Interest in Cattle

Our Project

Interest in Cattle is an Institute for Advanced Study-funded project that takes an innovative approach to questions of value and well-being in eastern and southern Africa. It will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines – from public health to history and anthropology, all of whom share an interest in cattle. Cattle, we suggest, lie at the intersection of multiple, distributed, strategies for securing the future. They are an everyday resource in livelihood strategies; a target of bio-security interventions informed by contemporary One Health approaches; a way to build and reaffirm horizontal social ties; an investment opportunity for those who seek to accumulate – and they are the centre of an enduring aesthetic which valorises them as things of beauty as well as cultural and economic resources.

The project will enable us to develop and refine 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.

We take our title from the first chapter of E.E. Evans Pritchard’s classic anthropological monograph, The Nuer. Evans-Pritchard describes the bovine-centric world of Nuer people of South Sudan in the 1930s and the centrality of cattle to Nuer kinship, politics, wealth and economics –‘cherche la vache’ is Evans-Pritchard’s advice for anyone who wants to understand Nuer behaviour.

The project will explore a series of problematics around cattle, as we seek to identify shared ways of asking questions:

1. 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?    

2. 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?   

3. 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 money terms. 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?   

4. Cattle infrastructures – how were/are cattle moved, managed, kept across different communities and scales in the past and the present? How are these infrastructures shaped by concerns of disease, wellbeing, and productivity?