John G. Galaty 

 Roundtable discussion 

 Visiting the Academic office 

 McGill University Professors visited IEA/CASS

    On July 8th of 2008, three Professors from McGill University Canada visited the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academic of Social Sciences (IEA/ CASS). Prof. John G. Galaty, Department of Anthropology, Prof. Barbara Jones Galaty, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, and Ms. Mary McConnell.  

    In a seminar organized by IEA/ CASS, Prof. John G. Galaty addressed a lecture on The Modernity of Pastoralism in East Africa Today: Property, Mobility and the New Territoriality. He said that the Pastoralism is an adaptation to arid lands, and in Africa pastoral patterns of mobility, settlement, and land use is shaped by the degree of aridity.  Pastoral mobility varies along a continuum from very frequent movement to only seasonal mobility to almost sedentary husbandry.  In East Africa, forms of cooperation and territorial organization vary with a society’s core institutions, with groups such as the Nuer and the Somali characterized by segmentary lineage organization, Oromo by a generation-grading system, and the Maasai and other Nilotic societies by an age-set system.  

    After examining diversity in pastoral systems in East Africa, he pointed out several broader perspectives in anthropology that bear on our understanding of contemporary dynamics of social change in Africa’s arid lands, especially the relationship of pastoralists and the culture of modernity. The first question addresses recent attempts to see processes of globalization, including increased trans-national mobility, migration, refugee flows and cultural exchanges, as challenging understanding of societies as bounded and territorialized.  The second question focuses on the related but quite different assumption, which advocates sedentarization, that continuing mobility threatens the modernization of pastoralists.  The third question focuses on the discursive “construction” of the pastoral image in “anti-modern” terms (as having a supposed anti-market mentality, an irrational perspective on herd management, and a pre-modern approach to land ownership), which from the perspective of the State and the development industry serves to undermine pastoral land rights.  Countering these positions, the paper proposes that pastoralists are quite modern in following adaptive rationality in land use, conservation, markets and openness to global trends, but are most threatened by land loss, which in turn stimulates increasing conflict.  On the conclusion, Prof. John G. Galaty mentioned that the notion of modernity is too often used in the African context less as a scientific construct defined by increasing productivity and economic progress and more to discredit arid-land pastoralists.  In this regard, pastoralists should be seen not just as a society characterized by a form of livelihood but also as a rural class fighting to retain its land base.

    There were 20 scholars and graduated students from CASS attended this roundtable seminar. Besides the discussion of Pastoralism, they also exchanged views with Canadian scholars on the environmental issues, First Nations studies and medical system in Canada.  

    Prof. DU Fachun, Vice Secretary-General of the Association of Canadian Studies in China, chaired the seminar and hosted a welcome dinner to McGill University Professors.

    Prof. John G. Galaty’s research focuses on East Africa, with primary emphasis on Kenya and Tanzania, secondarily Uganda and Ethiopia. He served as Secretary of the Commission on Nomadic Peoples at its inception, and later as President of the Canadian Association of African Studies. He also served as Associate Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and now is the Director of the Centre for Society, Technology and Development, McGill University.  

    (Written by DU Fachun, IEA/CASS)