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The Sediment of Nomadism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann
Jeffrey C. Kaufmann*
Affiliation:
University of Southern Mississippi
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Extract

And the grass dried up. And without grass their flocks and herds must die. And upon these animals depended both the shelter and food of the race—life itself.

Nomadism is a category imagined by outsiders and it brings with it many suppositions about pastoral life.…

This essay began as a footnote in which I construed “cactus pastoralism” as an anomaly in the pastoralist literature. I had found that the raising of zebu cattle in southern Madagascar on mixed diets of grass and prickly pear cactus of the genus Opuntia did not fit the standard definition of pastoralism as “the raising of livestock on ‘natural’ pasture unimproved by human intervention.” By that definition the Mahafale herders whom I had observed striving to keep their zebu cattle alive in the arid environment by “improving” their pastures with cactus “water-food” appeared not to be pastoralists at all.

I attributed the problem to a stifling typology giving precedence to “natural” grasslands that rendered invisible human agency in the making of such landscapes. I singled out the problematic concept of “pure” or “true” nomads, in which their “life itself—as Merian Cooper wrote at the beginning of Grass, and which I quoted above—depended entirely on their keeping livestock mobile. In the footnote I reasoned that “Western scholars of pastoralist societies rely on a typology or terminology that defines the form of pastoralism in relation to whether they are close or far from pure nomadism. Pastoralist studies have flirted with the modern constitution. As Latour wrote, ‘hybrids are indeed accepted, but solely as mixtures of pure forms in equal proportion.’“

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 36 , 2009 , pp. 235 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

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References

1 Cooper, Merian C., Grass (New York, 1925), 3.Google Scholar

2 Humphrey, Caroline and Sneath, David, The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia (Durham, 1999), 1.Google Scholar

3 Footnote 19 in the manuscript, which became footnote 13 in Kaufmann, Jeffrey C., “The Non-Modern Constitution of Famines in Madagascar's Spiny Forests: ‘Water-Food’ Plants Cattle, and Mahafale Landscape Praxis,” Environmental Science 5(2008), 73–89.Google Scholar

4 Salzman, Philip Carl, Pastoralists: Equality, Hierarchy, and the State (Boulder, 2004), 1.Google Scholar

5 Besides Madagascar, stock breeders have used cactus fodder in Australia Frawley, Jodi, “Prickly Pear Land: Transnational Networks in Settler Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 130[2007], 323–38)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in Sicily Barbera, Giuseppe, Inglese, Paolo, and Pimienta-Barrios, Eulogio, eds. Agro-Ecology, Cultivation and Uses of Cactus Pear [Rome, 1995], 18)Google Scholar; in South Africa van Sittert, Lance, “‘Our Irrepressible Fellow Colonist’: the Biological Invasion of Prickly Pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) in the Eastern Cape, c.l890-c.1910,” in Dovers, Stephen, Edgecombe, Ruth, and Guest, Bill, eds. South Africa's Environmental History: Cases and Comparisons [Athens, 2003], 139–59Google Scholar); in Tunisia Meyer, (Brian N. and McLaughlin, Jerry L., “Economic Uses of Opuntia,” Succulent Journal 53[1981], 107–12Google Scholar; Monjauze, A. and Le Houérou, H.N., “Le rôle des Opuntia dans l'économie agricole Nord Africaine,” Bulletin de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Agriculture de Tunis 8/9[1965], 85–164Google Scholar); and in the United States Houston, (Walter R., “Plains Pricklypear, Weather, and Grazing in the Northern Great Plains,” Ecology 44[1963], 569–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russell, Charles and Felker, Peter, “The Prickly-Pears (Opuntia spp., Cactacae): a Source of Human and Animal Food in Semiarid Regions,” Economic Botany 41[1987], 433–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vietmeyer, Noel D., “Lesser-Known Plants of Potential Use in Agriculture and Forestry,” Science 232[1986], 1379–84CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed).

