ABSTRACT
Economic Spaces of Pastoral Production and Commodity Systems: Markets and Livelihoods has been a co-learning project, and related to it, a politics of knowledge project. The collective learning project has been to probe deeply and disturb, especially through empirics, the idea in much contemporary thought that markets and livelihoods can ontologically be separated. The partitioning breaks down when these categories are theorised from a perspective of situated knowledge production. As Barbara Harriss-White argues, the performance of markets is affected by and continually changes relations of authority, and these contested realities always have implications and ramifications for livelihoods. Hans-Georg Bohle, considering livelihood as a category, points to how livelihoods are deeply politicised, realities too that spring from power relations which make, and in which, exchange takes place. The partitioning falls down further when brought into the empirical specifics of the spaces of pastoralism and pastoral economies. The book, hence, reveals the embedded, embodied and constitutive market-livelihood interdependencies of exchange relations.
