ANTH1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Transhumance, Rinderpest, Ecological Relationship
8 May 2018
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Week 4: LIVELIHOOD, ENVIRONMENT AND VALUE (1): Nuer Livelihood
• How will the Nuer material link with our working definition?
o The interest Nuer have in cattle reveals
• The integrated nature of the Nuer culture, social system and environment
• The way meeting the material requirements of livelihood and adapting to an
enormously demanding environment is embedded in social relationships
• The symbolic character of Nuer interest is cattle
• Nuer are* transhumant:
o Transhumance: Transfer of livestock from one grazing ground to another with the
changing of seasons
o Nuer are organised for movement
o Nuer live in villages on high ground during the wet season
o Move in small groups across the savannah as the land dries out
o Re-concentrate in camps on rivers during the dry season
• A note on use of Present Tense:
o Radical disruptions of Nuer political and ecological relationships
• Resource (Oil) Politics, war with Sudan and Civil War
• Famine
• Dam (Juba) impact on ecology
o The long term impact on this relationship between culture and ecology remains unclear
• Back to Livelihood
o Making a living
o Domestic Economy or Managing a Household
• Knowledge for livelihood:
o A cow is never to them just a cow, but is always a good cow or a bad cow and a Nuer
who is owed a cow will not accept in payment of his debt one that does not meet with
his approval. If you ask a Nuer in a cattle camp which are the best and worst cows in the
herd he can tell you at once. In judging their points he pays little attention to those
aesthetic qualities which please him in an ox, especially fatness, colour, and shape of
horns, but he selects those which indicate a good milch cow: a broad loose back,
prominent haunch bones, large milk-veins, and a much-wrinkled milk-bag.
• Nuer Share because:
o Cows produce milk at different times
o Some cows produce more milk than others
o Herds can be decimated by rinderpest
o Cows get sick or are attacked by insects and their milk production falls
• Nuer also share milk with calves;
o Nuer share milk with calves (Contrast with commercial dairy farm)
o The welfare of the calf comes first because building up the herd comes first
o Cattle and people are symbolically identified with each other
• Sharing is a livelihood strategy:
• The cultural is material and the material is cultural: two points
o Evans-Pritchard says that the Nuer are the parasites of cattle.
o He also says that cattle are the parasites of the Nuer
o This is because of the VALUE Nuer place on cattle
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