A transdisciplinary anthropologist and ecologist researching the histories of landscapes. I just published a book about water called, _The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho's Water-Export Economy_ (UC Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520386341/the-fluvial-imagination). I'm now working on two new projects. One is about Sylvia Plath and plant conservatories. The other is about the biogeography of the cosmopolitan plant family, Asteraceae.
The enclave state of Lesotho served as a labor reserve for South Africa's mining industries for m... more The enclave state of Lesotho served as a labor reserve for South Africa's mining industries for more than a century before the the migrant labor economy declined dramatically in the 1990s. The Lesotho government has since hung its hopes on becoming another kind of reserve for South Africa: a water reservoir. A treaty between the two countries initiated the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, a multibillion‐dollar effort to dam and divert water from the mountains of Lesotho to the arid industrial areas south of Johannesburg. Just as the infrastructure of South African apartheid‐era labor reserves required “upstream” engineering, whether material, social, or symbolic, so too does its water reservoir. One example of symbolic engineering, described here, includes the construction of Lesotho as a place defined by water abundance. Elites in Lesotho have sought to deploy water as a symbol of national identity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity, integrating rivers, dam reservoirs, and hydroelectric infrastructure into its national iconography. But while it is true that water is abundant in rivers that flow out of the highlands, the country is plagued by regular droughts and spotty water access. Everyday notions of water in Lesotho emphasize these contingent, capricious, and even destructive qualities. Scrutinizing contradictions between the representation of water and local realities, I show that the production of water commodities entails more than water's disarticulation from its meaningful cultural contexts, as depicted in literature on water commodification elsewhere. Water commodification in Lesotho—and therefore Lesotho's status as a water reservoir for South African industry—is dependent on water engineers' ability first to link water to those local contexts. That is, engineers generate a type of water that is locally emplaced but unfamiliar to local people. In conclusion, I show how everyday notions of water in Lesotho call into question anthropological depictions of the “harmonious” water threatened by commodification.
Economic anthropologists often look to goods that resist commodification to understand how cultur... more Economic anthropologists often look to goods that resist commodification to understand how culture determines what can be exchanged and on what terms. Livestock in Africa have served as prominent examples of such “recalcitrant commodities.” In this article, I argue that goods that do not resist commodification—what I call “clean‐break commodities”—also illuminate the culture of the economy. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork in Lesotho, I contrast the reticence to sell cattle in African societies, long the focus of anthropologists as well as experts in conservation and development, with the prodigious sale of sheep and goats (i.e., ovicaprids). Narrow focus on charismatic cattle cultures obscures both the historically shifting commodification of ovicaprids and the economic dreamworlds in which they become enrolled. Ovicaprid cultures morphed over time as rural Basotho navigated their country's structural transitions in the regional political economy—from recently colonized ethnostate to labor reserve for South African mining industries and to defunct labor reserve. Just as the resistance of cattle to commodification described by James Ferguson as the “bovine mystique” opened a window into social life in the labor reserve, the facile commodification of ovicaprids that I call the “ovicaprine mystique” does the same throughout Lesotho's history. [bovine mystique, livestock, commodification, postindustry, sub‐Saharan Africa]
On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark... more On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark that is now protected as a natural and cultural heritage site, a public eyesore hides behind dirt mounds and fences: the waste disposal and recycling facility known as AFLD Fasterholt. Established in the 1970s, when prevailing perceptions were that the entire mining area was a polluted wasteland, the AFLD Fasterholt waste and recycling plant has since changed in response to new EU waste management regulations, as well as the unexpected proliferation of non-human life in the area. Based on field research at this site — an Anthropocene landscape in the heartland of an EU-configured welfare state — this article is a contribution to the multispecies ethnography and political ecology of wastelands. We argue that “waste” is a co-species, biopolitical happening—a complex symbolic, political, biological, and technological history. We combine ethnographic fieldwork, social history, wildlife observation, and spatial analysis to follow what we call “undomestication,” the reconfiguration of human projects by more-than-human forms of life into novel assemblies of species, politics, resources, and technologies. Waste landscapes, this article argues, are the result of unheralded multispecies collaboration that can be traced empirically by attending ethnographically to multispecies forms of “gain-making,” the ways in which humans and other species leverage difference to find economic and ecological opportunity.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Oct 2017
This review explores what past environmental change in Africa—and African people's response to it... more This review explores what past environmental change in Africa—and African people's response to it—can teach us about how to cope with life in the Anthropocene. Organized around four drivers of change—climate; agriculture and pastoralism; megafauna; and imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism (ICC)—our review zooms in on key regions and debates, including desertification; rangeland degradation; megafauna loss; and land grabbing. Multiscale climate change is a recurring theme in the continent's history, interacting with increasingly intense human activities from several million years onward, leading to oscillating, contingent environmental changes and societally adaptive responses. With high levels of poverty, fast population growth, and potentially dramatic impacts expected from future climate change, Africa is emblematic of the kinds of social and ecological precariousness many fear will characterize the future globally. African people's innovation and adaptation to contingency may place them among the avant-garde with respect to thinking about Anthropocene conditions, strategies, and possibilities.
