The availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as cell phones, WIFI connections, and social media has broadly changed communication norms amongst mobile pastoralists. Scholars and development organisations have reported on the end results of digital tools, for example by examining the ability of governments and development organisations to send early-warning weather reports through enhanced cellular access; the use of SMS to engage in deliberative polling; and the use of WIFI connections to provide banking services. However, researchers have not yet fully addressed how these tools are changing the communicative norms and ethnographic research methods used between researchers and mobile pastoralists. These changing communicative norms embed relations that inform academic understanding of the opportunities that arise from the interplay of complex forms of social and economic variability as experienced by herders. This paper draws from the fields of Communication and Anthropology to understand how these same ICTs have changed the complex communication between herders and researchers through the establishment of new communicative networks. I ask how new communicative networks impact on both existing and emerging ethnographic research practices and how the emergent 'digital field' of research might open space for new communicative networks and research projects. Then, I propose that digital ethnography may be one way in which both herders and researchers can respond to variability while establishing research projects wherein herders are recognised both as participants in a research project and as co-producers of knowledge.
{"title":"Nomadic Digital Ethnography and Engagement","authors":"Allison Hahn","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240209","url":null,"abstract":"The availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as cell phones, WIFI connections, and social media has broadly changed communication norms amongst mobile pastoralists. Scholars and development organisations have reported on the end results of digital tools,\u0000 for example by examining the ability of governments and development organisations to send early-warning weather reports through enhanced cellular access; the use of SMS to engage in deliberative polling; and the use of WIFI connections to provide banking services. However, researchers have\u0000 not yet fully addressed how these tools are changing the communicative norms and ethnographic research methods used between researchers and mobile pastoralists. These changing communicative norms embed relations that inform academic understanding of the opportunities that arise from the interplay\u0000 of complex forms of social and economic variability as experienced by herders. This paper draws from the fields of Communication and Anthropology to understand how these same ICTs have changed the complex communication between herders and researchers through the establishment of\u0000 new communicative networks. I ask how new communicative networks impact on both existing and emerging ethnographic research practices and how the emergent 'digital field' of research might open space for new communicative networks and research projects. Then, I propose that digital ethnography\u0000 may be one way in which both herders and researchers can respond to variability while establishing research projects wherein herders are recognised both as participants in a research project and as co-producers of knowledge.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"299-311"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41736428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Research has shown that pastoralism and the management of the commons are connected (Bollig and Lesogorol 2016). In this article I discuss how the concept of variability, which emerged from discussions of dryland ecologies in the 1980s (Homewood 2008), can inform and enhance research on the commons and vice versa. Research on the commons can further elucidate the understanding of pastoralist practices. I conclude with reflections drawn from some empirical examples in the literature, the use of the socio-ecological systems (SES) framework, and discuss the benefits and potential problems when applied to heterogeneous and flexible pastoralist practices and to the pastoral management of the commons.
{"title":"Commons Research and Pastoralism in the Context of Variability","authors":"J. P. Blau","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240207","url":null,"abstract":"Research has shown that pastoralism and the management of the commons are connected (Bollig and Lesogorol 2016). In this article I discuss how the concept of variability, which emerged from discussions of dryland ecologies in the 1980s (Homewood 2008), can inform and enhance research\u0000 on the commons and vice versa. Research on the commons can further elucidate the understanding of pastoralist practices. I conclude with reflections drawn from some empirical examples in the literature, the use of the socio-ecological systems (SES) framework, and discuss the benefits and potential\u0000 problems when applied to heterogeneous and flexible pastoralist practices and to the pastoral management of the commons.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"272-285"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43546345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pitched against the apparently more civilised and modern 'settled' folk, pastoralists have historically been penalised for the seemingly primitive and outdated practice of mobility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in western India, this article challenges this reductive dichotomy and unpacks the many (im)mobilities produced, accessed, experienced and imagined by pastoralists. Adopting a relational lens, it shows how mobilities and immobilities co-constitute and are contingent on each other across social, geographical and temporal scales. Embedded within their own social and political history, the many forms of (im)mobilities can not only ontologically dispel the homogenizing effects of rigid typologies, but also but also practically offer pastoralists the capacity to adapt to changing times.
