Alterpolitics or alterotopies

A critique of nomadology with reference to West African Fulbe

Riccardo Ciavolella

Abstract: This article offers a critique of how the anthropology of pastoral nomadic
societies participates in the debate about alternative forms of political organiza-
tion and emancipation. In the first part, I retrace the roots of the reciprocal and
circular influence between anthropology and critical theory, focusing on Deleuze
and Guattari’s “nomadology” and their reliance on ethnographies of “primitive”
and especially nomadic people. Attracted by the spatial autonomy and immanent
forms of resistance of nomads, their work nourished the poststructuralist inter-
pretation of power, which in turn influenced contemporary radical political an-
thropologists. In the second part, I reintroduce ethnographic evidence on pastoral
nomads into the discussion. Relying on recent ethnographic evidence of the crisis
of nomadism, especially in West Africa, I argue that we should be more prudent in
considering interstitial spaces of freedom and resistances as strategies for structur-
ally changing power and for emancipation.
Keywords: emancipation, nomadism, politics, resistance, space

The “nomad” has frequently been a source of
inspiration for libertarian philosophers and
activists. Most notably with the foundation of
“nomadology” by Deleuze and Guattari (1980,
1986), the nomad has epitomized a “society
against the state”, drawing on Clastres’s study of
the Guayaki (1974). More recently, theorists en-
gaged in global social movements, such as those
referring to autonomist Marxism and postan-
archism, are updating nomadology explicitly
(Dunne et al. 2005; Karatzogianni 2009; Shukai-
tis 2009). Nomadology is one of the founding
inspirations, for example, of Hardt and Negri’s
“new barbarism” (2000: 218) of nomadic, rhi-
zomatic, and multitudinal subjectivities resist-
ing capitalist power and state domination, with
“their will of be-against and their desire for
liberation.”
Why does the rhetoric of nomadism, as an
emblematic example of alterpolitics, meet such
extraordinary success in radical political think-
ing? In the first part of the article, I argue that
two entangled dimensions of the rebellious
aptitude of nomads have attracted the atten-
tion of contemporary libertarian political the-
orists. First, their capacity to preserve a spatial
autonomy from states has been taken as the
sign of a possible “alterotopy”, that is, a differ-
ent territoriality to power. Second, their tactics
to preserve horizontal and decentralized forms

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 72 (2015): 23–36

© Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books
doi:10.3167/fcl.2015.720103
24 | Riccardo Ciavolella
of political organization have been seen as ex-
amples of “micropolitics” of insubordination to
power, making them similar to what James C.
Scott calls “infrapolitics” (1990: chap. 7): spatial
movement, elusion of state control, refusal of
taxation, lineage segmentation and fragmenta-
tion, hidden contestations, and so forth.
The problem that this article tackles is that
this philosophical abstraction of the “nomad”,
even if it is sometimes grounded on ethno-
graphic realities, mainly refers to past nomadic
societies. In the second part of the article, I ar-
gue that an ethnographic focus on the current
situation of communities with nomadic origins
rather calls for a different vision of politics, sur-
passing the simple rhetoric of spatial exterior-
ity to power and of infrapolitical resistance in a
global world saturated by territorialized powers
and capitalist logics. Today, peoples of nomadic
origins are increasingly marginalized. Their in-
herited political culture of nomadism—a col-
lection of knowledge and practices for resisting
power—is still useful for survival, but it cannot
be considered a way of emancipation or a con-
dition of freedom. I will rely on firsthand ethno-
graphic data about pastoral Fulbe in southeast
Mauritania, central Mali, and northwest Benin.
Despite their history of external autonomy to
centralized powers, these scattered communi-
ties are now completely marginalized, turning
pastoral nomadic autonomy into subalternity.
In contrast to their previous situation, they
suffer from social and physical immobility and
marginalization. While relying on microforms
of resistance for survival, they believe that only
intellectuals and politicians—that is, people able
to occupy transcendent political authorities and
produce a collective political strategy—can rep-
resent and guide them in the new world from
which they are now excluded.