This paper reviews anthropological literature on the topic of how and why civil services function... more This paper reviews anthropological literature on the topic of how and why civil services function as they do. The paper considers the formal and informal rules that structure bureaucratic practice, including the effects of institutional history or culture. The review examines how bureaucrats understand or experience their work, such as the rules that guide them; the clients, bosses, or employees with whom they interact; and their own actions. Finally, the review considers what methodological or ethical challenges are posed by the study of bureaucracies. The first section explores normative expectations of organizational practice and how they shape scholars’ accounts of the nature of bureaucratic power. The second section focuses on bureaucratic decision making, scrutinizing how institutional goals manifest in specific practices. The third section considers how sociocultural structures bear on bureaucratic practice, including the question of how organizational history and culture might complicate efforts at institutional reform. The fourth section engages with questions of knowledge production, ignorance, and indeterminacy, reviewing recent literature that questions the presumed role of bureaucracies and states as producers of knowledge. The fifth section explores the conceptual and practical methodological challenges faced by field researchers at institutions, and points toward key areas for future research.
Global land cover has changed rapidly over the past century. Change in rangelands, one of the lar... more Global land cover has changed rapidly over the past century. Change in rangelands, one of the largest land types, is a particular concern in developing countries where livestock production is important to rural livelihoods. Mistaken assumptions about the nature of change in such rangelands due to lack of monitoring can potentially lead to failed conservation efforts, conflict, and even environmental degradation. This study conducts the first ever time-series land cover classification of remotely sensed satellite images for Lesotho—a Southern African country infamous for its land degradation problems—in order to evaluate claims that mountain rangelands there are rapidly degrading through increases in bare ground and the encroachment of unpalatable shrubs into previously grass-dominated areas. Using Landsat 5 (TM) and Landsat 8 (OLI) images captured in 1998, 2005, 2010, and 2013, we estimated land cover dynamics in the highlands district of Mokhotlong, Lesotho’s center of livestock production. Our analysis shows no significant changes in six major land cover types during the period under study. Instead, we found localized shifts in land cover. These findings suggest that, while local-scale management interventions could be useful in certain cases, large-scale interventions into land management for the purpose of preventing land cover change are unnecessary. They demonstrate the importance of establishing conservation plans based on a sound understanding of land cover dynamics and the promise of remote sensing techniques for doing so.
Questions: In grazed, arid and semi-arid rangelands with high interannual rainfall variability, t... more Questions: In grazed, arid and semi-arid rangelands with high interannual rainfall variability, the effect of precipitation on vegetation composition outweighs that of livestock. In mesic systems, which tend to have low rainfall variability, livestock grazing outweighs precipitation. However, little is known about grazed, mesic systems with high interannual variability. In the Lesotho highlands, where such conditions prevail, we asked: Which factors determine the density of woody shrubs? Based on those findings, what are the implications for land managers seeking to promote sustainable livestock production?
Location: Motšerimeli Valley, Mokhotlong District, Lesotho
Methods: We created a geographic information system for a ~12km2 study area located in the upland cattle-post areas of the Lesotho highlands. Using a digital elevation model and knowledge of livestock movements, we modeled livestock grazing intensity for the study area based on the “piosphere” concept, which states that intensity diminishes with distance from heavily grazed sites such as water points. We used a point-intercept method to record vegetation in randomly generated plots on a 5m2 quadrat with a 0.5-m grid. At each plot, we measured soil organic matter, soil moisture, soil nutrients, soil depth, elevation, and slope. We then used regression to determine which variables explained variation in shrub density.
Results: Our analysis suggests that grazing intensity and soil resources are determinant of shrub density. Our model found that grazing intensity, soil moisture, and soil nutrients had significant explanatory power for shrub density, with grazing intensity and soil moisture explaining most variation. Assuming a linear response to changes in grazing regimes, our model results predict a 13% increase in shrub cover with a doubling of grazing intensity. With a halving of grazing intensity, shrub cover is predicted eventually to decrease by 4.5%.
Conclusions: In mesic grasslands with high interannual rainfall variability, control of livestock grazing intensity is a useful management tool for promoting grass dominance in pastures. However, shrub density is also determined by soil resources, suggesting that management decisions based on livestock numbers in isolation will not be likely to reverse trends of shrub encroachment and promote the productivity of grasses except where soil conditions permit it.