{"title":"A Relational View of Pastoral (im)mobilities","authors":"N. Maru","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240203","url":null,"abstract":"Pitched against the apparently more civilised and modern 'settled' folk, pastoralists have historically been penalised for the seemingly primitive and outdated practice of mobility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in western India, this article challenges this reductive dichotomy\u0000 and unpacks the many (im)mobilities produced, accessed, experienced and imagined by pastoralists. Adopting a relational lens, it shows how mobilities and immobilities co-constitute and are contingent on each other across social, geographical and temporal scales. Embedded within their own social\u0000 and political history, the many forms of (im)mobilities can not only ontologically dispel the homogenizing effects of rigid typologies, but also but also practically offer pastoralists the capacity to adapt to changing times.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48098696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The standard approach to measuring livestock ownership in pastoralist communities relies on an assumption of uniformity that does not reflect the diverse concepts of ownership held by pastoralists themselves. In Namibia's Koakaveld Region, Himba and Herero pastoralist communities have a rich vocabulary for categorising the origins, usage rights and cultural valence of their cattle. Drawing on both authors' experience overseeing a large-scale rangeland management programme evaluation in Namibia's Northern Communal Areas – and one author's experience growing up in and keeping cattle in a Himba pastoralist community – we show how the standard approach to measuring cattle ownership undermines accurate estimates of livestock wealth, off-take and inequality, and obfuscates pastoralist's strategies for turning ecological variability to their advantage. We conclude with lessons about how multi-dimensional data collection methods improve upon the standard approach to livestock ownership measurements.
{"title":"The Mismeasurement of Cattle Ownership In Namibia's Northern Communal Areas","authors":"D. Groves, Venomukona Tjiseua","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240206","url":null,"abstract":"The standard approach to measuring livestock ownership in pastoralist communities relies on an assumption of uniformity that does not reflect the diverse concepts of ownership held by pastoralists themselves. In Namibia's Koakaveld Region, Himba and Herero pastoralist communities have\u0000 a rich vocabulary for categorising the origins, usage rights and cultural valence of their cattle. Drawing on both authors' experience overseeing a large-scale rangeland management programme evaluation in Namibia's Northern Communal Areas – and one author's experience growing up in and\u0000 keeping cattle in a Himba pastoralist community – we show how the standard approach to measuring cattle ownership undermines accurate estimates of livestock wealth, off-take and inequality, and obfuscates pastoralist's strategies for turning ecological variability to their advantage.\u0000 We conclude with lessons about how multi-dimensional data collection methods improve upon the standard approach to livestock ownership measurements.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"255-271"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49366817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Relationships between public policy, resource management and the larger economic contexts remain poorly understood in the African drylands. A better understanding of changes in pastoral systems requires shifting the focus from a static and linear analysis to a dynamic one encompassing processes, relationships and contexts. A three-year fieldwork research experience on three different case studies in Senegal has led to the identification of three material objects at the interface between pastoral systems and development interventions: cattle breeds, feeding and milk. Such objects are at the heart of pastoral systems, and are typically crucial to policymakers' attempts to intensify pastoral production. By raising the example of cattle feeding in Northern Senegal, I suggest that a methodological and analytical framework focusing on the socio-political dimensions of technical objects can be useful to analyse the encounter between the linear and universal input/output rationality of livestock development models and those of pastoralists, based on the embeddedness of socio-political, economic and environmental variability. Such an approach, I thus argue, can be used to deconstruct production models, highlighting the context of production and the modes of operation of the social actors. This could open up a space to describe social and technical change beyond abstract and 'universal' development models, and to promote more inclusive and empirically based policy-making.