Nomadology has roots
Rather ironically, the use of the “nomad” for
reflecting on politics derives from a certain no-
madic thinking in grappling with concepts in
different disciplines and social realities. Never-
theless, one can trace the genealogy of the use
of nomadism as a metaphor of alterpolitics, and
it has a lot to do with anthropology. In their
“rhetorical” way of using anthropological mate-
rial (Bloch 1983: 12), Marx and Engels already
considered “nomads” a good example of social
and political organization preceding, but also
avoiding, the emergence of the state, social in-
equalities, and, of course, capitalism. Following
Morgan, they considered pastoral society to be
eluding mediated and alienating social relations
of modern capitalism, as long as their society re-
lied on kin relationships (and not on territory)
and on a totalizing relationship with nature
from production to consumption. In a Marxist
evolutionary perspective, pastoral nomads were
perhaps not the most primitive, as long as cattle
herders had already invented capital, as the ety-
mology of the word “cattle” suggests. However,
since it was a capital of the mobile type, there
was no historical pressure on nomadic pastoral
tribes for settling, which would otherwise be the
condition for producing economic inequalities,
social differentiation, and vertical political au-
thorities (Marx 1858: 471).
After this reference at the beginnings of
Marxism, we would have to wait until the 1970s
to see the emergence of nomadology. With the
extinction of the antinomadic modernist par-
adigm, a postmodern “nomadic metaphysics”
(Cresswell 1997, 2006) came into being, empha-
sizing movement as a sign of freedom, exile as
a condition for political dissension, and flows
and hybridity as forming identities and politi-
cal subjectivities from below (Braidotti 1994;
Melucci 1989).
Interestingly, James Clifford (1997: 39) was
among those postmodern anthropologists who
borrowed nomadic metaphysics from philoso-
phy and cultural studies, but with the condition
of rejecting any ethnographic reference to real
nomads, to elude the risk of making nomadol-
ogy a “postmodern primitivism.” The use of
“nomadism” in postmodern rhetoric was highly
metaphoric, with an apparent disconnection
from any real significance of it for actual nomads

or other “primitives”: “nomadic” was the way of
thinking of social theorists, especially postcolo-
nial cosmopolitans, rather than the real modes
of living of Saharan or Siberian herders. But
while postmodern anthropologists eluded any
references to real nomads, the groundbreaking
philosophical work leading to the infatuation
with nomads, that is, Deleuze and Guattari’s
writings, had been made through a constant
use of anthropological literature as sources on
primitive, and especially nomadic, societies.
Deleuze and Guattari tried to theorize, from
a Spinozean point of view, the possibility of a
space of liberty inside power. In Anti-Oedipus
(1972), they massively relied on anthropological
literature, seeking primitive examples of “bar-
barian” attitudes conflicting with the encoding
forces of modernity—ideological domination,
social hierarchy, spatial territorialization, and
political centralization. This was only a prelim-
inary stage to Deleuze and Guattari’s theoreti-
cal development of “nomadology”, for which a
critical point had been another encounter with
anthropology: their collaboration with Clas-
tres. Inspired by the reading of Anti-Oedipus
and critical of a typical Western conception of
power, his Society against the State (1974) stated
the immanent exercise of freedom and anar-
chism of the Guayaki as a real exemplary model
of society resisting the emergence of domina-
tion through primitive strategies of segmenta-
tion, fission, flight, and war.
