Nomadic and transhumant livestock comprise the normative mode of production in the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa. By adopting management practices with high human labor and informational input, pastoral societies have adapted to innately high environmental variability. The Western veterinary model, which developed under sedentary conditions of production, has been unable to address herd ...

Community-based management (CBM) has been implemented in socio-ecological systems (SES) worldwide. CBM has also been the prevailing policy in Sámi pastoral SES in Norway, but the outcomes tend to vary extensively among resource groups ("siidas"). We asked why do some siidas self-organize to manage common pool resources sustainably and others do not? To answer this question we used a mixed metho...

Given the growing popularity of indicators among policy-makers to measure progress toward conservation and sustainability goals, there is an urgent need to develop indicators that can be used accurately by both specialists and nonspecialists, drawing from the knowledge possessed by each group. This paper uses a case study from the Kalahari, Botswana to show how participatory and ecological meth...

The land management practices of pastoralist Maasai communities have a major bearing on landscapes and wildlife habitats in northern Tanzania and play a key role in maintaining habitat for one of the world's most spectacular assemblages of terrestrial large mammals. Pastoralists manage lands according to locally devised rules designed to manage and conserve key resources such as pastures and wa...

Livestock herders have historically played a key role in developing and sustaining the rangeland regions of the Greater Himalayas. Rangelands, which cover approximately one-third of the Himalayan land area, are concentrated in the higher elevation regions above 3000 m where grasses and alpine shrubs are the dominant vegetation types. Through the pursuit of various forms of nomadic and transhuma...

This paper outlines the emergence of pastoral settlements in urban and peri-urban spaces of Ethiopia focusing on Yabello, the present capital of Borana zone. By doing so, the paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on the manner in which pastoral livelihoods are changing in Ethiopia, and elsewhere in Africa. More specifically, a livelihoods approach is adopted to examine the wellbeing of B...

Premodern human societies differ greatly in socioeconomic inequality. Despite much useful theorizing on the causes of these differences, individual-level quantitative data on wealth inequality is lacking. The papers in this special section provide the first comparable estimates of intergenerational wealth transmission and inequality in premodern societies, with data on more than 40 measures of ...

This volume evolved from a 1997 symposium held at the American Asso­ ciation for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Meetings in Seattle, Washington. This symposium drew together the leading scholars of nomadic pastoralists from anthropology, demography, genetics and medicine. They focused upon the ecology and population biology of contemporary herding groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Mi...

Many factors contribute to misdiagnosis and underreporting of infectious zoonotic diseases in most sub-Saharan Africa including limited diagnostic capacity and poor knowledge. We assessed the knowledge, practices and attitudes towards spotted fever group rickettsioses (SFGR) and Q fever amongst local residents in Laikipia and Maasai Mara in Kenya. A semi-structured questionnaire was administere...