{"title":"Socio-Technical Objects at the Crossroads Between 'Universal' Policy Models for Livestock Production Development, Local Practices and Dynamics of Change","authors":"S. Magnani","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240208","url":null,"abstract":"Relationships between public policy, resource management and the larger economic contexts remain poorly understood in the African drylands. A better understanding of changes in pastoral systems requires shifting the focus from a static and linear analysis to a dynamic one encompassing\u0000 processes, relationships and contexts. A three-year fieldwork research experience on three different case studies in Senegal has led to the identification of three material objects at the interface between pastoral systems and development interventions: cattle breeds, feeding and\u0000 milk. Such objects are at the heart of pastoral systems, and are typically crucial to policymakers' attempts to intensify pastoral production. By raising the example of cattle feeding in Northern Senegal, I suggest that a methodological and analytical framework focusing on the socio-political\u0000 dimensions of technical objects can be useful to analyse the encounter between the linear and universal input/output rationality of livestock development models and those of pastoralists, based on the embeddedness of socio-political, economic and environmental variability. Such\u0000 an approach, I thus argue, can be used to deconstruct production models, highlighting the context of production and the modes of operation of the social actors. This could open up a space to describe social and technical change beyond abstract and 'universal' development models, and to promote\u0000 more inclusive and empirically based policy-making.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"286-298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47385524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Livelihood surveys often categorise pastoralist households by economic activity and material assets, using measures such as herd ownership, extent of mobility and the degree of reliance on livestock vs other sources of subsistence and income. However, in contexts of high variability and uncertainty, such objective classifications may inadvertently perpetrate two distortions. First, they stabilise highly fluid economic landscapes, over-looking the ways in which people draw opportunistically from an array of livelihood strategies or move between them over time. Second, they may flatten the social field, overlooking the ways that class and kinship structure and constrain people's livelihood options. This paper argues for greater attention to subjective assessments of livelihood, such as the labels by which people self-identify or distinguish themselves from others. Drawing on over twenty months of anthropological fieldwork, I describe the notion of raiya, a polysemous identity construct that has become a salient part of everyday discourse in Turkana County, Kenya. While raiya connotes an array of conventional dichotomies – including rural/urban, traditional/modern and nomadic/sedentary – attention to the uses of this term in 'speech acts' reveals how it is used to manage relationships and access opportunities across these apparent divisions. This example demonstrates how research on identity practices can inform the study of livelihoods, not only because self-identification indicates a commitment to certain cultural values (Moritz 2012), but also because identity labels highlight the messy processes of boundary-shifting and boundary-crossing that characterise social and economic life under conditions of high variability.
{"title":"Identity as a Lens on Livelihoods: Insights From Turkana, Kenya","authors":"C. Rodgers","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240205","url":null,"abstract":"Livelihood surveys often categorise pastoralist households by economic activity and material assets, using measures such as herd ownership, extent of mobility and the degree of reliance on livestock vs other sources of subsistence and income. However, in contexts of high variability\u0000 and uncertainty, such objective classifications may inadvertently perpetrate two distortions. First, they stabilise highly fluid economic landscapes, over-looking the ways in which people draw opportunistically from an array of livelihood strategies or move between them over time. Second,\u0000 they may flatten the social field, overlooking the ways that class and kinship structure and constrain people's livelihood options. This paper argues for greater attention to subjective assessments of livelihood, such as the labels by which people self-identify or distinguish themselves\u0000 from others. Drawing on over twenty months of anthropological fieldwork, I describe the notion of raiya, a polysemous identity construct that has become a salient part of everyday discourse in Turkana County, Kenya. While raiya connotes an array of conventional dichotomies –\u0000 including rural/urban, traditional/modern and nomadic/sedentary – attention to the uses of this term in 'speech acts' reveals how it is used to manage relationships and access opportunities across these apparent divisions. This example demonstrates how research on identity practices\u0000 can inform the study of livelihoods, not only because self-identification indicates a commitment to certain cultural values (Moritz 2012), but also because identity labels highlight the messy processes of boundary-shifting and boundary-crossing that characterise social and economic life under\u0000 conditions of high variability.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48159384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mikkel Bille, Being Bedouin Around Petra: Life at a World Heritage Site in the Twenty-First Century; Alexandre Kedar, Ahmed Amara and Oren Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev'","authors":"D. Chatty","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240213","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"348-351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47058061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses the research methods adopted while working with Kel Tamasheq (Tuareg) families in the urban space of Bamako. With no authorisation to move outside the city, the researcher cannot but be, on the one hand, a fixed point of observation of informants' movements in and out of the city. On the other hand, the progressively acquired capacity to move through Bamako's Kel Tamasheq families – sometimes depending on others, sometimes autonomously – resituates a mobile approach within a context of general immobility. As these two levels of observations collide, this article reflects on an emerging methodological approach to 'discontinuous (im)mobility'. The article suggests that strategic (im)mobility is key to comprehending the extension and organisation of different relationships. By discontinuous (im)mobility this article means a not-necessarily pre-planned organisation of the researcher's mobility while doing fieldwork. Initially this might seem to lead to great confusion in collecting and analysing qualitative ethnographic data. However, in the long run it provides a rich and varied corpus of observations and interactions that are inclusive and intra-scalar. Readiness to be (im)mobile, to navigate volatility, is the norm that is not grasped by equilibrium-driven methodological approaches based on ordered and sequential fieldwork design. This discontinuous (im) mobility allows us to comprehend the entanglement and ongoing reproduction of such variabilities, whose change is hastened by the shifting socio-political context in Mali. To support my argument, the article takes the example of tbushak, a practice of visiting relatives and friends.