6 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, 1993), 56.Google Scholar

7 Khazanov, Anatoly M., Nomads and the Outside World (2d ed., Madison, 1994).Google Scholar

8 I am in no way implying that my mentor in pastoralist studies, with whom I studied at Wisconsin, adheres to Latour's argument about modernity. I suspect he does not; I am simply pointing out a similarity in the structure of their arguments.

9 The use of the past tense is appropriate here in bringing out the fact that Khazanov considers pure pastoral nomads, or those who most closely approached pure nomadism, to belong to history and no longer part of the contemporary world.

10 Khazanov, , Nomads and the Outside World, xxxi.Google Scholar

11 Kroeber made a similar argument about “true pastoral nomads,” which he defined as “peoples making their living wholly off their flocks without settling down to plant” (Kroeber, A.L., Anthropology [New York, 1948], 277Google Scholar). Rather than using the term non-autarky, as Khazanov did, Kroeber used the term “half-culture”—which unfortunately conjures up notions of “half-breed”—to represent their dependency upon farmers and townspeople to satisfy their dietary and material needs. Kroeber's point was that pure pastoral nomads are self-sufficient in only a “half-culture” way: they could not survive if not for what they get from trading and sometimes raiding sedentary people, townspeople, farmers. He describes “pure pastoralism as a specialty secondarily segregated out of a more balanced economy by accentuation of one part” (277-78). He made the point that Khazanov developed brilliantly: pastoral nomads “would not have been able to specialize to the same degree if they were wholly isolated and independent. They exist in some degree of cultural and social symbiosis” (278). He also noted that scholars at the time uncritically thought of them as static, when in fact pastoral nomads are dynamic and changing all the time. He seems to have recognized the hybrid nature of nomadism.

12 I wish to thank the reviewer for urging me to develop the argument, though I doubt this essay resembles remotely the expected direction that the argument would take.

13 The eleven references: Ahmed, Akbar S., “Nomadism as Ideological Expression: the Case of the Gomal Nomads,” Nomadic Peoples 9(1981), 3–15Google Scholar; Dyson-Hudson, Neville, “The Study of Nomads,” in Irons, William and Dyson-Hudson, Neville, eds. Perspectives on Nomadism (Leiden, 1972), 2–29Google Scholar; Galaty, John G. and Johnson, Douglas L., eds. The World of Pastoralism: Herding Systems in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Johnson, Douglas L., The Nature of Nomadism: A Comparative Study of Pastoral Migrations in Southwestern Asia and Northern Africa, Department of Geography Research Paper No. 118 (Chicago, 1969)Google Scholar; Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World; Malhotra, S.P., “Nomads and Nomadism,” in Mann, Harbans Singh, ed. Desert Ecosystem and Its Improvement (Jodhpur, 1977), 133–43Google Scholar; Nambia, V.A., “Modern Technology and New Forms of Nomadism: Duck Herders in Southern India,” Nomadic Peoples ns 5(2001), 155–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prasad, R.R., Pastoral Nomadism in Arid Zones of India: Socio-Demographic and Ecological Aspects (New Delhi, 1994)Google Scholar; Robbins, Paul, “Nomadism Now: Cultural Survival in a Changing Desert Environment,” Annals of Arid Zone 43(2004), 1–19Google Scholar; Salzman, Philip Carl, “Is ‘Nomadism’ a Useful Concept?” Nomadic Peoples 6(1980), 1–7Google Scholar; Solanki, G.S., “Nomadism and Migration of Pastoralists and Their Livestock in Western India,” Annals of Arid Zone 29(1990), 203–10.Google Scholar

A coda: after communicating with Paul Robbins about his paper, I sent him a draft of this article. He acknowledged that he was the anonymous reviewer in a reference to the “sics” that I placed in the quotation: “Of course, if I had to answer for every misspelling in a review, knowing that it would get a “sic” in someone's article some time later, I suppose I would have hung up reviewing altogether many years ago!” I intended no mockery but was following merely the convention of rigor exhibited in this journal to quote accurately and precisely all text and all sources. I apologize for any offense taken.