Clastres’s argument would later influence
Deleuze and Guattari and their A Thousand Pla-
teaus (1980). Deleuze and Guattari’s fundamen-
tal idea was that human creativity, innovation,
freedom, and immanent power lie in the cen-
trifuge forces of nomadic-like “war machines”,
floating in a “smooth space” outside the “stri-
ated space” of transcendent power. Especially
in the chapters “Treatise on Nomadology” and
“Segmentarity and Micropolitics,” they broadly
relied on ethnographic and historical accounts
of primitive and mainly nomadic people (Miller
1993), like Clastres’s, because anthropology gave
a sort of authority to their ideas, offering eth-
nographic accounts of real primitive nomadic
Alterpolitics or alterotopies | 25
peoples avoiding state, modernity, and domi-
nation. For example, their spatial theory took
inspiration from Ibn Khaldun’s paradigm of
cyclical history between urban and centralized
civilization and anarchist tribal badyyia. For
the medieval Arab sociohistorian, the political
power of the civilized and urban Arab state lay
in the regenerating forces of nomadic and tribal
Bedouins or Berbers living at the peripheries
and cyclically attacking the center in times of
political decline. Anthropologist Ernest Gellner
(1969) would later confirm this theory in re-
lation to Moroccan power topography, under-
lying a dynamic opposition between the space
of “institutional dissidence” (siba) and the land
of government (makhazen). For Deleuze and
Guattari, these examples showed that real power
lies in the deterritorialized forces of people living
in the smooth space at the margins of authority.
Freedom was outside domination;
now it is in its interstices
Deleuze and Guattari’s problem with anthro-
pologists’ primitives and nomads was that they
wanted to make those societies meaningful to
understand power not outside, but inside mo-
dernity. When considering the anthropological
concept of lineage segmentation (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980: 254–255), which accounts “for
primitive societies with no central and fixed state
apparatus, power, nor specialized global polit-
ical institutions,” they therefore asked rhetor-
ically, “Why return to the primitive, if what is
at stake is rather our life?” In a magical process
of rewesternization of the primitive and the no-
madic, their answer was that segmentation is
an organizing principle of capitalist and state
societies, too. To show this, Deleuze and Guat-
tari reversed anthropologists’ topographical
imagination of power. They partially criticized
Clastres for thinking of autarkic primitives as
living in a physical and cultural space radically
distinct from the European territory of state and
capitalism. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s
“geophilosophy”, capitalist and state modernity
26 | Riccardo Ciavolella
has saturated the whole space of social life, with
no primitive outside left. Thus, they tried to
transpose the ontological exteriority to power
of Clastres’s primitives to an ontological resis-
tance inside power. Freedom and resistance
cannot be found in an exterior space any longer,
but in “interstices” of domination occupied by
the emerging figure of “the savage within”. The
will for spatial autonomy of the primitive no-
mad becomes the capacity for resistance inside
power of the modern one against vertical, tran-
scendental, and all-encompassing power of the
state and capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari’s way
to emancipation was then to find a partial exte-
riority, an “alterotopy” that is at the same time
outside power to avoid it, and inside power to
resist it. From symbols of complete autonomy,
nomads turned into creators of lignes de fuite,
of possibilities to escape, to mock, or to bypass
power in its interstices and margins, and to cre-
ate partial and temporary territories of freedom.
This type of use of the anthropology of no-
madic, and more generally of primitive, societies
is a big issue in the debate between anthropol-
ogy and critical theory. In a widely discussed
critique, Miller (1993, 2003) has suggested that
Deleuze and Guattari’s infatuation for anthro-
pology brought them to a metaphorical abstrac-
tion with no relation to real persons and concrete
ethnographic realities. Some Deleuzian philoso-
phers responded to this by saying that, although
it may be a fictitious misinterpretation of the
ethnographic reality, it permits understanding
postmodern subjectivities and their relation to
power in contemporary societies (Bogue 2004;
Holland 2006; Patton 2000). This type of debate
also directly affects anthropology. From within
his renowned constructivist approach, Jean-
Loup Amselle (2011) published an article in Le
Monde denouncing the nomadology persisting
in the political and philosophical debates. Since
the late 1970s (Amselle 1979), he has been fight-
ing against any idea of pristine community and
against the ideological primitivism of certain
branches of Western thought, from Rousseau to
Clastres and Lévi-Strauss.
