Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The agrarian and rural worlds of the Global South are in a state of unprecedented flux in the twenty-first century. With the manifest failures of the development paradigm and accelerated fencing of commons, nomadic pastoral communities are being forced to change their lifestyles due to scarce access to pastures. The notion of pastoral societies as stateless societies or groups trying not to be governed is popular among Anarchist philosophers. Alternative formulations conceptualize pastoral societies as kinship societies that use a complex web of interpersonal relationships to continue accessing vital means of production. However, these notions can no longer capture the dynamics of pastoral communities in the Global South. Nomadic pastoral groups have responded, like other rural and agrarian communities, through a range of strategies, the most important of which is diversification of livelihoods. Yet pastoralism has not withered away, and remains a profitable profession. Many erstwhile nomadic pastoralists have become semi-sedentary and continue to practice absentee-pastoralism. In this paper, I distinguish between kinship relations and a kinship society to demonstrate intimate exclusion and class-like relations using difference in access to the means of pastoral production. Based on fieldwork on the Bakerwal, this paper explores access mechanisms with an understanding of the everyday lives of humans and their relationship with non-humans. It identifies various mechanisms allowing one to reproduce their everyday lives and how these mechanisms differ within the same community. The findings highlight the agency of knowledge production to interact and negotiate with various actors in the everyday processes.