With that aside, I wish again to thank Paul (whom I will continue to refer to as “the reviewer”) for his extensive and very helpful comments that made this article better. To be fair, he had interrogated typologies in the following: idem, “Pastoralism and Community in Rajasthan: Interrogating Categories in Arid Lands Development,” in A. Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds. Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India (Durham, 2000), 191-215; idem, “Healing the Nomad Within? the Uses and Abuses of the Mobility Metaphor in Critical Theory,” in J.P. Sharpe, ed. Wondering through the Tropics: Western Travel and the Geographing of Others, Department of Geography Discussion Paper Series No. 106 (Syracuse, 1994).

14 Scholars have attempted to clarify the concept of “nomadism,” as we will see below, but they leave ordinarily the concept of “pure” intact and largely unanalyzed.

15 No thorough historiographie survey of the concept, to my knowledge, has yet been done. Robbins (personal communication 02 June, 2009) points out that such a survey would do well to offer a postcolonial critique by tracing a “longer colonial thread through the nomad … [of] a political explanation for [the] perverse persistence [of “pure”].

16 Ellis, Stephen, “Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa,” JAH 43(2002), 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Ibid.,7-11.

18 Mudimbe, V.Y., The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, 1988), 81.Google Scholar

19 I consider this a landmark book in anglophone nomadic studies. Although it is flawed by a synchronic perspective of nomadic peoples, it served as a model for empirical, field-work-based, studies among herders. A similarly influential model was the periodical Nomadic Peoples, which Philip Carl Salzman founded in 1972 at McGill University, two years before the founding of HA. On the francophone side, an equally influential book was L'Équipe Écologie et Anthropologie des Sociétés Pastorales, ed. Production Pastorale et Société (Paris, 1979).Google Scholar Among francophone periodicals, Cahiers de l'ORSTOM, in its Série Sciences Humaines, has published numerous articles on pastoralist peoples in Africa.

20 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 6.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 8.

22 This does not mean that I concur with Dyson-Hudson's anti-historical approach to the study of nomads and pastoralists. In his introductory essay he praises the Malinowskian synchronic approach: “to record ordinary, day-to-day activities just as much as the exotic, and to search for explanations by way of the evident facts of observable behavior before invoking the weight of the past to account for the actions of the present. The better that advice has been followed for any nomadic society, the more we can now claim to understand it; and where it has not been followed we still cannot, in reality, claim to understand it at all.” Much of my writing on Mahafale pastoralists has followed the diachronic approaches I learned at Wisconsin from David Henige, Thomas Spear, Herbert Lewis, and Anatoly Khazanov. In a later article that Dyson-Hudson wrote with his wife, he suggests an historical anthropological approach, one that uses “dynamic models for analyzing livestock herding systems” that “emphasize processes and change rather than using static models and typologies” (Dyson-Hudson, Rada and Dyson-Hudson, Neville, “Nomadic Pastoralism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 9[1980], 15-61, esp. 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

23 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 7Google Scholar; he cites in particular Sahlins, Marshall, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, 1968).Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 2.

25 Such skepticism towards essential qualities was by no means confined to anthropology at the time. Around the same time, arguments about essential properties abounded, for example, in analytic philosophy, and the matter continues as a philosophical problem. See Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), 361–64.Google Scholar

26 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 8.Google Scholar Rada Dyson-Hudson demonstrated that observing the spatial mobility of herded cattle differed from Karimojong self-proclaimed nomadism in her “Pastoralism: Self Image and Behavioral Reality,” in Irons, /Dyson-Hudson, , Perspectives on Nomadism, 30–47.Google Scholar

27 This search for contingencies and variance grew out of Dyson-Hudson's admiration for Barth, Fredrik, Nomads of South Persia: the Bassen Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy (Oslo, 1961).Google Scholar

28 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 9.Google Scholar

29 His critique of the use of typology in anthropology follows the critique set out in Schneider, David, “Some Muddles in the Models; or How the System Really Works” in Banton, M., ed. The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology (London, 1965), 25–86.Google Scholar