Amselle’s j’accuse had a prestigious ascen-
dance in the movement of French African stud-
ies. In 1971, while promoting anthropology as a
science for understanding modernity, Georges
Balandier (1971: 5–6) criticized “the anthropo-
logical reference, or the use of models of societ-
ies considered as more ‘authentic’, … as a means
of social criticism.” Some years later, Marc Augé
(1977) called Clastres’s work “pretext ethnol-
ogy.” This is also an ideological debate inside
anthropology, with the anarchist theories of
Clastres, who was very close to the antitotalitar-
ian movement of Socialisme ou barbarie (Lefort,
Castoriadis, Abensour, and others), opposed to
the Marxist ones (Clastres 1978). Augé also crit-
icized poststructuralist philosophers who used
ethnographic concepts, such as Deleuze and
Guattari and Foucault, by calling them “meta-
anthropologists.” Influenced by Althusserian
structuralist Marxism (Colleyn and Dozon
2008), Augé (1977: 14) criticized any idea about
history as an evolution “from the most open
(the primitive society) to the more repressive
(the state).” For structuralist Marxists, the “lin-
eage state” in Africa (Terray 1988) rather denied
the absence of domination, exploitation, and
power “ideologics” in primitive societies.
Topographies of power and
resistance in a saturated world
While “primitive societies” remain a good refer-
ence for anarchist anthropologists (Macdonald
2011), to constructivists, postmodern nomadic
metaphysics may look like a misinterpretation
of their ethnographic work: a negation of the an-
thropologists’ epistemological mission of know-
ing “real people doing real things” (Ortner 1984:
144). Nevertheless, one cannot elude confron-
tation with nomadology so easily. The critical
reason for this is that postmodernism and post-
structuralism have made a comeback in political
anthropology. This issue is even more important
now that many anthropologists base their the-
ory on philosophers like Foucault and Deleuze

and Guattari, as is the case of libertarian anthro-
pologists actively involved in discussions about
or even engaged in social movements.
For example, James C. Scott’s theory about
resistance (1990) is deeply influenced by post-
structuralist disillusion with modernist and es-
pecially Marxist revolutionary theories (Scott
2012) and is a tentative attempt to anthropolog-
ically develop different concepts: Thompson’s
moral economy, Foucault’s microphysics of re-
sistance, Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitics,
and Michel de Certeau’s tactics. It is import-
ant to remember that tactics was intended as
a calculated action that does not have its “own
space,” since “tactics has no other space than
the space of the other” (Certeau 1990: xlvi). In
libertarian anthropology and theory (Newman
2011), a topological vision of power and resis-
tance, such as that inspired by nomadology, is
increasingly present. In his study on hill peoples
in Southeast Asia (2009: 29), Scott clearly tries
to restore the possibility of an exterior spatiality
to power and domination by explicitly referring
to Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of seg-
mentation, Clastres’s theory of primitive exteri-
ority to domination, and Gellner’s paradigm of
institutional dissidence. Surely, Scott defended
himself from the critique of “locating pristine
spaces outside power, pure sites of resistance”
(Murray Li 2005: 385). In a poststructuralist
perspective, he argued that resistance could not
be understood outside its dynamic relation,
and geographical interaction, with power (Scott
2009: 400). Nevertheless, the alterotopic dimen-
sion remains crucial in his work. In Domina-
tion and the Arts of Resistance, Scott analyzes
“social spaces for a dissident subculture” (Scott
1985: 120) not only as “a sequestered physical
location,” but in any “social site” (private spaces,
hidden social gatherings, etc.) where subordi-
nates can express their dissension to power.
