The Sediment of Nomadism

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.¹

Nomadism is a category imagined by outsiders and it brings with it many suppositions about pastoral life. . . .²

I

This essay began as a footnote in which I construed "cactus pastoralism" as an anomaly in the pastoralist literature.³ 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."⁴ 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.⁵ 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.'"⁶

Bruno Latour's explorations into the ways that nature and culture combine in technology provided a perspective that resonated with my skepticism about pure nomadism. Where scientists refer to "pure" as a sign of "modernity," Latour found the lack of pure objects—vis-à-vis expanding hybridity due to human agency—as a sign that "we have never been modern." The more that scientists tout "pure" forms of technology, Latour argued, the more "hybrid" (part human, part nature) they are. The concept of "pure" in this context, Latour explained, comes from the culture of science and its way of making an arbitrary human construction seem natural and real.

Latour's argument reminded me of an important theme in Anatoly Khazanov's remarkable book about nomads.⁷ A similar oppositional exchange on the order of a zero-sum game—where more of one thing brings on less of another—occurs as his central argument about nomads.⁸ Khazanov demonstrated that the more pastoral nomads turned their subsistence economies into specialized or "pure" mobile pastoralism, the less autarky they had.⁹ In other words, the more livestock herders become specialized in moving their larder on the hoof across the landscape, "the more dependent they become, in turn, on the outside, non-pastoralist, mainly sedentary world."¹⁰ Their need to trade or to find some other way of acquiring materials and dietary supplements useful to them in their mobile lives, which they themselves as mobile livestock specialists do not produce, causes them to engage with neighboring farmers, professional traders, and urban dwellers, and to participate in broader political economic relationships.¹¹

Putting Khazanov's thesis into Latour's idiom, we get: the more that scholars claim nomadic peoples to be engaged in "pure" nomadism, the less pure and the more "hybrid" (not independent, not self-sufficient, non-autarky) their way of life is at the wider scale. Might this push-pull tension—where the more one pushes for or insists on a concept, the more it pulls away and the less of it one has—of aiming for the pure and narrow, and hitting the hybrid and broad, also have parallels in how scholars of nomadic and pastoralist peoples conceive them as close or far from being modern? This was my question when I started to look at cactus pastoralism through the lens of Latour's critique of modernity.

Though cryptic, the footnote and its compressed points served a purpose. It provoked comment from an anonymous reviewer...