Struggles over water, Struggles over meaning: cattle, water and the state in Botswana

Abstract

IntroductionIn a recent paper on ‘The state and social processes in Africa’, Lonsdale (1981) convincingly demonstrates the poverty of assuming that any one ‘grand theory’ is able to explain the complex relations among state, social process and class struggle and other equally complex social phenomena. Images of the state as parasitic (as in formulations of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’), as an epiphenomenon of property relations or as a neutral mediator, individually fail to grasp the complexity of states' organization and action (Jessop, 1977), yet each clearly evokes an important dimension of that complexity. The fact of political and economic domination has to be dealt with but equally the often contradictory quality of state power reflects the fact that the mediating institutions and ideologies between dominating and dominated are the objects and arenas for competition and struggle among different social groups and categories. The recognition that one has to deal analytically not with a monolithic entity but a set of institutions that are subject to being ‘redefined, added to and patched’ (Lonsdale, 1981: 2) is important. The challenge, then, is to devise analytical means that capture such processes and allow us to unravel the dynamic of contradictions rather than merely note their pervasive character.