“We Eat with Different Spoons these Days”: The Maintenance of Pastoralism as a Social Formation in the Sahara and Sahel

Abstract

Despite the fatalistic rhetoric articulated by Western media and some experts, pastoralists have not disappeared. Drought, disease, famines, civil conflicts, theft, and banditry have certainly undermined livelihoods and forced families of Arab, Tuareg, Toubou and Fulani to settle and seek out opportunities that are not compatible with pastoralism, particularly in urban areas. This situation is not necessarily permanent and varies case-by-case and more significantly generation-to-generation. Some ex-pastoralists abandoned hopes of restocking their flocks but plan for some of their children to become future pastoralists. In addition, despite sedentarization, many retained customary practices of natural resource management, social norms and behaviors and find in the urban areas other pre-capitalist practices that are compatible with their means of everyday tasks and performances. Using the analyses of Tom Brass, Deborah Bryceson and David Harvey an argument is made that while pastoralists have lost their herds and shifted from their customary economy into a proletarian-capitalist one, the path is not unilinear and in fact, is fluid with pastoralists shifting from one to the other in times of dearth and prosperity.