30 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 23.Google Scholar Presumably, other ideal types, still much in use in anthropology, such as “horticulturalists” and “hunters and gatherers,” are problematic for the same reasons. The same applies to the perennial “bands,” “tribes,” “chiefdoms” typology that Service, Elman R., Profiles in Ethnology (3d ed., New York, 1978)Google Scholar, put into use and which continues in most standard introductory textbooks in cultural anthropology. One exception to the rule is Lassiter's, EricInvitation to Anthropology (3d ed., Lanham, 2009).Google Scholar

31 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 23.Google Scholar

32 Ibid.

33 Cf. Krader, Lawrence, “The Ecology of Nomadic Pastoralism,” International Social Science Journal 11(1959), 499–510Google Scholar; Goldschmidt, Walter, “Theory and Strategy in the Study of Cultural Adaptability,” American Anthropologist 67(1964), 402–08.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Spooner, Brian, “The Status of Nomadism as a Cultural Phenomenon in the Middle East,” in Irons, /Dyson-Hudson, , Perspectives on Nomadism, 122–31Google Scholar; idem, The Cultural Ecology of Pastoral Nomads (Reading, MA, 1973).

35 Ekvall, Robert B., Fields on the Hoof: Nexus of Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralism (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

36 Lattimore, Owen, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York, 1940).Google Scholar See also Krader, “The Ecology of Nomadic Pastoralism.” William Irons has also developed this theme in, for example, “Political Stratification among Pastoral Nomads” in L'Équipe, Pastoral Production and Society, 361-74.

37 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 24.Google Scholar

38 For example, Khazanov uses “pastoral nomadism” (Nomads and the Outside World, 19), which illuminates the original Greek concept of nomadism (Khazanov, Anatoly, “Myths and Paradoxes of Nomadism,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 22[1981], 141–53)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Swift, Jeremy, “Pastoral Nomadism as a Form of Land-Use: the Twareg of the Adrar n Iforas” in Monod, , ed., Pastoralism in Tropical Africa, 443–54.Google Scholar Thomas J. Barfield prefers “nomadic pastoralism” (The Nomadic Alternative [Englewood Cliffs, 1993], 5Google Scholar). One scholar who did abandon the “nomad” label is Humphrey, Caroline (The End of Nomadism?, 1)Google Scholar, who explained in a way that might please Dyson-Hudson: “The end of nomadism in our title thus refers not only to the possible demise of a way of life but also to the fact that the very category of nomadism has ceased to be useful analytically.”

39 See, for example, Salzman, , ‘Nomadism,’ 2Google Scholar; Khazanov, , Nomads and the Outside World, 17.Google Scholar

40 Leach, E.R., Rethinking Anthropology (London, 1961), 2.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., 3-5.

42 See Dyson-Hudson, 24-26, for suggestions on the relevant elements of his “herding model.” James Ferguson provides a similar argument about looking for inter-relations and not whole societies or what fits our arbitrary analytical categories in his “The Bovine Mystique: Power, Property and Livestock in Rural Lesotho,” Man ns 20(1985), 647-74, esp. 669.Google ScholarHenige, David makes a similar point in Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison, 2005), 43Google Scholar: “All evidence is vestigial. The sources in which it is embedded cannot possibly replicate the events that, wittingly or unwittingly, they testify to. They can never be treated as representing a larger reality, but only as hinting at it” (emphasis in original).

43 Khazanov, , Nomads and the Outside World, 18.Google Scholar

44 Kroeber, , Anthropology, 277.Google Scholar

45 Larson, Pier M., History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822 (Oxford, 2000), 7.Google Scholar I also concur with Larson's approach to modernity in Madagascar.