It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening ... more It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening nightclubs since the Apartheid era. As with the Hillbrow neighbourhood generally, the racial and national makeup of the club is quite different than it was a few decades back. With the removal of the pass laws in 1986, which ended legal prohibitions on “non-whites” residing in Hillbrow and other downtown areas, white South Africans fled to suburbs in the north of the city and a poor, largely immigrant population from across Africa and beyond took their place. The City of Johannesburg has largely neglected this area, unlike the pristine northern suburbs, and Hillbrow has tumbled into crime and poverty. Hillbrow does receive some attention from the government—but it is a rather unsavoury type. While roads remain potholed and streetlamps stay dark, hard-line policing has intensified...
In this article, I consider how a temporal reorientation of bureaucracy studies – from retrospect... more In this article, I consider how a temporal reorientation of bureaucracy studies – from retrospective analysis of outcomes to prospective analysis of states of possibility manifest in moments of bureaucratic waiting – could help students of bureaucracy to think non-normatively about the relationship between policy and practice. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with low-level officials at visa permitting offices of a South African immigration bureaucracy to explore how time textures everyday bureaucratic processes and configures one’s understanding of what is possible in bureaucratic encounters. I develop the concept of ‘‘dereliction’’ to describe the ambiguous condition of hope and despair experienced by people engaged in bureaucratic encounters, illuminating the technologies that produce and manage this ambiguity, such as counters, cubbies, and temporary extension permits. While previous authors have shown that bureaucracies work to capture and control time, I shed light on a somewhat different sort of power: bureaucracies’ ability to orient people toward the future.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2010
Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegi... more Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegibility in the public's encounter with the state. Much of this work has taken the perspective of the public, however, and less has been said about how functionaries of the state perceive their interactions with the public. This perspectival bias needs to be overcome through ethnographies of the state and of state bureaucracies in everyday practice. This article examines the Immigration Services Branch of the South African Department of Home Affairs, a state bureaucracy widely deemed “illegible” by South Africans and non-South Africans alike. It documents some of the factors that inform the actions of street-level bureaucrats, illustrating how bureaucrats develop systems of meaning to help them mitigate the challenges posed by an unpredictable populace and management hierarchy. These systems serve to stabilize these two unstable entities, but they also enable officials to act in ways that might run counter to official discourse while simultaneously upholding its legitimacy. Their stabilization efforts therefore incite a destabilization of the state, leading it to appear as “magical” or “illegible” to the public.
This paper deals with the transformation of “institutional culture” in bureaucratic agencies. Thi... more This paper deals with the transformation of “institutional culture” in bureaucratic agencies. This is explored in the context of post-Apartheid South African public sector reform, and more particularly that of migration management within the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The paper assesses the effects on staff’s perceptions and practices of a politically driven attempt at inculcating a new sense of “service delivery”. Structural factors are not found to have been prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in implementing the reform. It is rather the failure of the political leadership to address the lack of a shared sense of mission and the range of unintended, counter-productive effects, elicited by the reform itself which explain the overall incapacity to amend perceptions and behaviours among civil servants.
Zimbabwean displacement has significant implications for the evolution of state forms in Southern... more Zimbabwean displacement has significant implications for the evolution of state forms in Southern Africa. In South Africa, Zimbabwean migrants' claims to residence confront exclusionary immigration laws. The South African government officials who are responsible for enforcing these laws have helped migrants to circumvent protocols and procedures while simultaneously overstepping the bounds of their authority to prevent migrants from entering the nation's borders and residing within. Drawing upon a range of ethnographic and survey data, this study explores these two tendencies in government efforts to tackle smuggling across the Zimbabwean border, limit access to immigration permits and police undocumented residence in the city of Johannesburg. The article suggests that these seemingly contradictory developments – corrupt circumvention and overzealous enforcement – are both products of a single dynamic: the state's monopolisation of legitimate movement. The ‘state’ is not being captured but is helping to generate parallel and informal orders alongside conventional immigration law.
