very overwritten policy palimpsest in the public and private sectors. A paragraph like the immediately preceding reads legibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved. But none of the previous inscriptions are pane-clear and entire because of the intervening the layers, effacements, and erasures about risk and its management.

That is, words and concepts are grabbed and patched together from different contexts and times in this palimpsest, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes:

. . . . .risks spread out……….to minimize losses or instead…………concentrated. . . uncorrlated

Now, that too is “spreading risk”! Albeit considerably less positive.

I

It’s long recorded that control room operators in key critical infrastructures prevent, often daily and unbeknownst to the public, major accidents and failures. Because these do not occur, are not recorded as savings to the public weal.

This track record of saves matters when justifying proposals for wholesale replacement or upgrading of these systems because failures or accidents do happen from time to time. As if the latter costs are considered reason enough to jettison the system without regard, however, to the losses in savings incurred in the jettisoning.

II

Not starting with the saves is far more than a methods problem. It takes us to the entire notion of “problem” as a starting point for major policy and management.

In my profession, policy analysis, asking “What’s the problem?” is the first step in an analyzing an issue.

As reasonable as that may sound, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that preventing something from becoming a problem is therefore a major part of that analysis and policymaking as well. This applies to reliability professionals wherever they are, from pastoralists to control room operators. Nor is this anything like news. “Is not the best policymaker the one who makes changes before the problem emerges?”

Source

Martin Reuss (1988). “The Myth and Reality of Policy History”. The Public Historian 10(1): 41 – 49 (p. 42).

A third problem is Formulaic radicalism. This is an attempt to project a veneer of political and intellectual dissidence while ultimately relying on highly established tropes which often lead to unsurprising conclusions. Contemporary research is generally formulaic but [critical management studies, CMS] adds the critical flavour. It often does so by giving phenomena – no matter how benign – a negative framing.

Studying ‘resistance’ gives a progressive, even heroic flavour to a topic. One way CMS researchers do formulaic radicalism is by using conventional formats but include some markers of radicalism. The author may seek to express radical and critical ideas while complying with ‘mainstream’ conventions. Such a move can help to indicate that a study is clearly positioned in an academic subfield, guided by an authoritative framework, and informed by a detailed review of the literature.

Next the research outlines a planned design, a careful data management strategy (sometimes using data sorting programs and codification), and a minor section of ‘safe’ reflexivity. The authors summarize findings, outlines how they add to the literature (and sometimes the author-ity [sic]) and offers a brief conclusion (not saying too much outside the chosen and mainly predictable path). The form should matter less than the content, but this highly domesticated form tends to weaken the impact of the substantive content. The norm of presenting a number of abstracted, short interview statements does not always help to reveal any particularly novel insights.

In the text, there are frequent nods to critical aims such as exploring power, supporting emancipation, recognizing resistance, or generating reflexivity. However, the formulaic presentation of findings often undermines this and leads to modest insights.

André Spicer and Mats Alvesson (2024). “Critical Management Studies: A Critical Review.”
Journal of Management Studies (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joms.13047)

The terms China, Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are used to describe the current government of China under General Secretary Xi Jinping. ‘China’ is not intended to refer to the country itself with the entirety of its peoples and cultures.

Recent first footnote of a peer-reviewed journal article

One of the questions that helped precipitate the research on highly reliable socio-technical systems was: Why aren’t there more normal accidents, given technologies are so tightly coupled and interactive?

A symmetrical question has been posed by the high reliability research since then: Why aren’t there more real-time control rooms or operations centers, given there are so many reliability mandates, critical services and hazardous technologies?

One answer suggests itself: There are in fact more control rooms than people suppose, if the persisting dearth of control room research is any guide.

If a researcher only ever studies one political context, then the horizons of explanation are constrained because of selection bias. If one only studies the United States, without comparison to other countries, then this leads to a sample selection bias where one cannot answer why the United States has comparatively high poverty. To paraphrase [sociologist and political scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset], poverty scholars who only know one country, know no country.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10446494/

For a time, my reading centered on histories of ideas, like those of progress, improvement and the Enlightenment. Once I started reading Isaiah Berlin, there was no going back. That was the pull side of being attracted to abstractions.

Being pushed to abstractions has been a different matter. Discussions about all those varieties of capitalism, realpolitik, and modernities, to name just three entangled constellations, are unsatisfactory for me, when they stop short of recording the actually-existing practices on the ground. So I am pushed further by being compelled to contextualize these abstractions.

To put it differently, what is “insufficiently abstract” for me is the weird undifferentiation that comes with the comparative absence of histories of the highly various and contingent practices at stake when filling in the details.

Note: “comparative” absence of details, not “total” absence. For an example of the kind of history of ideas that goes further by identifying and comparing practices associated with those ideas, I can think of no more formidable book than the recent: Michael Sonenscher (2023). After Kant The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought. Princeton University Press.

When I first became interested in livestock herders in Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands. Fifty years later the refrain is the herders are marginalized–marginalized in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency.

May I suggest a more positive and apposite analogy:

The illuminators [of medieval manuscripts] enriched the margins of the page, conventionally an empty space, with figurative, vegetal or abstract elements. Sometimes the marginal images were merely decorative, at other times they functioned rather like visual footnotes or sidebars, as serious or comic commentaries on the text. . .

Jed Perl (2021). Authority and Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York

Pastoralists continue to illuminate what others persist calling “the margins.” Indeed, pastoralists are our counter-public for that point.

. . .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)

——-

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.

——-

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)

——-

Related blog entry:

https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/07/most-policy-relevant-entries-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralisms-reposted/