Walking with herders: following into the multispecies classroom

Abstract

The recently developed walking ethnography, or go-along method, to study pastoralists in a participatory manner provides data that the usual sit-down interview is unable to realise, not least because it shifts the power dynamic between researcher and researched. The herder’s practice takes place outside — a mobile activity that is best understood or learnt in action. This project with Nama pastoralists in the arid regions of the Northern Cape, South Africa, has been walking with herders and learning from them, literally on the hoof. In our interactions, the herders lead us as they follow the animals and as these, in turn, seek out and engage the plants. The method allows us to see herders as the developers of unique knowledge of the ecology, the animals and the management of these resources in a challenging environment. The paper demonstrates the novelty of this method and explores the walking ethnography as a multispecies and multisensorial world that is a sympoietically intertwined cosmos. What emerges is a world that is neither science nor indigenous knowledge but rather an endogenous system that syncretically draws on science, herder knowledge and novel information to make possible the sustained practice of herding in this marginal ecology.