Matthieu SALPETEUR

The world hosts a high variety of livestock breeds on which numerous people depend, but these breeds currently face a number of threats, among which diversity erosion. This project aims at addressing this issue by providing a much-needed understanding of the dynamics of domestic animals diversity that result from local pastoralists’ conceptions and practices. It will complement the existing literature through a specific focus at the level of herds. The project builds on separate bodies of literature - on breeding management and on the social organisation of agrobiodiversity - to propose a novel approach to the topic, combining an emic perspective on diversity in domestic animals, conceptual models that integrate social organization in studying domesticated diversity, and a formalized analysis of animal exchanges and circulation through Social network analysis. The project brings together specialists of five iconic pastoral systems across Asia and Africa: the Mongol, the Kyrgyz, the Rabari (India), the Arabs from the Bhata area (Chad) and the WoDaaBe (Chad and Niger). They will build on their preliminary knowledge of these systems to explore the dynamics of diversity around four key dimensions, that will structure the project as tasks: i) emic understandings of domestic animal diversity, ii) roles of domestic animal diversity and selection processes, iii) circulation and distribution of diversity, and iv) scales of diversity. Data collection will be done through fieldwork in each selected area, and will involve qualitative methods (ethnography), ethnosciences and social network analysis. The expected results are i) detailed descriptions and a comprehensive analysis of the factors shaping diversity in domestic animals at different scales (from the single animal to above-herd scale), ii) analyses of the animal exchange networks between pastoralists enabling to identify patterns of exchanges and their potential impacts on diversity, and iii) refined hypotheses about diversity dynamics in pastoral systems that will pave the way for future projects. Progress during the project and results will be discussed with specialists in fields such as zootechnics and animal science, population genetics, and breeding management, to foster exchanges and advance in our analyses.

Mobile pastoral systems, despite being highly adaptive to harsh and unpredictable environments, are faced with increasing challenges worldwide, due – among other factors – to a fast extension of irrigated agriculture and a fragmentation of landscapes. Understanding how they react and adapt to these changes is a key contemporary issue, concerning almost every region in the world, including Europe. The aim of the NomadicN project is to increase our understanding of the complex processes at play when mobile pastoralists navigate across fast-changing densely-cultivated landscapes. For this, we will develop a new approach to the analysis of the pastoral movements, by integrating into a single framework data on ecological variations and data on the social interactions that are necessary to mediate access to privately-owned resources. The objectives of the project are a) to identify the key ecological and social processes that underlie the migration dynamic, b) to analyze how these two sets of drivers interact and influence the decision-making process along migration stages, and c) to study, at the landscape scale, how the intertwinement of these processes shapes – or not - the mobility patterns of transhumant groups and how it affects their resilience. We will do so through the analysis of the annual migration cycle of nomadic shepherds from the Rabari community, in the Kutch area (Gujarat, India).