The Mobile Workshop: Mobility, Technology, and Human-Animal Interaction in Gonarezhou (National Park), 1850-present.

Abstract

The dissertation investigates the role of mobility in the interactions of people, technology, and nature in Gonarezhou National Park in southeastern Zimbabwe for the last 150 years. It concentrates on the movement of three specific actors. First, it examines the movement of people such as state administrators, hunters or poachers, human traffickers, insurgents, and illegal immigrants to South Africa. Second, it explores technologies like indigenous hunting technologies, western-made guns, veterinary disease control, and indigenous and western conservation. Thirdly, it looks at the movement of nature, specifically wild animals, plants, water, minerals, and the weather.

By paying close attention to the role of mobility, the dissertation attempts to bring together people, nature, and technology in one narrative. Scholars who write about mobility have often normalized or naturalized it in such a way that we do not see how movement itself works to produce history or ‘social’ behavior. Mobility is taken as more of a premise but is rarely problematized. This dissertation argues that mobility itself disrupts and (re)assembles various kinds of boundaries in important ways. I use the notion of the mobile workshop to talk about the artifacts, skills and socio-technical relations that surround these border-crossing people, nature, and technology as they move through time and space. These artifacts, skills and socio-technical relations are the very same ones scholars have used to define a workshop. Mobility renders the workshop portable and capable of operating on the move or being shifted from place to place.

This dissertation tells how villagers around Gonarezhou forest have formed alliances with these itinerant outsiders, animals, insects and technologies to transgress state monopoly over wildlife. At no point in the 150 years examined here did the human element completely control the stage where technology and nature interacted. In principle, various incarnations of the state defined “right” and “wrong” forms of mobility; in practice, the “wrong” mobilities of human and nonhuman subjects ruled these various forms of the state, which in turn resorted to treating human subjects in the same ways as they did animal pests. Governance became pest control work.