Seminar by Prof Caroline Dyer

Topic: Leaving the acacia tree? Dignity and changing terms of schooling inclusion among mobile pastoralists in Gujarat

Abstract

This paper takes the pastoralist metaphor of ‘leaving the acacia tree’, a place of relative comfort and dignity, in search of an unknown destination, as a cue to explore how mobile pastoralists value and use formal education as they navigate socio-economic change, dispossession from the commons and sedentary living. Drawing on several iterations of ethnographic field work among Rabaris in Gujarat, it develops earlier work on adverse incorporation and the ‘terms of inclusion’ on which schooling comes to mobile pastoralist communities (in India and beyond) (Dyer 2012). It explores what ‘terms of schooling inclusion’ are, and how responses to them are being re-shaped in the light of socio-economic and political changes, and of global and community-specific discourses of dignity and being ‘left behind’. It reflects on the realities of schooling’s processes and often disappointing outcomes, and provides evidence of a new material poverty which suggests that schooling inclusion might be interpreted as part of a wider process of adverse incorporation than equitable development. In conclusion, it examines what now prompts, for some, a re-evaluation of pastoralism as a dignified occupation for ‘educated’ young people.