Pierre du Plessis

Project title

Beyond the Hoof: How Cattle Production Shaped the Landscapes and Anthropological Knowledge of the Kalahari

What is your project about?

This project explores the effects of the cattle industry beyond the immediate sites of production in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, or what I call “effects beyond the hoof”. More specifically, it investigates the ways that particular infrastructures – fences and boreholes – have contributed to wildlife loss and vegetation change since the 1950’s and how these transformations may have also indirectly influenced the production of anthropological knowledge during this time. In this way, it also reconsiders the field of environmental anthropology that emerged partly out of Kalahari hunter-gatherer studies and how this would have occurred at a time of radical environmental transformation.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

I am originally from Botswana and have been conducting research in the Kalahari Desert since I was a bachelor’s student. My research has primarily focused on Indigenous San knowledges of Kalahari environments and how these environments are increasingly threatened by a variety of growth industries, including extractivism and industrial livestock production. In recent years, it became clear to me that the wildlife areas that I have been working in are being lost to the expansion of cattle in particular. This expansion has been made possible by sinking borehole wells that provide water, allowing year-round cattle to graze year-round in the arid region. This allowed for the growth of the cattle industry which was largely motivated by a profitable export market in Europe that required Botswana to adhere to strict veterinary disease control measures. The control measures included fences that led to the mass die-off of migrating antelope at around the same time that there was an intensification of anthropological research in the Kalahari. I became really interested in how these environmental transformations not only impacted the landscapes and communities of the Kalahari, but may have shaped the development of environmental anthropology that was emerging in this area.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

While grounded in anthropology, this project is truly interdisciplinary, bringing ecological, historical, and anthropological research together to study landscape change in the present. This is, in itself, is a challenge that aims to expand our understandings of the extensive effects that industrial projects, such as livestock agriculture, have on environments and that shape our understandings of the humans and nonhumans that live in those environments. This requires both historical research about the development of the cattle industry in Botswana and analysis of the historical ecology of the Kalahari to examine how cattle production infrastructures had effects that ripple across landscapes.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

This project aims to show that it is not enough to simply study the immediate sites of agricultural production. The environmental impacts of industrial agriculture are far reaching. They have significant effects on the broader landscape ecology, the social worlds of the people who live beyond the sites of production and even shape the ways that we come to know and understand these spaces. I think this has significant implications for how we understand and address the environmental challenges facing the world today.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

This represents the next step in my career where I am fortunate enough to assemble and lead an innovative team of scholars to conduct in-depth, interdisciplinary research that contributes to development of multispecies landscape studies. This will allow me to firmly establish myself not only as a leading scholar in this field of study, but to develop my capacities as a research leader, supervisor, and mentor. It also allows me to maintain my commitment to building international networks with a focus on establishing collaborations in southern Africa.