The Sediment of Nomadism

Abstract

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 genusOpuntiadid 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 ofGrass, 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.’“