This spatial dimension of resistance is even
more explicit in David Graeber’s political theo-
ries. For him, ethnographic cases of alterpolitics
can be deeply inspirational for theorists of re-
volt against the empire, as shown by the Mal-
Alterpolitics or alterotopies | 27
agasy peasants that he has studied, constantly
affirming their autonomy and evading colonial
control and exploitation by movement (Grae-
ber 2007). Cases like this offer positive exam-
ples of distinctive physical or social spatiality
to domination. The “prefigurative alternative
spaces” of Occupy Wall Street or the indignados
movements, in which Graeber is actively in-
volved, are then laboratories of alterotopy that
create an egalitarian and participatory democ-
racy as that of the “other” (see Boni, this issue;
Graeber 2004). As he explicitly claims, Graeber
works within the thinking of Hakim Bey’s an-
archism—whose temporary autonomous zones
drew direct inspiration from nomadology (Bey
1991: 6), from Zapatistas’ indigenous and au-
tonomous territories that aim for “changing the
world without taking power” (Holloway 2002),
and from autonomist Marxism, whose inspi-
ration from nomadology is more than evident
(Negri 2001; Pelbart 2002). These thinkers con-
sider that, if the empire has completely saturated
the social space (Hardt and Negri 2000: 266),
radical politics has to redefine new “spaces of
liberty” in the interstices of power (Guattari and
Negri 1990). It should “liberate a space by open-
ing it to the dimension of exteriority, mobility
and nomadism,” precisely by taking inspira-
tion from Clastres’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s
topological vision of resistance (Revel 2003:
128).
Inside anthropology, the importance given
to alterotopies—places or enclaves as sites of re-
sistance—is both explained and exemplified by
Arturo Escobar’s work (2008) on “territories of
difference” of indigenous and postslavery com-
munities in Colombia. These people, Escobar
argues, build autonomous social spaces through
their social movements, their relation to local-
ity, and their alternative solidarities. Prolonging
the anthropological debate on the production
of locality in a global society, Escobar empha-
sizes the local processes of territorialization, or
place making. These territories of indigenous
and postslavery subjectivities are not isolated
realities disconnected from the world, but sites
28 | Riccardo Ciavolella
of “place-based struggles” with a global signifi-
cance, as they are expressly alternative to global
capitalism. While giving importance to spatial
differentiation and local places, these “subaltern
strategies of localization” are actually network
oriented and multiscaled.
Interestingly, Escobar builds this analysis by
relying on poststructuralist ideas of resistant
subjectivities from below, but puts an emphasis
not on nomadism but on the poetics of territory
and locality and (distinctively from Hardt and
Negri) on the possibility of an outside from Eu-
ropean modernity (Escobar 2008: 346). Noma-
dology and the poetics of territorial locality
may then seem like contradictory outcomes of
poststructuralism applied to anthropology and
critical theory. Nevertheless, and despite this
apparent contradiction between nomadism and
localism, they are coherent in the sense that
they both rely on a topographical imagination
for thinking of “alterotopies”, or autonomous
zones from power—outside or below it.
Keeping track of nomads
“Our” nomad has made a long journey from the
ethnographic encounter to philosophical post-
modernism and back to anthropological in-
terpretations, from deserts and steppes to cos-
mopolitan university seminars or alterotopical
occupied squares on both shores of the Atlan-
tic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. It is now
time to go back to the concrete anthropology
of nomadism and see what it can say about al-
terpolitics. This is not a claim for the return of
the objective anthropologist who would tell “the
truth” about nomads against philosophers’ ab-
straction. As Michel Agier put it (2012: 61), the
most balanced and effective mode of relation
between anthropology and philosophy is not
“verification,” but “experience of concepts in sit-
uation.” Thus, what is at stake is an effort to par-
ticipate in the philosophical debate by returning
to ethnographic evidence, a scale-jumping exer-
cise from theories of resistance in globalization
to the actual possibilities of emancipation of
some scattered communities in some arid lands
in the global South.
Some of the most respected scholars on no-
madic and pastoralist studies, such as Anatoly
Khazanov, have often criticized the myth of the
nomad in philosophical theories and literature
as disconnected from detailed ethnographic de-
scriptions (1984: 2), and the political purposes
of colonial representation of the nomad as “an-
archist”. Meanwhile, it is interesting to see that
anthropologists’ generalizations on nomadic
pastoralists sometimes seem to confirm, at least
partially, postmodern abstractions. Anthropo-
logical literature actually shows that pastoral
nomads have a pronounced tendency to socio-
economic equality, individual freedom, and hor-
izontal political organization. That is why Philip
C. Salzman (2004), from an “inspiring alterpol-
itics” rationale, considers that their experiences
could teach us many things about democracy in
our modern societies. They are basically orga-
nized by equality and freedom: the opposite to
the repressive tendency of the sedentary world,
based on economic exploitation, territorialized
activities, religious aristocracies, political elites,
and the monopoly of violence.