For over a century the enclave state of Lesotho has acted as a labor reserve for South Africa’s m... more For over a century the enclave state of Lesotho has acted as a labor reserve for South Africa’s mining industries. With the decline of the migrant labor economy in the 1990s, many people in Lesotho lost their primary source of income: wage remittances from family members working over the border. During that same period, the Lesotho government hung its hopes on becoming another kind of reserve for South Africa: a water reservoir. A Treaty between the two countries initiated the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), a multi-billion dollar effort to dam and divert water from the mountains of Lesotho to the arid industrial areas south of Johannesburg. However, the rise of the LHWP has raised concerns that degradation stemming from land mismanagement in the upstream catchment could imperil the water economy, prompting erosion control programs and land use reforms. This dissertation examines the logics and consequences of such programs, the water production infrastructure of which they form a part, and the broader ecology of life in an economic “periphery.” Based upon 15 months of ethnographic field research, I show how efforts to produce water commodities rely on colonial soil conservation techniques that represent modes of governance more than ecological measures per se. Following the colonial legacy of figuring Lesotho as a politically walled-off but economically dependent territory, the goal of governance then and now is to maintain a relationship between nonsustainable multispecies livelihoods, on the one hand, and political quietude, on the other. Elites in Lesotho construct water commodification as a national priority, thereby arguing that erosion control is necessary. Erosion control is presented as a technical matter when in fact it is a political one, as nonsustainability is not a failure of local management but rather an architectural feature of a regional political economy: land degradation stems from Lesotho’s historical experience as a “periphery” to the South African “core.” Settler colonialism by white Afrikaners; population growth and class struggle within Basotho society; and colonial promotion of wool and mohair production together put intense pressure on the mountain rangelands where LHWP dams are now sited. Today’s nonsustainable livelihoods are maintained through the innovative livestock production strategies of rural Basotho, and through a tenuous politics of distribution established by elites, whereby payments for water are channeled toward concentration and corruption but trickle down to rural livelihoods through development and environmental management programs. In making this argument, I present ethnographic and historical accounts of the symbolic production of water as a national natural resource; the development of soil conservation work parties called fato-fato; the establishment of rangeland management associations; peasant and state understandings of land degradation; and the development of a wool, mohair, and mutton export economy that promotes rural livelihoods but also rangeland degradation. My findings contribute to interdisciplinary literature on state-making, environmental conservation, and natural resource politics by describing the symbolic and material infrastructures required for water production, and by showing how history and political economy insinuate ecological processes.
PhD Dissertation, submitted at Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, December 2016.
My d... more PhD Dissertation, submitted at Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, December 2016.
My dissertation, titled "Stability and Change in African Environments: An Historical Ecology of Rangelands in Lesotho" uses methods and theory from plant ecology, remote sensing, history, and anthropology to investigate environmental dynamics associated with livestock production in the Southern African country of Lesotho. Specifically, it describes land cover change by assessing historical records (oral histories, missionary and colonial accounts, and herbarium specimens) and by time-series classification of remotely sensed multispectral satellite images. In addition, it analyzes data produced through vegetation sampling in the highlands to examine the extent to which livestock grazing pressure is determinant of land cover, with a particular focus on shrub encroachment. Finally, in a review of literature on African environmental change from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene, it situates the contemporary landscape dynamics of Lesotho in a continental and deep historical context.
The enclave state of Lesotho served as a labor reserve for South Africa's mining industries for m... more The enclave state of Lesotho served as a labor reserve for South Africa's mining industries for more than a century before the the migrant labor economy declined dramatically in the 1990s. The Lesotho government has since hung its hopes on becoming another kind of reserve for South Africa: a water reservoir. A treaty between the two countries initiated the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, a multibillion‐dollar effort to dam and divert water from the mountains of Lesotho to the arid industrial areas south of Johannesburg. Just as the infrastructure of South African apartheid‐era labor reserves required “upstream” engineering, whether material, social, or symbolic, so too does its water reservoir. One example of symbolic engineering, described here, includes the construction of Lesotho as a place defined by water abundance. Elites in Lesotho have sought to deploy water as a symbol of national identity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity, integrating rivers, dam reservoirs, and hydroelectric infrastructure into its national iconography. But while it is true that water is abundant in rivers that flow out of the highlands, the country is plagued by regular droughts and spotty water access. Everyday notions of water in Lesotho emphasize these contingent, capricious, and even destructive qualities. Scrutinizing contradictions between the representation of water and local realities, I show that the production of water commodities entails more than water's disarticulation from its meaningful cultural contexts, as depicted in literature on water commodification elsewhere. Water commodification in Lesotho—and therefore Lesotho's status as a water reservoir for South African industry—is dependent on water engineers' ability first to link water to those local contexts. That is, engineers generate a type of water that is locally emplaced but unfamiliar to local people. In conclusion, I show how everyday notions of water in Lesotho call into question anthropological depictions of the “harmonious” water threatened by commodification.
