Pastoralism In Anthropology Research Paper

Within the limits of such definitions, ‘pastoralism’ refers to a wide range of very different situations, regions, and times. Milk-based economies built on cattle/small stock in East Africa and on camels/flocks in the Horn of Africa date 2,000–3,000 years back. Pastoralists exploiting arid regions use species diversification as a risk reducing strategy: different species are subject to different hazards, have supplementary production patterns and require different labor. Contemporary East African pastoralism is based on an emphasis on cow or camel milk production for subsistence purposes, supplemented with small stock rearing to produce milk or meat for market sale or household needs. In the present situation there is often a change towards commercial production of small stock for the meat market, although authorities often encourage the sale of immature cattle to the livestock industry. The basic division of labor in such societies is that young men take care of mobile adult cattle and camels out of lactation, allowing them to profit from valuable but distant pastures. Women, children, and elderly men look after lactating dams and cows, calves, and small stock. These are often managed in a less mobile fashion if conditions allow. In East African cattle cultures, a careful attitude about the reproductive potential of the herd is a prime moral value that reflects on the fundamental worth of the pastoralist as a human being and as a member of the community. Reproductive capital could traditionally only be disposed of in socially and ritually meaningful contexts such as gift-giving, bride-wealth, or stock friendships. The typical form of social organization among such pastoralists is a confederation of intermarrying clans, led by the property-holding senior men and identifying themselves as having a common ethnicity.

Middle Eastern pastoralism has an emphasis on sheep and goat rearing for the purpose of producing milk and/or meat for domestic consumption or sale. Such pastoralism has existed in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean and in Eastern and Northern Africa for 3,000 to 4,000 years, and is today considered to have developed there as a supplement to horticulture. In the millennium before Christ, camel saddling technology had developed enough to enable pastoral groups to involve themselves in long-distance caravaneering as well as in extensive camel-back raiding. This brought the breeding of transport and riding animals into the herding operation, and above all involved the desert dwellers in important political and economic relations with sedentary riverine or oasis polities. The spread of Islam reflected the need to find a religious basis of trust when trading out of reach of tight jural or political control. Most shepherding communities of the Middle East are today Muslims, although religious restrictions are often less tight than in urban areas. Small stock rearing provided a subsistence basis for desert or mountain-based family members who did not take part in caravaneering, which was mainly a task for select males. An interesting difference exists between Saudi Arabia and North Africa on one hand and Somalia on the other, in that Somali pastoralists exploit the camel primarily as a milk animal and do not ride it while camel milk is less important where the animal is ridden.

In central Asia other combinations of livestock have enabled other matches of raiding, trade and subsistence dairy production, such as, for example, the traditional salt trade in the Himalayas where yak and sheep are used both for transport and dairy production. Mongolian pastoralism places the strongest emphasis on horses and sheep. Although there are a number of good studies on these communities (e.g., Humphreys and Sneath 1999), they have attracted less contemporary anthropological attention than have East African or Middle Eastern pastoralists. Due to the legacy of the Golden Horde they have instead appealed to the interest of cultural historians.

Reindeer-based pastoralism in the subarctic tundra is the only contemporary form of pastoralism based on specialization in one species. It is considered the most recently developed form of specialized pastoralism and thought to have developed out of hunting only during the last millennium. Herders follow the natural movements of reindeer herds whose primary use is the production of meat. Contemporary Sami herding in Scandinavia is market-oriented, motorized, and generally a large scale operation (Ingold 1980).

Evolutionary anthropologists and philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century concerned themselves with pastoralism because it was assumed to be a transitional stage between hunting and agriculture. Engels, inspired by Morgan, took a particular interest in it, because he saw livestock holdings as the origin both of private property and of male domination. Serious field research among pastoral people was undertaken only in the 1940s and 1950s when monographs on groups such as the Nuer, Dinka, and Somali came to play a decisive role in the development of British structural-functional theorizing about patrilineal descent systems. Within other scholarly traditions, attempts were made to find suitable ways of systematically classifying pastoral economies into subtypes (full nomads, seminomads, etc.) often based on the relative time spent on the move or relative dependence on agriculture. These classificatory systems for a long time dominated what was written on pastoralism but were not theoretically productive.