{"title":"Niglá: Methodology of Discontinuous (im)mobilities Among Malian Kel Tamasheq In Bamako","authors":"G. Gonzales","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240202","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the research methods adopted while working with Kel Tamasheq (Tuareg) families in the urban space of Bamako. With no authorisation to move outside the city, the researcher cannot but be, on the one hand, a fixed point of observation of informants' movements in\u0000 and out of the city. On the other hand, the progressively acquired capacity to move through Bamako's Kel Tamasheq families – sometimes depending on others, sometimes autonomously – resituates a mobile approach within a context of general immobility. As these two levels of observations\u0000 collide, this article reflects on an emerging methodological approach to 'discontinuous (im)mobility'. The article suggests that strategic (im)mobility is key to comprehending the extension and organisation of different relationships. By discontinuous (im)mobility this article means a not-necessarily\u0000 pre-planned organisation of the researcher's mobility while doing fieldwork. Initially this might seem to lead to great confusion in collecting and analysing qualitative ethnographic data. However, in the long run it provides a rich and varied corpus of observations and interactions that are\u0000 inclusive and intra-scalar. Readiness to be (im)mobile, to navigate volatility, is the norm that is not grasped by equilibrium-driven methodological approaches based on ordered and sequential fieldwork design. This discontinuous (im) mobility allows us to comprehend the entanglement and ongoing\u0000 reproduction of such variabilities, whose change is hastened by the shifting socio-political context in Mali. To support my argument, the article takes the example of tbushak, a practice of visiting relatives and friends.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"195-208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47164941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alun Thomas, Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin.","authors":"Henryk Alff","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240214","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"352-354"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43082129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article reflects on the conceptual debt that anthropology has developed towards the peoples it studies, by exploring the case-study of Gypsy/Roma anthropology. We argue that ethnographically-grounded research has enabled anthropologists to access and incorporate Gypsy/Roma visions and practices of the world. The flexible Gypsy epistemologies, which Gypsies/ Roma use in the social and cultural construction of particular forms of identity and mobility, have thus translated into a specific practice of theory, which has provided more adequate tools for grasping the complexity of reality and contributed to a decolonialisation of anthropological thought.
{"title":"Flexible Epistemologies: Gypsy/roma Thinking and Anthropology Theory","authors":"Stefania Pontrandolfo, Marco Solimene","doi":"10.3197/np.2020.240204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2020.240204","url":null,"abstract":"This article reflects on the conceptual debt that anthropology has developed towards the peoples it studies, by exploring the case-study of Gypsy/Roma anthropology. We argue that ethnographically-grounded research has enabled anthropologists to access and incorporate Gypsy/Roma visions\u0000 and practices of the world. The flexible Gypsy epistemologies, which Gypsies/ Roma use in the social and cultural construction of particular forms of identity and mobility, have thus translated into a specific practice of theory, which has provided more adequate tools for grasping the complexity\u0000 of reality and contributed to a decolonialisation of anthropological thought.","PeriodicalId":19318,"journal":{"name":"Nomadic Peoples","volume":"24 1","pages":"228-240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43090925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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