682 jeremy h. keenan

SUSTAINABLE NOMADISM: THE CASE OF THE ALGERIAN TUAREG

Jeremy H. Keenan

One of more surprising features of the ‘new’ Marxism that so invigo- rated anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s was that, with certain notable exceptions such as Pierre Bonte (1981) and some of his colleagues,1 it contributed remarkably little to our understanding of nomadic pastoralist societies, despite their historical importance. Bonte himself suggested this was because Marxist theorists paid little attention to societies with a communal, classless structure or little- developed class structure once the principal class formations—Asi- atic, ancient, feudal, capitalist—had been treated. One reason for this was because anthropologists turned too readily to Marx’s Grun- drisse, (notably the section Formen—‘Forms which Precede Capitalist Production’—Marx 1973, pp. 471-514), rather than the method of historical materialism as developed in his more mature works, and thus found themselves either uninspired (and unimpressed) or drawn into interminable debates on the early forms of Germanic society, feudalism and the Asiatic mode of production. But I do not think Bonte is altogether correct in saying that Marxist theorists ignored societies with a communal, classless or little developed class structure. On the contrary, a number of anthropologists developed the most exciting and fruitful insights into these societies by applying the con- cepts of historical materialism to primitive social formations.2 While it is too harsh to say that Marxist anthropologists gave inadequate attention to classless societies, it is true that they didn’t give much attention to nomadic pastoral societies—not all of which, it should be said, were classless.

1 Much of Bonte’s work was undertaken within the framework of the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes (Paris) and the ‘Ecology and Anthropology of Pastoralist Societies’ Group (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme). 2 In particular, Claude Meillassoux’s (1964) pioneering work on the Gouro. Other anthropologists who made major contributions include Maurice Godelier (1966; 1973), Emmanuel Terray (1972; 1974), Pierre Ph. Rey (see Rey and Dupré 1972), Samir Amin (1973), and others.

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The real problem for most anthropologists who began exploring the application of the concepts of historical materialism to ‘anthropologi- cal societies’ lay in their conceptualization of ‘mode of production.’ All too often they tended to see as many ‘modes of production’ as there were ‘forms of production.’ Nomadic pastoralism is a mode of subsistence (i.e. a form of production) not a ‘mode of production,’ and as such may be found in many different modes of production, including most of those identified at one time of another by Marxist theorists in the 1960s and 1970s—such as the ‘domestic,’ ‘lineage,’ ‘tributary,’ ‘slave,’ ‘feudal,’ ‘Asiatic’ and at least one variant of the ‘primitive communist’ mode of production (Keenan 1981). The point can perhaps be made more clearly the other way around, namely that different social relations of production can be found under identi- cal ecological and technological conditions. Ranching, for example, which differs little in its material basis from nomadic pastoralism, is compatible with feudal, early and advanced capitalist relations of production. Focusing on the material base in this way and thus confusing the ‘mode of production’ with the mode of subsistence or form of pro- duction resulted in anthropologists simply confusing the relations of production with the concrete labor process, albeit frequently dressed up in immensely complex and elaborate social forms. Apart from doing Marxist theory a great disservice, this approach took anthro- pologists into a dead-end. Anthropologists did not deliberately take themselves into this theoretical cul-de-sac. They went there because, in the case of nomadic pastoralism, the signposts were particularly badly placed. In those days, when there were more flourishing and self-sustaining nomadic pastoral societies, it was quite evident that pastoralism was their predominant mode of subsistence. Today, that is not always quite so clear. Eking out a living by such means has become increasingly more difficult in most parts of the world. But even in the heyday of nomadic pastoralism, few, if any, of these societies lived solely off pastoralism. It was this fact that led those aspirant Marxists to confuse so readily the mode of subsistence with the ‘mode of production.’ While pastoralism may have been the predominant mode of subsistence, it was rarely, if ever, exclusive—at least at the level of the ‘reproduction’ of the wider economy and its social conditions of existence. I believe that there have been few societies that have been able to sustain and reproduce themselves exclusively from nomadic pasto-

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