Rethinking spaces of gendered livestock ownership: pastoralist women’s knowledge, care, and labor

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the traditionally underemphasized and overlooked roles of pastoral (livestock-keeping) women in managing their livestock, demonstrating the types of, and significance of, their knowledge for pastoral livelihoods and wellbeing. Such knowledge has been regularly dismissed by male pastoralists and by Western scholarship and practice due to a long history of emphasis on men’s spheres of influence with livestock (namely, herding activities away from the home) rather than women’s (namely, livestock caretaking activities and milk management within the home). In re-examining the spatiality and temporality of pastoral livestock management activities through a feminist lens, this article demonstrates how women’s knowledge is key to functional herd health, food security, and cultural mores in pastoral communities. Drawing from a long-term ethnographic and mixed methods research project in southern Kenya’s Narok County, it also demonstrates the gendered complexity of women’s labor and care in human-animal-environment entanglements. In so doing, this study de-emphasizes the notion of men’s formal ownership of livestock to highlight instead the important interplay of gendered labor, spaces, and bodies for pastoralists in accessing and managing livestock and related resources.