46 Leach, , Rethinking Anthropology, 3Google Scholar, emphasis added. The Radcliffe-Brown quotation is from the preface in Fortes, Meyers and Pritchard, E.E. Evans, eds. African Political Systems (London, 1940), xii.Google Scholar

47 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 23.Google Scholar

48 Johnson, Nature of Nomadism.

49 Ibid., 165.

50 Ibid., 166.

51 Ibid., 168.

52 Ibid., 170.

53 Dyson-Hudson, , “Nomads,” 7.Google Scholar I would add that Johnson's book exhibited remarkable scholarship for a master's thesis, the only one in nomadic studies that, to my knowledge, was published—and by the University of Chicago Press no less. Robbins (personal communication 02 June, 2009) points out that Dyson-Hudson and I “may have boxed Johnson in a little more than he deserves. This is possibilism and not determinism. The point here is that—for Johnson—people have to solve puzzles presented to them by the inevitable diversity of the world. Each solution is unique. I don't think he ever intended (in his master's thesis, of all things) to say these were given ways of being. Rather, they were the external expression, in mappable movement, of the complex nutrient and water exchanges required in having herds. Cookie cutter is ungenerous in this regard. More importantly, I don't find the environment to be “dictating culture.” I think Johnson dismisses culture altogether (rather refreshingly), except as the descriptive quality of human problem-solving. This by no means rescues him from the “purity” issues, and a kind of colonialism, which may still hold…”

54 Johnson, , Nature of Nomadism, 17.Google Scholar

55 Ibid., 15-16. He cites Bernard, Augustin and Lacroix, N., L'évolution du nomadisme en Algérie (Algiers, 1906)Google Scholar and Merner, Paul-Gerhardt, Das Nomadentum im Nordwestlichen Afrika (Stuttgart, 1937).Google Scholar

56 Johnson, , Nature of Nomadism, 15.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., 16-17.

58 Malhotra, , “Nomads and Nomadism,” 133.Google Scholar

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid., 134.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 136.

64 Ibid., 137.

65 Ibid.

66 See, for example, Kaufmann, Jeffrey C., “Agency in a Mahafale Pastoralist Landscape,” in Kaufmann, Jeffrey C., ed. Greening the Great Red Island: Madagascar in Nature and Culture (Pretoria, 2008), 197–217.Google Scholar

67 Khazanov develops this idea in his Nomads and the Outside World.

68 Salzman, , “Is ‘Nomadism’ a Useful Concept?,” 2.Google Scholar For the Karimojong (also Karamo-jong) see, for example, Dyson-Hudson, Neville, “Factors Inhibiting Change in an African Pastoral Society: the Karimojong of Northeast Uganda,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 24(1962), 771–801CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Karimojong Politics (Oxford, 1966); idem, “Strategies of Resource Exploitation among East African Savanna Pastoralists,” in David R. Harris, ed. Human Ecology in Savanna Environments (London, 1980), 171-84; Rada Dyson-Hudson, “Pastoralism: Self Image and Behavioral Reality.”

69 For example, the “pure pastoralist” Maasai in terms of a pure pastoralist diet according to Jacobs, Alan H., “African Pastoralists: Some General Remarks,” Anthropological Quarterly 38(1965), 144–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Maasai Pastoralism in Historical Perspective” in Théodore Monod, ed. Pastoralism in Tropical Africa (London, 1975), 406-25.

70 Dahl, Gudrun and Hjort, Anders, “Some Thoughts on the Anthropological Study of Pastoralism,” Newsletter of the Commission on Nomadic Peoples 5(1980), 11–15Google Scholar; Asad, Talal, “Equality in Nomadic Social Systems?” Critique of Anthropology 3(1978), 57–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71 He states succinctly his anti-essentialism in later publications (Salzman, Philip C., “Pastoral Nomads: Some General Observations Based on Research in Iran,” Journal of Anthropological Research 58[2002], 245–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Pastoralists: Equality, Hierarchy, and the State [Boulder, 2004], especially chapter 2, “Agency and Adaptation: Pastoralists of Iran,” 17-41): “For us to select and emphasize one aspect as paramount would be a distortion of the always complex human reality. And such an essentialism and reductionism would be a distortion of nomadism, for to understand nomadism truly, we must grasp its dependence on human objectives and upon multiple social, cultural, and environmental circumstances and thus appreciate its variability, its malleability, and its impermanence” (“Pastoral Nomads,” 261; Pastoralists, 40).