Substantial progress in the study of pastoralism can be traced to three different but intertwined strands of research that were prominent in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. One followed American traditions of cultural ecology and focussed on adaptation. The second was prominent in France and pursued Marxist analyses of modes of production. The third was inspired by Barth’s theories of economic action. The conjunction of these interests, followed up by participatory fieldwork, led to a boost in understanding the technical aspects of pastoralism, the complex set of resources required, and the problems of continuity involved in sustaining herd capital over time in arid regions characterized by unpredictable climatic conditions.

As noted, pastoral production involves both a production of utilities and a continuous reproduction of livestock capital. Paine (1971) made a useful distinction between herding and husbandry. The first referred to the care for the wellbeing and growth of animals as such and husbandry is the management of the herd in its totality. The latter takes place through investments, acquisitions, or culling and sales and involves the herd owner in socially highly significant transactions that establish relations of friendship, affinity, economic insurance, spread of risks, and political alliance that are necessary for a socially and economically secure existence as a pastoralist. This implies a long-term scheming which has a very different time perspective from making herding decisions. The latter are made on a daily ad hoc basis, taking into consideration the latest information about the nutrition, health, and productive status of the animals as well as the quality and quantity of fodder and water available in accessible pastures, the presence of predators and human enemies, and the immediate availability of labor.

Pastoral economic power has several facets: control over the animals as food producers and as objects of exchange, and control over the growth potential of one’s livestock herd. This makes possible multifaceted property concepts. Animal wealth can be redivided, redistributed, and reorganized in a number of ways, creating diversity in rules and practices of inheritance and other forms of transgenerational property devolution. Senior men often strive to control the labor of younger men by retaining ultimate control of the latter’s future herds and by summoning ritual prerogatives such as blessing power among the East African pastoralists or closeness to ancestral spirit owners of the land among the Mongols.

Property rights to grazing and water demonstrate a wide span of variation, depending on the territorial regularities of movement. East African pastoralists exploit land that can be seen as either government property or divine property, as open access or as a commons held by the ethnic group. Transhumant Middle Eastern pastoralists may have very definitive rights to seasonal routes. The Beja clans of Sudan claim tracts of land primarily for defining the political privilege of host-ship. Such differences in land right patterns reflect the degree of predictability in location and extent of seasonal rainfall or river flooding as well as the farming cycles of agricultural neighbors and concomitant fluctuations of markets. Seasonal regularity and predictability structure the possibilities for control of land, grazing, and political power. Pastoralism does not represent any single way of organizing relations of production (cf. Bonte 1981, p. 30). There is a great divergence for example between the quasi-feudal Khirgiz of Afghanistan on the one hand and the loosely organized Turkana of Kenya on the other. The Khirgiz khan distributes stock-loans to thousands of clients while among the Turkana each household strives for its own independence through cattle which are either owned by themselves or borrowed on a more egalitarian basis between stock allies. The issue of the forms of inequality that could be found within pastoral societies and the mechanisms often maintaining a relative degree of egalitarianism has interested many of the researchers referred to. If livestock rearing is considered per se, there are many practical problems that are common to pastoralists in different parts of the world, yet the ecological niches they occupy also allow for substantial variation. However, the insufficiency of ecological determinism for understanding pastoral cultures and social conditions has become apparent particularly in relation to such questions of equality and inequality.

