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Livestock Transfers, Risk Management, and Human Careers in a West African Pastoral System

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Abstract

Pastoralists employ different strategies to minimize the risk of losing their livelihood due to drought, disease, and other disasters. Livestock transfers have been considered critical because they provide not only a safety net during disasters but also contribute to the resilience of pastoral societies by allowing pastoralists to rebuild their herds after disasters. I examine whether and how livestock transfers serve as risk management strategies in a comparative, ethnographic study of three pastoralist communities in the Far North Region of Cameroon. The findings show that livestock transfers contribute to short-term survival of households but not long-term viability of family herds. Here I argue for a more holistic, anthropological approach that considers the social and cultural aspects of strategic decisions that individual pastoralists make when they engage in these transfers.

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Notes

  1. Tropical Livestock Units in which 1 TLU = 1 camel; 0.8 cattle; 0.1 small stock (Dahl and Hjort 1976).

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the Methods of Analysis Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) Colloquium at Stanford University and a panel at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal in honor of Walter Goldschmidt. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-9910557) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Gr. 6661). I would like to thank the pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, in particular those in the three communities, for participation in the study, the Centre d’Appui a la Recherche et au Pastoralisme (CARPA) for research support in the field, the University of Ngaoundére, Cameroon, for granting research permission and research affiliation during my study in 2000–1. I would like to thank Rebecca Garabed, Daniel Hruschka, James Holland Jones, Bahram Tavakolian, Tom Weisner, and three anonymous reviewers for their critical and insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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    Mark Moritz

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Moritz, M. Livestock Transfers, Risk Management, and Human Careers in a West African Pastoral System. Hum Ecol 41, 205–219 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9546-8

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