Area of inquiry (group 2): movement, time and space practice questions.

Evans-Pritchard, working among the Nuer of the southern Sudan in the 1930s, recorded that people placed events by reference to the yearly move between village and cattle camp, and placed persons by reference to their distance from one another within the lineage system. His account of Nuer time-reckoning is best summarised as

• time reckoned through ecological rhythms and through position in the social structure
• an absence of any means of ordering events, so that recollection of the past was unreliable
• a calendar equivalent to the European one but using different names for the months of a year
• a system of dating introduced by colonial administrators that the Nuer had come to adopt

Answer: time reckoned through ecological rhythms and through position in the social structure

Evans-Pritchard distinguished oecological time, tied to the annual movement between village and camp, from structural time, measured as distance between groups in the lineage system. Neither is a rough approximation of calendar time: they answer questions about where people are and how they are related, not about how many units have elapsed.

Basso, researching Western Apache place-names at Cibecue in Arizona in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recorded that a speaker would answer a difficulty raised in conversation simply by pronouncing the name of a place, and then say nothing further. His account of that practice holds that

• the names served chiefly as directions, so that listeners could locate the place under discussion
• each name recalls a story attached to it, so naming the place delivers the moral point on its own
• the exchange was a formality of politeness that carried no content beyond marking the end of a turn
• the names preserved an old vocabulary that speakers could no longer attach to any remembered events

Answer: each name recalls a story attached to it, so naming the place delivers the moral point on its own

Places around Cibecue carry historical tales about people who came to grief through their own conduct, so pronouncing a name puts the hearer in the position of the person in the story. Basso's point is that the landscape does moral work which nobody has to state aloud.

Bourdieu described the Kabyle house in Algeria, where he worked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as divided between a dark, low, damp part associated with the animals, the women and the night and a lighter upper part, and observed that the same oppositions ordered the world beyond the door. In his analysis the interior of the house is best described as

• a layout dictated by the climate and by the building materials available in the region
• an arrangement in which each of the two halves is set aside for one of the households sharing the building
• a small world ordered by the same oppositions as the world outside, but reversed in relation to it
• a plan drawn up by the head of the household in order to display his standing to visiting neighbours

Answer: a small world ordered by the same oppositions as the world outside, but reversed in relation to it

Bourdieu's argument turns on a homology: dark and light, low and high, female and male recur inside the house, while the inside-outside axis inverts them, so the house is the external world turned around. The order is therefore taught twice over, which is how a plan nobody recites is nonetheless learned.

Ferguson showed that development documents of the 1970s and 1980s portrayed Lesotho as an isolated subsistence economy, although a large share of rural households depended on wages earned by men working in South African mines. In his analysis, describing the country in that way mattered because

• it made the description an error of fact that better survey statistics would in time have corrected
• it made the planners appear to have consulted migrant workers before their proposals were drafted
• it made the households themselves answerable for a poverty the documents recorded but did not explain
• it made a political and regional situation legible as a technical problem that a project could solve

Answer: it made a political and regional situation legible as a technical problem that a project could solve

Ferguson's argument is that the description was not merely inaccurate: rendering Lesotho a bounded subsistence economy converted a regional and political situation, made by labour migration and by the South African economy, into something a development project could be designed to fix. That is why he calls the apparatus an anti-politics machine, and why the failed projects still extended state administration.

De León studied undocumented crossings of the Sonoran desert, where policing since the 1990s has closed urban routes and pushed traffic into terrain in which heat, distance and scavengers do much of the damage. His analysis of that policy is that

• the deaths are an unintended consequence that closer supervision of patrol officers could readily prevent
• the terrain has been made an instrument of enforcement, with harm produced at a distance from any officer
• the crossings would have taken the same routes and produced the same outcomes without any change in policing
• the policy has been effective on its own terms, since the number of people attempting to cross has fallen steadily since it was introduced

Answer: the terrain has been made an instrument of enforcement, with harm produced at a distance from any officer

The point is about how space is put to work: a decision taken in an office is executed by the desert, so that no individual act of violence appears in any record. De León's archaeological method — recovering what is left behind on the trails — was designed to document exactly what that arrangement disperses.

Barth travelled with Basseri nomads in southern Iran in the 1950s and recorded that their annual migration followed a recognised route and schedule, with each group holding an established claim to particular pastures at particular times. This material is most often cited to establish that

• pastoral movement is unplanned wandering in search of whatever grazing can be found
• nomadic groups are unable to maintain durable claims over land because they do not remain on it
• such movement is organised by rights and a timetable, so it is a form of tenure rather than its absence
• the migration was determined entirely by rainfall and could not be predicted by the households taking part in it

Answer: such movement is organised by rights and a timetable, so it is a form of tenure rather than its absence

The route and its timing constitute a property system: to be late is to find the pasture taken, and the schedule coordinates groups who must share the same corridor. Reading nomadism as the absence of attachment to land was the colonial-era error this material corrects.