Galaty List Description

International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES)

Proposed Panel on: “Resilience to Resistance: Pastoralist Strategies in Response to Contemporary Political and Ecological Disruption and Change in Africa”

Organizers:

• Michael Bollig (University of Koln, Germany), Email: michael.bollig@uni-koeln.de

• John Galaty (McGill University, Canada), Email: john.galaty@mcgill.ca
  

The ecological, economic and socio-cultural conditions of African pastoralism have profoundly changed over the past two to three decades. Sedentarisation, individuation of property rights and the demise of common property resource management, the loss of lands (to sedentary agriculturalists, industrialised cash crop production, game parks), dramatic shifts in livestock numbers, whether decrease in response to drought or diminishing pastures, or increase due to market incentives, vegetation changes, commoditization of livestock husbandry, the re-arrangement of political organisation with increased integration into national politics, the shift from a semi-autonomous mode of production to a peasant mode of production, increase of violent conflicts between stakeholders and the implementation of reservers aimed at conserving the natural environment (e.g. the establishment of game parks, conservancies etc.), all these changes have led to transformations of pastoral socio-ecological systems. Changes have been destructive and catastrophic in cases where violence became the major change agent (e.g. Somalia, Uganda’s Karamoja, Northern Kenya), resulted in a stabilization of livestock husbandry (e.g. with the Maasai of Ngorongoro) and/or led to novel allocations of access rights privileging immigrant agriculturalists, internal elites or governmentally sponsored programmes. There has been little academic effort to trace the effects these socio-political dynamics have had on the environment and society.

The panel will focus on (1) changing implications of changing processes of pastoral economics, including land tenure and labour organisation, for resource use and environmental sustainability; (2) novel forms of wealth distribution, resource control, consumption and exchange, and the role of new elites; (3) the effects of regional conflict on pastoral communities and state-community relations; and (4) changing modes of articulation of pastoral communities with global ideologies and organisations, including new belief systems, religious affiliations, NGO’s, and the international indigenous movement.