Interest in Cattle: value, risk and security in eastern and southern Africa

In East and Southern Africa, cattle are ‘of interest’ in many ways. Cattle and other kinds of livestock, such as camels, have long been central to strategies of storing and accumulating wealth. Despite the rise of a money economy, many people still use livestock to save and to mark key life events such as marriages and funerals, and maintain strong emotional attachments to their animals. Cattle were ‘of interest’ (and concern) to colonial governments who saw their extractive enterprises threatened by diseases like sleeping sickness, and then to development practitioners who sometimes wanted to encourage farmers to ‘up-grade’ their stock, and at other times encouraged farmers to ‘de-stock’ - i.e. to sell off their herds and invest in other, more ‘rational’ ways. Nowadays, when antibiotic residues are found in the milk of small dairy farmers, and diseases like Rift Valley Fever appear to be on the rise, concerns about the intersections between climate change, intensified farming, and health issues join questions about the role of livestock in developmental economies. This interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, historians and epidemiologists will explore how cattle are linked to changing understandings of future security, value and risk and develop new collaborations and research projects in this area.

The project will enable the development and refinement of a series of questions around these intersecting forms of interest in cattle – and to draw on historical experience as well as contemporary research in producing a series of outputs that will inform current debates, encourage engagement with the complex questions raised by the place of cattle in our more-than-human world, and enable and guide future research on this topic.

This project takes inspiration from E.E. Evans Pritchard’s classic anthropological monograph, The Nuer, and his insight on the intimacy and ubiquity of cattle in society: cattle embody multiple possibilities of value. They are part of economic strategies in which the tensions of entailment – whose animal is this, and who has claims on it? – exemplify chronic challenges around individual accumulation and collective prosperity. In public health terms they are both resources – in terms of nutrition and genetics - and threats, as potential vectors of disease and vehicles of anti-microbial resistance as their production is intensified. They have been the target of multiple interventions that are emblematic of the intrusive and changing logics of development: from destocking to dipping to genetic improvement to zero-grazing. Despite the sometimes contradictory nature of those interventions, they have generally sought to push people into valuing cattle in measurable, money terms rather than through the social relationships that they embody. Yet even as social inequality and pressures on grazing make cattle-ownership an increasingly remote ideal for many people, some key social contracts – notably bridewealth - continue to be expressed in terms of cattle.

In thinking about interest in cattle as a point where strategies for the future intersect, this team of investigators we will look both at the present and at the history of cattle and comparative forms of forms of livestock management in eastern and southern Africa since the nineteenth century. That history is one of empire, economic transformation, development, and biomedicine, as well as of changing forms of indigenous knowledge and value.  The earliest colonial encounters for many African people related to the control of cattle diseases, which was often pursued in violent, even punitive ways. Infectious disease mitigation has also evolved over the twentieth century from imperial livestock management and panic over imported disease to contemporary investment in One Health research focused on livestock disease in multi-species communities. Urbanisation and the enclosure and commoditisation of land make possession of cattle an ever-more remote ideal for many: what has this meant for ideas of value and relationships that revolved around cattle?

The project will explore a series of problematics around cattle, as they seek to identify shared ways of asking questions. Each of these will be the subject of one seminar over the course of the project.

• Cattle livelihoods across scale – how have people understood the risks and possibilities of cattle-keeping in terms of scale? By this we mean not simply the number of cattle that might be kept, but the sense of the wider context of interest in cattle: how does keeping cattle place people in the community, and the world? Do they imagine themselves as sellers of milk to their neighbours; as members of a producer cooperative; as part of a family tending a shared asset for future generations; as customers of global pharmaceutical companies; as suppliers of a global beef trade?   
• Risk and risk management : what do people understand as the risks of keeping cattle – in terms of disease, crime, accidents? How do they seek to mitigate these – do they distribute their cattle, physically and socially; do they guard or isolate them; do they try to insure them through paying money? How are ideas of risk changing in the context of new forms of biosecurity and concerns about emerging disease?
• Valuing cattle: in what ways do people understand the value of the cattle that they care for? Cattle exist across multiple ‘registers of value’, to use Jane Guyer’s term: they have a calculable, but varying, price in terms of money; they also place people in society in ways that may be harder to express in monetary terms, and relate to other kinds of livestock such as goats and camels in complex ways. The problematic of value is closely linked to that of ownership – how far is a particular animal a distinct item, alienable through a cash transaction – and how far might it be the embodiment of multiple claims and obligations. How can we account for the value of cattle?
• Cattle infrastructures - how were/are cattle moved, managed, kept across different communities and scales in the past and the present, including across pastoralist and sedentary farming communities? How are these infrastructures shaped by concerns of disease, wellbeing, and productivity?

Alongside these discussions, the PIs will seek to widen the conversation by drawing in a wider audience in eastern and southern Africa. For this, they will turn to the affective and aesthetic power of images of cattle. Drawing on their own photographic archives, they will create a series of short blogs on the ‘interest in cattle’ that they have encountered in our own research. These, along with a short discussion paper for each seminar, will be made available through a dedicated WordPress website.

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