Claudia Bode
Nomadic or transhumant pastoralists, and their animals, travel up to hundreds of kilometres in search of water and adequate nutrition in climates that are often unsuited for agriculture. In opposition to earlier understandings of pastoralists being responsible for ecological degradation through overgrazing, it has become clear that extensive herding landscapes are in fact co-created with walking, grazing ruminants. As such, pastoralists necessarily have close, relational and highly specific understandings of climactic and ecological conditions in the places where they live. These are often remote areas, and herders may dress traditionally, speak highly local languages, and/or identify themselves as Indigenous. The fetishization of pastoralist cultures is particularly insidious considering the threats they face and have faced from governments, companies and NGO’s looking to capitalize on grazing land for mining, conservation, energy generation, or other projects. Often it is a misunderstanding of pastoralist mobility itself which leads to claims that the land is “underutilized”, simply because it is not continuously inhabited.
Through my PhD – which is being carried out at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, in affiliation with an internationally funded project called “Community Water Systems” – I am investigating the landscapes and worlds of Indigenous nomadic pastoralists in Finnmark County, Norway (Sápmi) and Turkana County, Kenya. In both places, encroachments on grazing land are accelerating, often in the name of “green” infrastructure. Building on recent critical research into nomadic or transhumant pastoralism, I hope to understand how these landscapes arise out of, and are shaped by, overlapping and often conflicting or contested ways of knowing and acting. I am particularly interested in the points of contact between fluid, relational, and mobile ways of understanding space, and techno-managerial planning or resilience narratives.
Within this overall research context, funding from the LRG will allow me to engage visual/sensory ethnographic research methods to bring to the surface everyday, embodied, and tacit forms of knowledge which may not fit easily into existing numeric or textual formats for the communication of “data”. As they are collaborative, these strategies for ethnographic “thick description” (including or combining photography, narrative, short films, or sound recordings) will allow for a critical engagement with the ethical questions that accompany research with, and representation of, marginalized and mobile communities. I hope to experiment with these techniques collaboratively while in the field with pastoralists, but also in my engagements with other actors, such as management authorities or technical advisors. By producing scholarly work that critically interrogates the medium of knowledge production, my aim is to draw attention to the invisibility of certain ways of knowing, as well as the role this might play in the continued marginalization of these communities. By producing knowledge in formats beyond the academic-textual, I hope to be able to engage with a wider audience and draw links to other researchers engaging pluriversal research methodologies.