Economic anthropologists often look to goods that resist commodification to understand how cultur... more Economic anthropologists often look to goods that resist commodification to understand how culture determines what can be exchanged and on what terms. Livestock in Africa have served as prominent examples of such “recalcitrant commodities.” In this article, I argue that goods that do not resist commodification—what I call “clean‐break commodities”—also illuminate the culture of the economy. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork in Lesotho, I contrast the reticence to sell cattle in African societies, long the focus of anthropologists as well as experts in conservation and development, with the prodigious sale of sheep and goats (i.e., ovicaprids). Narrow focus on charismatic cattle cultures obscures both the historically shifting commodification of ovicaprids and the economic dreamworlds in which they become enrolled. Ovicaprid cultures morphed over time as rural Basotho navigated their country's structural transitions in the regional political economy—from recently colonized ethnostate to labor reserve for South African mining industries and to defunct labor reserve. Just as the resistance of cattle to commodification described by James Ferguson as the “bovine mystique” opened a window into social life in the labor reserve, the facile commodification of ovicaprids that I call the “ovicaprine mystique” does the same throughout Lesotho's history. [bovine mystique, livestock, commodification, postindustry, sub‐Saharan Africa]
On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark... more On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark that is now protected as a natural and cultural heritage site, a public eyesore hides behind dirt mounds and fences: the waste disposal and recycling facility known as AFLD Fasterholt. Established in the 1970s, when prevailing perceptions were that the entire mining area was a polluted wasteland, the AFLD Fasterholt waste and recycling plant has since changed in response to new EU waste management regulations, as well as the unexpected proliferation of non-human life in the area. Based on field research at this site — an Anthropocene landscape in the heartland of an EU-configured welfare state — this article is a contribution to the multispecies ethnography and political ecology of wastelands. We argue that “waste” is a co-species, biopolitical happening—a complex symbolic, political, biological, and technological history. We combine ethnographic fieldwork, social history, wildlife observation, and spatial analysis to follow what we call “undomestication,” the reconfiguration of human projects by more-than-human forms of life into novel assemblies of species, politics, resources, and technologies. Waste landscapes, this article argues, are the result of unheralded multispecies collaboration that can be traced empirically by attending ethnographically to multispecies forms of “gain-making,” the ways in which humans and other species leverage difference to find economic and ecological opportunity.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Oct 2017
This review explores what past environmental change in Africa—and African people's response to it... more This review explores what past environmental change in Africa—and African people's response to it—can teach us about how to cope with life in the Anthropocene. Organized around four drivers of change—climate; agriculture and pastoralism; megafauna; and imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism (ICC)—our review zooms in on key regions and debates, including desertification; rangeland degradation; megafauna loss; and land grabbing. Multiscale climate change is a recurring theme in the continent's history, interacting with increasingly intense human activities from several million years onward, leading to oscillating, contingent environmental changes and societally adaptive responses. With high levels of poverty, fast population growth, and potentially dramatic impacts expected from future climate change, Africa is emblematic of the kinds of social and ecological precariousness many fear will characterize the future globally. African people's innovation and adaptation to contingency may place them among the avant-garde with respect to thinking about Anthropocene conditions, strategies, and possibilities.
This paper reviews anthropological literature on the topic of how and why civil services function... more This paper reviews anthropological literature on the topic of how and why civil services function as they do. The paper considers the formal and informal rules that structure bureaucratic practice, including the effects of institutional history or culture. The review examines how bureaucrats understand or experience their work, such as the rules that guide them; the clients, bosses, or employees with whom they interact; and their own actions. Finally, the review considers what methodological or ethical challenges are posed by the study of bureaucracies. The first section explores normative expectations of organizational practice and how they shape scholars’ accounts of the nature of bureaucratic power. The second section focuses on bureaucratic decision making, scrutinizing how institutional goals manifest in specific practices. The third section considers how sociocultural structures bear on bureaucratic practice, including the question of how organizational history and culture might complicate efforts at institutional reform. The fourth section engages with questions of knowledge production, ignorance, and indeterminacy, reviewing recent literature that questions the presumed role of bureaucracies and states as producers of knowledge. The fifth section explores the conceptual and practical methodological challenges faced by field researchers at institutions, and points toward key areas for future research.
Global land cover has changed rapidly over the past century. Change in rangelands, one of the lar... more Global land cover has changed rapidly over the past century. Change in rangelands, one of the largest land types, is a particular concern in developing countries where livestock production is important to rural livelihoods. Mistaken assumptions about the nature of change in such rangelands due to lack of monitoring can potentially lead to failed conservation efforts, conflict, and even environmental degradation. This study conducts the first ever time-series land cover classification of remotely sensed satellite images for Lesotho—a Southern African country infamous for its land degradation problems—in order to evaluate claims that mountain rangelands there are rapidly degrading through increases in bare ground and the encroachment of unpalatable shrubs into previously grass-dominated areas. Using Landsat 5 (TM) and Landsat 8 (OLI) images captured in 1998, 2005, 2010, and 2013, we estimated land cover dynamics in the highlands district of Mokhotlong, Lesotho’s center of livestock production. Our analysis shows no significant changes in six major land cover types during the period under study. Instead, we found localized shifts in land cover. These findings suggest that, while local-scale management interventions could be useful in certain cases, large-scale interventions into land management for the purpose of preventing land cover change are unnecessary. They demonstrate the importance of establishing conservation plans based on a sound understanding of land cover dynamics and the promise of remote sensing techniques for doing so.