72 Salzman, , “Nomadism,” 2.Google Scholar His argument against reductionism to single factors such as mobility, ideology, economics, or ecology had been developed in Salzman, Philip C., “Multi-Resource Nomadism in Iranian Baluchistan,” in Irons, /Dyson-Hudson, , Perspectives on Nomadism, 60–68.Google Scholar

73 Khazanov, “Myths and Paradoxes of Nomadism.”

74 Salzman, , “Nomadism,” 2.Google Scholar

75 Ibid., 6.

76 Ibid., 5.

77 Ibid.; cf. Salzman, , “Pastoral Nomads,” 249Google Scholar; idem, Pastoralists, 24, where he elaborates this theme as follows: “Nomadism, the regular displacement of the household, is unlikely to be oriented to one productive activity only, such as pastoralism, because few populations limit themselves to a single productive activity. Rather, nomadic mobility is also likely to be put to work in support of other productive activities, such as cultivation, as among the Baluch, or fishing, as among the Nuer. … Nomadic mobility is not infrequently from a location of one productive activity, such as pastoralism, to another, such as arboriculture. Thus our categories and labels, such as “nomadic pastoralists,” tend to oversimplify and distort the multiresource economies that most nomads have and the versatile, multipurpose nomadism that they use to the fullest extent.”

78 Salzman, Philip Carl, ed. When Nomads Settle: Processes of Sedentarisation as Adaptation and Response (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

79 Galaty, John G., Aronson, Dan, Salzman, Philip Carl, and Chouinard, Amy, eds. The Future of Pastoral Peoples (Ottawa, 1981).Google Scholar

80 Humphrey, Caroline, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Ingold, Tim, Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Little, Peter D., The Elusive Granary: Herder, Farmer, and State in Northern Kenya (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World.

81 Anderson, David M. and Due, Vigdis Broch, eds. The Poor Are Not Us: Poverty and Pastoralism in Eastern Africa (Oxford, 1999)Google ScholarPubMed; Bernus, Edmond, Touregs Nigériens (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar; Clark, N.T., “The Effect of the 1973/74 Drought in Somalia on Subsequent Exports and Registered Slaughterings of Camels, Sheep, Goats and Cattle,” Nomadic Peoples 17(1985), 53–57Google Scholar; Fabietti, Ugo and Salzman, Philip Carl, eds. The Anthropology of Tribal and Peasant Pastoral Societies: the Dialectics of Social Cohesion and Fragmentation (Como, Italy, 1996)Google Scholar; Finnström, Sverker, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda (Durham, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fratkin, Elliot, Surviving Drought and Development: Ariaal Pastoralists of Northern Kenya (Boulder, 1991)Google Scholar; Fratkin, E., Alvin, K.A., Roth, E.A., eds. African Pastoralist Systems (Boulder, 1994)Google Scholar; Hutchinson, Sharon E., Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (Berkeley, 1996).Google Scholar

82 Ferguson, James, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, 2006), 14, 38, 166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For globalization as interconnection and “flow” of global capital see Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996).Google Scholar

83 Ahmed, , “Nomadism as Ideological Expression,” 3.Google Scholar

84 Ibid., 3-4.

85 Ibid., 11.

86 Ibid., 4, emphasis added to first complete sentence.

87 Ibid., 10.

88 Galaty, /Johnson, , World of Pastoralism, 2.Google Scholar

89 Ibid., 3.

90 Ibid., 26.

91 Ibid., 28-29.

92 Louise Sperling and John G. Galaty, “Cattle, Culture, and Economy: Dynamics in East African Pastoralism” in idem, 69—98, esp. 85, 92.

93 Solanki, , “Nomadism and Migration,” 209.Google Scholar

94 Ibid., 208.

95 Hardin, Garrett, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162(1968), 1243–48.Google ScholarPubMed

96 Solanki, , “Nomadism and Migration,” 209.Google Scholar

97 Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World.

98 Cf. James, L., “The Kenya Masai: a Nomadic People under Modern Administration,” Africa 12(1939), 49-73, esp. 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where the author refers to the pastoral nomadic Maasai as an “exclusively self-sufficing people.”

