Chapter 12 Multiple Rights in Animals An East African Overview

Schlee, Günther

doi:10.1515/9780857453365-014

Cited by 3 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…The idea of an individual animal as singular property of one person is alien to Boraan practice. Property in animals is more about relations, and so multiple and overlapping, than things (Schlee, 2012). Loaned or shared animals, women's stock, and those inherited by children before fathers die may have multiple claims and no neat property definition.…”

Section: To Buy or Not To Buymentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncertainty in the drylands: Rethinking in/formal insurance from pastoral East Africa

et al. 2023

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Amidst climatic and economic volatility, agricultural development and climate adaptation policies have increasingly turned to weather microinsurance to manage uncertainties, particularly in dryland pastoral and agricultural settings. While the political embrace of insurance has been cause for concern amongst those who fear insurance will undermine embedded coping mechanisms and moral economies, economists have puzzled over low insurance adoption rates amongst target populations. This article argues for an approach that scrutinizes insurance in relation to dynamic social practices and norms for responding to uncertainty. We employ this approach to investigate pastoralists’ encounters with index-based livestock insurance in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. Drawing on interview, ethnographic, and survey data, we demonstrate how insurance is understood within larger moral economies and collective imaginaries for living with and managing uncertainty in the drylands. Relational understandings shape pastoralists’ participation in risk-sharing arrangements, collective and individual decisions about livestock insurance purchase, and eventual uses of insurance payouts. Payouts also support a broad array of social reproductive purposes and investments in social and political life. As we conclude, these findings upset the binary between formal and informal insurance, revealing how “formal” index insurance must be negotiated with embedded social affiliations, rights, obligations, and understandings of uncertainty.

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Section: To Buy or Not To Buymentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncertainty in the drylands: Rethinking in/formal insurance from pastoral East Africa

et al. 2023

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“…Livestock often constitute a significant portion of a household's heritable property. Livestock production can therefore lay the foundation for wealth-based inequalities to accumulate over time (Borgerhoff Mulder et al 2010; but see Salzman 1999; Schlee 2012, 265).…”

Section: Wealth In Livestockmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, while animals are usually the private property of the (male) household head, different family members, affines, kin, clan elders, political elites and stock friends may possess certain rights to those animals such that the nominal owners do not possess full usus , fructus , or abusus rights to ‘their’ animals (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940, 17; Gulliver 1955, 49–63; Khazanov & Schlee 2012; Schlee 2012). They may not be able to slaughter or sell animals without first consulting the tangled web of relations that bind together people, livestock and communities.…”

Section: Wealth In Livestockmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But wealth in people plays a crucial role in building stock as it is people who provide the labour, skills and knowledge necessary for herding. In fact, labour tends to be the limiting factor in stock-keeping (Bates 1973, 144–89; Schlee 2012; Schneider 1981). Thus, while ‘cattle beget children’, as the Zulu expression goes (Tambiah 1989, 424), children, wives and clients enable the raising of cattle (Schlee 2012, 266).…”

Section: Wealth In Livestockmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, labour tends to be the limiting factor in stock-keeping (Bates 1973, 144–89; Schlee 2012; Schneider 1981). Thus, while ‘cattle beget children’, as the Zulu expression goes (Tambiah 1989, 424), children, wives and clients enable the raising of cattle (Schlee 2012, 266). In other words: wealth in people (P) is reproduced through its reciprocal relationship with wealth in livestock (L): P-L-P’ (see Figure 1).…”

Section: Wealth In Livestockmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Wealth in Livestock, Wealth in People, and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Jordan

Price¹,

Makarewicz²

2023

CAJ

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Within archaeology, the value of livestock is usually presented in terms of use values, the calories and products animals provide humans. Yet domestic animals are also sources of wealth that accrue symbolic and social values, tying livestock production to the reproduction of human social relations. Taking a Marxist perspective that recognizes dialectical relations between forms of value, we develop a model based on ethnographic examples in which the cycling between use value and social/symbolic values adhering to wealth in livestock are mobilized for the reproduction of ‘wealth in people’, or the accumulation of rights stemming from relationships between people. This model of cycling between forms of value can be applied to many ethnohistorical agropastoral political economies. We apply it to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B societies (c. 8500–7000 bc) in Jordan. During this time, the mode of production shifted from one grounded in the community to one centered on extended households. We suggest wealth in people was a key asset for LPPNB households and that wealth in livestock served as a major component of, and a particular ‘moment’ within, its reproduction. This might help explain the accelerated pace by which livestock production overtook hunting in the southern Levant in the eighth millennium bc.

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Friendship, kinship and social risk management strategies among pastoralists in Karamoja, Uganda

Iyer¹

2021

Pastoralism

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This paper describes risk-pooling friendships and other social networks among pastoralists in Karamoja, Uganda. Social networks are of critical importance for risk management in an environment marked by volatility and uncertainty. Risk management or risk pooling mainly takes the form of “stock friendships”: an informal insurance system in which men established mutually beneficial partnerships with unrelated or related individuals through livestock transfers in the form of gifts or loans. Friends accepted the obligation to assist each other during need, ranging from the time of marriage to times of distress. Anthropologists and economists claim that social networks are critical for recouping short-term losses such as food shortage, as well as for ensuring long-term sustainability through the building of social capital and rebuilding of herds. To this end, I present ethnographic data on friendship, kinship, and other networks among male and female pastoralists in Karamoja. Using qualitative and quantitative data on these relationships and norms of livestock transfers and other mutual aid, I show the enduring importance of social networks in the life of Karamoja’s pastoralists today. I also demonstrate how exchange networks were utilized by participants during a drought. On this basis, I argue that appreciating historical and traditional mechanisms of resilience among pastoralists is vital for designing community-based risk management projects. I discuss how traditional safety net systems have been used successfully by NGOs to assist pastoralists in the wake of disaster, and how the same can be done by harnessing risk-pooling friendships in Karamoja.

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Chapter 12 Multiple Rights in Animals An East African Overview

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Uncertainty in the drylands: Rethinking in/formal insurance from pastoral East Africa

Uncertainty in the drylands: Rethinking in/formal insurance from pastoral East Africa

Wealth in Livestock, Wealth in People, and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Jordan

Friendship, kinship and social risk management strategies among pastoralists in Karamoja, Uganda

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