Questions: In grazed, arid and semi-arid rangelands with high interannual rainfall variability, t... more Questions: In grazed, arid and semi-arid rangelands with high interannual rainfall variability, the effect of precipitation on vegetation composition outweighs that of livestock. In mesic systems, which tend to have low rainfall variability, livestock grazing outweighs precipitation. However, little is known about grazed, mesic systems with high interannual variability. In the Lesotho highlands, where such conditions prevail, we asked: Which factors determine the density of woody shrubs? Based on those findings, what are the implications for land managers seeking to promote sustainable livestock production?
Location: Motšerimeli Valley, Mokhotlong District, Lesotho
Methods: We created a geographic information system for a ~12km2 study area located in the upland cattle-post areas of the Lesotho highlands. Using a digital elevation model and knowledge of livestock movements, we modeled livestock grazing intensity for the study area based on the “piosphere” concept, which states that intensity diminishes with distance from heavily grazed sites such as water points. We used a point-intercept method to record vegetation in randomly generated plots on a 5m2 quadrat with a 0.5-m grid. At each plot, we measured soil organic matter, soil moisture, soil nutrients, soil depth, elevation, and slope. We then used regression to determine which variables explained variation in shrub density.
Results: Our analysis suggests that grazing intensity and soil resources are determinant of shrub density. Our model found that grazing intensity, soil moisture, and soil nutrients had significant explanatory power for shrub density, with grazing intensity and soil moisture explaining most variation. Assuming a linear response to changes in grazing regimes, our model results predict a 13% increase in shrub cover with a doubling of grazing intensity. With a halving of grazing intensity, shrub cover is predicted eventually to decrease by 4.5%.
Conclusions: In mesic grasslands with high interannual rainfall variability, control of livestock grazing intensity is a useful management tool for promoting grass dominance in pastures. However, shrub density is also determined by soil resources, suggesting that management decisions based on livestock numbers in isolation will not be likely to reverse trends of shrub encroachment and promote the productivity of grasses except where soil conditions permit it.
It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening ... more It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening nightclubs since the Apartheid era. As with the Hillbrow neighbourhood generally, the racial and national makeup of the club is quite different than it was a few decades back. With the removal of the pass laws in 1986, which ended legal prohibitions on “non-whites” residing in Hillbrow and other downtown areas, white South Africans fled to suburbs in the north of the city and a poor, largely immigrant population from across Africa and beyond took their place. The City of Johannesburg has largely neglected this area, unlike the pristine northern suburbs, and Hillbrow has tumbled into crime and poverty. Hillbrow does receive some attention from the government—but it is a rather unsavoury type. While roads remain potholed and streetlamps stay dark, hard-line policing has intensified...
In this article, I consider how a temporal reorientation of bureaucracy studies – from retrospect... more In this article, I consider how a temporal reorientation of bureaucracy studies – from retrospective analysis of outcomes to prospective analysis of states of possibility manifest in moments of bureaucratic waiting – could help students of bureaucracy to think non-normatively about the relationship between policy and practice. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with low-level officials at visa permitting offices of a South African immigration bureaucracy to explore how time textures everyday bureaucratic processes and configures one’s understanding of what is possible in bureaucratic encounters. I develop the concept of ‘‘dereliction’’ to describe the ambiguous condition of hope and despair experienced by people engaged in bureaucratic encounters, illuminating the technologies that produce and manage this ambiguity, such as counters, cubbies, and temporary extension permits. While previous authors have shown that bureaucracies work to capture and control time, I shed light on a somewhat different sort of power: bureaucracies’ ability to orient people toward the future.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2010
Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegi... more Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegibility in the public's encounter with the state. Much of this work has taken the perspective of the public, however, and less has been said about how functionaries of the state perceive their interactions with the public. This perspectival bias needs to be overcome through ethnographies of the state and of state bureaucracies in everyday practice. This article examines the Immigration Services Branch of the South African Department of Home Affairs, a state bureaucracy widely deemed “illegible” by South Africans and non-South Africans alike. It documents some of the factors that inform the actions of street-level bureaucrats, illustrating how bureaucrats develop systems of meaning to help them mitigate the challenges posed by an unpredictable populace and management hierarchy. These systems serve to stabilize these two unstable entities, but they also enable officials to act in ways that might run counter to official discourse while simultaneously upholding its legitimacy. Their stabilization efforts therefore incite a destabilization of the state, leading it to appear as “magical” or “illegible” to the public.