99 Khazanov, , Nomads and the Outside World, 19–21.Google Scholar

100 Idem., “Introduction to the Second Edition” in Nomads and the Outside World, xxxii. See also Schneider, Harold K., “The Subsistence Role of Cattle among the Pakot and in East Africa,” American Anthropologist 59(1957), 278–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

101 See, for example, Khazanov, Anatoly M., “Pastoral Nomads in the Past, Present, and Future: a Comparative View” in Olson, Paul A., ed. The Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Insight and Industrial Empire in the Semiarid World (Lincoln, 1990), 81–99Google Scholar; idem, “Pastoralists in Second and Third World Countries—the Problem of Modernization,” Bulletin of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo 13(1990), 16-20; idem, “Nomads and Oases in Central Asia” in John A. Hall and I.C. Jarvie, eds. Transition to Modernity: Essays on Power, Wealth and Belief (Cambridge, 1992), 69-89; idem, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” Nomads and the Outside World, (1994), xxix-lix; idem, “Nomads in the History of the Sedentary World” in Anatoly M. Khazanov and André Wink, eds. Nomads in the Sedentary World (Richmond, Surrey, 2001), 1-23.

102 Idem., “Introduction to the Second Edition,” xlii-xliii.

103 Ibid., xlvii.

104 Idem., “Nomads and Oases,” 73-74.

105 Idem., “Nomads in the History of the Sedentary World,” 15.

106 Idem., “Pastoral Nomads in the Past, Present, and Future,” 86.

107 Khazanov says something close to this point in another context: “If we stop using the ‘European miracle’ as a yardstick, assume that historical process was multiform, and pay more attention to the internal logic of developments, then we may possibly allocate the nomads a more modest role in the historical process of the medieval Middle East” (“Nomads in the History of the Sedentary World,” 15).

108 Prasad, Pastoral Nomadism in Arid Zones of India.

109 Ibid., 151.

110 Ibid., 183.

111 Nambia, , “Duck Herders,” 165.Google Scholar

112 Ibid., 157-59.

113 Ibid., 164.

114 In this regard it parallels cactus pastoralism, being outside the norm of nomadic studies.

115 Humphrey, /Sneath, , End of Nomadism?, 305.Google Scholar

116 Kaufmann, Jeffrey C., “La question des Raketa: Colonial Struggles with Prickly Pear Cactus in Southern Madagascar, 1900-1923,” Ethnohistory 48(2001), 87–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

117 Robbins, , “Nomadism Now,” 14.Google Scholar In this regard, it is, among the list of references, most akin to my theoretical concerns in this essay. He too is interested in deconstructing the “crisis” narrative.

118 Ibid., 1; also personal communication 02 June, 2009.

119 The “crisis” theme has served to call attention to the plight of pastoralist peoples, not unlike its use in the conservation biology literature on Madagascar that forecasts the end of biological diversity vis-à-vis Malagasy culture. See Kaufmann, Jeffrey C., “The Sad Opaqueness of the Environmental Crisis in Madagascar,” Conservation and Society ns 4(2006), 179–93Google Scholar (for the online version go to www.conservationandsociety.org).

120 Cf. Sperling's and Galaty's emphasis on “discontinuity” making it nearly impossible for specialized pastoralists to change into diversified producers (The World of Pastoralism, 92), and Khazanov's discussion of the “painful process” of going from one way of life to another on the continuum (Nomads and the Outside World, xlvii).

121 Robbins, , “Nomadism Now,” 2.Google Scholar

122 Ibid., 4.

123 Ibid., 8, 10, 11, 14.

124 Spencer, Paul, The Pastoral Continuum: the Marginalisation of Tradition in East Africa (Oxford, 1997).Google Scholar

125 I thank Paul Robbins for clarifying the “sediment” as a colonial stain on modernity (personal communication 02 June, 2009).

126 Canclini, Néstor García, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis, 1995).Google Scholar

127 Ferguson, James, “The Bovine Mystique,” 669.Google Scholar

128 Dillard, Annie, “About Symbol, and with a Diatribe Against Purity,” Living by Fiction (New York, 1982), 163–72Google Scholar, quotations from 171.