Valences of Movement, Production, and Control: Nomads and the State in Mauritania

This research project will seek to explore the relationship between Sahrawi nomadic herders and state control in Mauritania, with a primary focus on the northern province of Tiris Zemmour. I am to explore specifically the assertion of sovereignty and choice by nomads in relation to state control, unifying a tradition of ethnographic treatment of non-state societies (ranging from Pierre Clastres to James C. Scott) with the literature on nomadic pastoralists specifically (drawing on or critiquing theorists of nomadism such as Anatoly Khazanov, Dawn Chatty, and Nick McDonell). My original contribution to knowledge consists of both empirical and theoretical insights. Empirically, the region of Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Mali, and Algeria historically inhabited by Hassaniyya-speaking nomadic pastoralists-what I will call, following Alice Wilson's example, the "Hassanophone Sahara"-has for a variety of reasons received less scholarly attention than it deserves, and my fieldwork seeks to provide a basis for future scholars who wish to investigate the region and its people. Theoretically, my argument coheres around three key points: 1) that state control is a continually re-constituted negotiating process between state power and popular power in all spheres of social and political life, 2) that the biological constraints of a pastoralist group's primary livestock are a driver of its political choices and its negotiation process with states, and 3) that mobile populations challenge sedentary states' ambitions for schematic measurement and therefore engage in the process of sovereignty-negotiation in unique ways. I aim to write an ethnography of the political-social-economic practice of camel pastoralism in its relationship to state power, using the Sahrawi nomads of Tiris Zemmour as an illustrative case study.