This paper deals with the transformation of “institutional culture” in bureaucratic agencies. Thi... more This paper deals with the transformation of “institutional culture” in bureaucratic agencies. This is explored in the context of post-Apartheid South African public sector reform, and more particularly that of migration management within the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The paper assesses the effects on staff’s perceptions and practices of a politically driven attempt at inculcating a new sense of “service delivery”. Structural factors are not found to have been prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in implementing the reform. It is rather the failure of the political leadership to address the lack of a shared sense of mission and the range of unintended, counter-productive effects, elicited by the reform itself which explain the overall incapacity to amend perceptions and behaviours among civil servants.
Zimbabwean displacement has significant implications for the evolution of state forms in Southern... more Zimbabwean displacement has significant implications for the evolution of state forms in Southern Africa. In South Africa, Zimbabwean migrants' claims to residence confront exclusionary immigration laws. The South African government officials who are responsible for enforcing these laws have helped migrants to circumvent protocols and procedures while simultaneously overstepping the bounds of their authority to prevent migrants from entering the nation's borders and residing within. Drawing upon a range of ethnographic and survey data, this study explores these two tendencies in government efforts to tackle smuggling across the Zimbabwean border, limit access to immigration permits and police undocumented residence in the city of Johannesburg. The article suggests that these seemingly contradictory developments – corrupt circumvention and overzealous enforcement – are both products of a single dynamic: the state's monopolisation of legitimate movement. The ‘state’ is not being captured but is helping to generate parallel and informal orders alongside conventional immigration law.
For over a century the enclave state of Lesotho has acted as a labor reserve for South Africa’s m... more For over a century the enclave state of Lesotho has acted as a labor reserve for South Africa’s mining industries. With the decline of the migrant labor economy in the 1990s, many people in Lesotho lost their primary source of income: wage remittances from family members working over the border. During that same period, the Lesotho government hung its hopes on becoming another kind of reserve for South Africa: a water reservoir. A Treaty between the two countries initiated the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), a multi-billion dollar effort to dam and divert water from the mountains of Lesotho to the arid industrial areas south of Johannesburg. However, the rise of the LHWP has raised concerns that degradation stemming from land mismanagement in the upstream catchment could imperil the water economy, prompting erosion control programs and land use reforms. This dissertation examines the logics and consequences of such programs, the water production infrastructure of which they form a part, and the broader ecology of life in an economic “periphery.” Based upon 15 months of ethnographic field research, I show how efforts to produce water commodities rely on colonial soil conservation techniques that represent modes of governance more than ecological measures per se. Following the colonial legacy of figuring Lesotho as a politically walled-off but economically dependent territory, the goal of governance then and now is to maintain a relationship between nonsustainable multispecies livelihoods, on the one hand, and political quietude, on the other. Elites in Lesotho construct water commodification as a national priority, thereby arguing that erosion control is necessary. Erosion control is presented as a technical matter when in fact it is a political one, as nonsustainability is not a failure of local management but rather an architectural feature of a regional political economy: land degradation stems from Lesotho’s historical experience as a “periphery” to the South African “core.” Settler colonialism by white Afrikaners; population growth and class struggle within Basotho society; and colonial promotion of wool and mohair production together put intense pressure on the mountain rangelands where LHWP dams are now sited. Today’s nonsustainable livelihoods are maintained through the innovative livestock production strategies of rural Basotho, and through a tenuous politics of distribution established by elites, whereby payments for water are channeled toward concentration and corruption but trickle down to rural livelihoods through development and environmental management programs. In making this argument, I present ethnographic and historical accounts of the symbolic production of water as a national natural resource; the development of soil conservation work parties called fato-fato; the establishment of rangeland management associations; peasant and state understandings of land degradation; and the development of a wool, mohair, and mutton export economy that promotes rural livelihoods but also rangeland degradation. My findings contribute to interdisciplinary literature on state-making, environmental conservation, and natural resource politics by describing the symbolic and material infrastructures required for water production, and by showing how history and political economy insinuate ecological processes.
PhD Dissertation, submitted at Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, December 2016.
My d... more PhD Dissertation, submitted at Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, December 2016.
My dissertation, titled "Stability and Change in African Environments: An Historical Ecology of Rangelands in Lesotho" uses methods and theory from plant ecology, remote sensing, history, and anthropology to investigate environmental dynamics associated with livestock production in the Southern African country of Lesotho. Specifically, it describes land cover change by assessing historical records (oral histories, missionary and colonial accounts, and herbarium specimens) and by time-series classification of remotely sensed multispectral satellite images. In addition, it analyzes data produced through vegetation sampling in the highlands to examine the extent to which livestock grazing pressure is determinant of land cover, with a particular focus on shrub encroachment. Finally, in a review of literature on African environmental change from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene, it situates the contemporary landscape dynamics of Lesotho in a continental and deep historical context.