Over time, anthropologists looking at pastoralism have come to place more emphasis on the various ways in which pastoral communities were integrated in larger regional economic and political systems, and on the interlinkages between pastoral production and other economic activities. An observer who considers the activities of a pastoral group in a particular place and time is easily misled to disregard the variation that a long-term perspective reveals. Later research has emphasized that pastoralism is not necessarily a static, ‘pure’ adaptation, but rather a stage in a flexible series of adaptations to irregular climatic circumstances. It has only existed as a pure subsistence form under particular historical conditions. What is more typical for pastoralists than a monodimensional dependence on one type of resource is flexibility in combining different resources. To survive as pastoralists in the long term, livestock-rearers have had to integrate supplementary pursuits such as venture farming, small scale-irrigation, famine-year hunting, or trade. With a longer-term perspective on some of the ethnic groups of East Africa, a gradual switch between dry-land agriculture, pastoralism, and hunting seems to be no rare occurrence. The apparent degree of specialization in and dependence on pastoralism is thus often spurious. Pastoralists whose work is dominated by care for animals still normally depend on getting parts of their diet from farm produce. Small-scale supplementary cultivation can be added to pastoralism in innumerable ways or these products can be secured from others through barter or cash trade, predation, tribute taking, or labor services. The large variation in possible solutions to this problem in itself precludes ecological determinism as a fruitful point of departure for understanding social organization. Processes of stratification and equalization within the pastoral communities can only be understood when these modes of articulation with surrounding structures are taken into account. Today, an essential issue is to what extent a pastoral group in their combination of assets have access to cash or other resources that can act as a security independent of fluctuations in herd health or climate.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the famines among African pastoralists hit by drought coincided with the international breakthrough of environmentalist dis- course. Desertification became a catchy symbol of how humanity was overexploiting its brittle resource base. Hardin (1968) presented his theory of ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ using as an illuminating but fictive illustration a herd-owner’s use of pastures. Maximizing his individual gain, the herd-owner was thought not to pay attention to the collective good. In the end all herd-owners would accordingly lose from their own faulty strategy. Hardin’s theory was picked up by policy-makers dealing with pastoral development in East Africa. During the 1980s and 1990s a concern for how policies informed by Hardin’s theory affect the situation of pastoralists has turned opposition to Hardin’s model into a major inspiration for anthropological research. The debate has centered on the degree to which human-induced desertification is taking place. Are pastoralists to be blamed for overgrazing or to be seen essentially as conservationists? The anthropological critique of Hardin and of evolutionary ecologists is often intermixed with an ecological–technical critique, considering the long term effect of pastoral practices on species diversification and erosion, emphasizing the resilience of desert vegetation, the relative local impact of global climatic change, and inadequacies in models relating grazing pressure to the subsequent availability of good fodder. More anthropological argumentation emphasizes the necessity to distinguish between the knowledge, values and considerations actually expressed among herds people and the effects of their herding practices. A methodological issue, dividing social scientists and evolutionary ecologists, is whether ‘self-interest’ can be analyzed as a causal variable independent of how the actor interprets his own strategies and choices. Pastoral anthropologists question the relevance of the fictive decision-making situations postulated by model-builders like Hardin to the choices real her downers have to make. Pastoral economies are based on constant recombination of the available resources of livestock capital and food, and in order to match productive resources and consumption needs as efficiently as possible. This makes the household a debatable unit of analysis. Anthropologists also emphasize the existence of collective institutions and norms which serve a conservationist function, and argue that external observers often think in terms of quantity and tend to neglect quality issues that pastoralists deem entirely important in relation to the composition of a herd and to fodder, minerals, and water. Neither is the parallel and intertwined rationalities of herding and husbandry appreciated. Caring for continuity involves more than a concern for water and fodder: it requires concern for securing access to territory, to docile, fertile, and reproductive stock and to reliable and knowledgeable labor—all critical resources that cannot be taken for granted but have to be continuously ensured.

While the 1970s gave fresh insights into pastoralism at a generalizable level, the field has been relatively stagnant in the 1980s and 1990s, except for the argumentation in defense against pastoralists blamed for desertification. Plentiful documentation has however been secured of threats to the viability of pastoral subsistence. Official worries over the situation of pastoral nomads are concerned with land degradation, but evidence particularly from East Africa points to problems associated with the extent of accessible pastures rather than their quality. Contemporary pastoralists suffer a successive limitation of critical grazing or water assets through the expansion of towns and of small-holder farming and large-scale mechanized agriculture, through irrigation schemes and game reserves and more brutally, through the expansion of zones of war or insecurity.

Technological changes such as motorized surveillance and transport of herds, easy fencing, mechanical watering, or stationary foddering create forms of management more profitable but less efficient in terms of providing work and food for a large number of people. A concentration of stock ownership takes place parallel to a transition to more intensive small stock rearing at the expense of cattle or camel herding, something which has been suggested to have negative ecological consequences in the long run. The diversion of farm products once provided by cultivating neighbors into other more competitive markets is another serious problem to modern pastoralists.

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