Pastoral Life in Common: An Anthropological Contribution to Resilience Research

Objective

For many of the world’s pastoralists, compelling environmental factors encourage extensive livestock management across common grazing land that provides food security for millions of humans and livestock. These pastoral commons are rapidly disappearing, despite having proved resilient for millennia. There is an urgent need to better understand the social processes that sustain resilient grazing commons. Dominant theories and policy initiatives directed at pastoral commons rely on an economistic model of human action, where individual appropriation of collective resources must be regulated by rules and clearly delineated property rights. PLACE seeks to invert conventional theories of common resource management by proposing a novel relational approach to resilient pastoral commons, built through social ties and practices of relatedness. To do so requires refocusing attention away from the grazing commons and onto the domestic space of pastoral households and public ceremonial occasions in pastoral communities. It is in these locations that the affective links between mothers, daughters and sisters build resilient pastoral commons. In synthesising a critical stance alongside a more positive proposal for relational resource use, we aim to deliver a radically new understanding of the social fabric underlying pastoral land-use. PLACE will be achieved through three research objects: (1) We will critically reappraise current anthropological and economic theories of the commons. (2) We will compare newly collected field data with anthropological accounts and archaeological evidence. (3) We will propose a new theoretical approach to the resilience of pastoral commons based on social relations.