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Papers by Colin Hoag
Location: Motšerimeli Valley, Mokhotlong District, Lesotho
Methods: We created a geographic information system for a ~12km2 study area located in the upland cattle-post areas of the Lesotho highlands. Using a digital elevation model and knowledge of livestock movements, we modeled livestock grazing intensity for the study area based on the “piosphere” concept, which states that intensity diminishes with distance from heavily grazed sites such as water points. We used a point-intercept method to record vegetation in randomly generated plots on a 5m2 quadrat with a 0.5-m grid. At each plot, we measured soil organic matter, soil moisture, soil nutrients, soil depth, elevation, and slope. We then used regression to determine which variables explained variation in shrub density.
Results: Our analysis suggests that grazing intensity and soil resources are determinant of shrub density. Our model found that grazing intensity, soil moisture, and soil nutrients had significant explanatory power for shrub density, with grazing intensity and soil moisture explaining most variation. Assuming a linear response to changes in grazing regimes, our model results predict a 13% increase in shrub cover with a doubling of grazing intensity. With a halving of grazing intensity, shrub cover is predicted eventually to decrease by 4.5%.
Conclusions: In mesic grasslands with high interannual rainfall variability, control of livestock grazing intensity is a useful management tool for promoting grass dominance in pastures. However, shrub density is also determined by soil resources, suggesting that management decisions based on livestock numbers in isolation will not be likely to reverse trends of shrub encroachment and promote the productivity of grasses except where soil conditions permit it.
Theses by Colin Hoag
My dissertation, titled "Stability and Change in African Environments: An Historical Ecology of Rangelands in Lesotho" uses methods and theory from plant ecology, remote sensing, history, and anthropology to investigate environmental dynamics associated with livestock production in the Southern African country of Lesotho. Specifically, it describes land cover change by assessing historical records (oral histories, missionary and colonial accounts, and herbarium specimens) and by time-series classification of remotely sensed multispectral satellite images. In addition, it analyzes data produced through vegetation sampling in the highlands to examine the extent to which livestock grazing pressure is determinant of land cover, with a particular focus on shrub encroachment. Finally, in a review of literature on African environmental change from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene, it situates the contemporary landscape dynamics of Lesotho in a continental and deep historical context.
Location: Motšerimeli Valley, Mokhotlong District, Lesotho
Methods: We created a geographic information system for a ~12km2 study area located in the upland cattle-post areas of the Lesotho highlands. Using a digital elevation model and knowledge of livestock movements, we modeled livestock grazing intensity for the study area based on the “piosphere” concept, which states that intensity diminishes with distance from heavily grazed sites such as water points. We used a point-intercept method to record vegetation in randomly generated plots on a 5m2 quadrat with a 0.5-m grid. At each plot, we measured soil organic matter, soil moisture, soil nutrients, soil depth, elevation, and slope. We then used regression to determine which variables explained variation in shrub density.
Results: Our analysis suggests that grazing intensity and soil resources are determinant of shrub density. Our model found that grazing intensity, soil moisture, and soil nutrients had significant explanatory power for shrub density, with grazing intensity and soil moisture explaining most variation. Assuming a linear response to changes in grazing regimes, our model results predict a 13% increase in shrub cover with a doubling of grazing intensity. With a halving of grazing intensity, shrub cover is predicted eventually to decrease by 4.5%.
Conclusions: In mesic grasslands with high interannual rainfall variability, control of livestock grazing intensity is a useful management tool for promoting grass dominance in pastures. However, shrub density is also determined by soil resources, suggesting that management decisions based on livestock numbers in isolation will not be likely to reverse trends of shrub encroachment and promote the productivity of grasses except where soil conditions permit it.
My dissertation, titled "Stability and Change in African Environments: An Historical Ecology of Rangelands in Lesotho" uses methods and theory from plant ecology, remote sensing, history, and anthropology to investigate environmental dynamics associated with livestock production in the Southern African country of Lesotho. Specifically, it describes land cover change by assessing historical records (oral histories, missionary and colonial accounts, and herbarium specimens) and by time-series classification of remotely sensed multispectral satellite images. In addition, it analyzes data produced through vegetation sampling in the highlands to examine the extent to which livestock grazing pressure is determinant of land cover, with a particular focus on shrub encroachment. Finally, in a review of literature on African environmental change from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene, it situates the contemporary landscape dynamics of Lesotho in a continental and deep historical context.