I intentionally prefer to talk of a “tendency”,
because historical and ethnographical evidence
shows a wide spectrum of realities concerning
pastoral nomads’ equality and freedom. Indeed,
there has been intense discussion in the last de-
cades about pastoral and nomadic societies, with
scholars challenging the nature or the degree
of their egalitarianism (Dyson-Hudson 1980;
Boehm et al. 1993; Mulder et al. 2010; Salzman
1999, 2001). There is enough ethnographic re-
cord to find one specific case maintaining or
contradicting any given theory. In West Africa,
for example, segmentary societies practicing
extensive pastoralism and nomadism, such as
the Moors and the Tuaregs, historically devel-
oped emiral political entities, characterized by
a massive discrepancy in cattle possession and
highly stratified social systems, with tributary
tribe factions and enslaved social categories
(Bonte 1981; Bourgeot 1995). Through gener-
alizations, the different interpretations of free-

dom and equality in nomadic societies tend to
bring scholars out of the specific historical and
ethnographic case formulating reciprocal accu-
sations of having ideological bias, in terms that
are surprisingly similar to those of the debate
around philosophical primitivism or nomadol-
ogy. Those insisting on egalitarianism presume
that the others are Marxists or postcolonial cul-
tural critics seeing inequalities and exploitation
everywhere (Salzman 1999: 31), while they are
in turn suspected of representing romantic lib-
erals or libertarians.
I argue that one crucial point in understand-
ing the possibilities of political autonomy and
economic equality is nomads’ relation to space.
Nomadologist philosophers were not entirely
wrong when they considered nomads’ relation
to space as different from that of sedentary
groups (Singleton 2005; Retaillé 2010), but so,
too, is their relation to other communities as
spatial exteriority balanced between autonomy
and interdependence.
If we look more specifically to West Africa,
the spatial relationships nomadic communities
have with sedentary groups can explain the dif-
ferent types of their autonomy. In the arid Sahara,
where there had never been another competing
group exploiting territory as a “striated space”
until colonial regimes, nomadic tribes have
managed to preserve political autonomy from
exterior powers. Thus, possible hierarchy was
internally built not on intensive territorial con-
trol—except through the exploitation of slaves
in oases encapsulated in the nomadic space—
but on commercial routes, religious-based tribu-
tary networks, cattle accumulation, and military
force (Ould Cheikh 1991). On the contrary, in
the Sahel, where the majority of pastoral Fulbe
have historically lived, nomadic societies have
rather developed in the interstices of large cen-
tralized and territorialized polities. To be sure,
despite nomadic origins, several Fulbe groups
have themselves formed these types of politi-
cal entities by relying on agriculture produc-
tion, exploitation of social hierarchies, armed
domination, and theocratic aristocracies (Botte
and Schmitz 1994). But here I will refer to dif-
Alterpolitics or alterotopies | 29
ferent historical situations where Fulbe groups
have not developed centralized polities and
conserved a spatial autonomy, relying on free
spaces of movement at their peripheries and
preserving their extensive pastoral activities.
I particularly refer to the Fulbe communities I
have worked with in Mauritania, Mali, and Be-
nin, which seem to fit into the category of “fron-
tier groups” as proposed by Kopytoff (1987), as
being capable of keeping a distance from domi-
nation thanks to the existence of “buffer zones”
at the margins of larger polities. Their historical
political autonomy is all but the consequence
of “isolation”, mobility being a facilitator of so-
cial interaction, especially with interdependent
farming economies. Political autonomy was,
and still is, rather an objective to be constantly
reaffirmed in interacting with state powers and
the advancing of global capitalism. Actually,
mobility has historically been a mode of resis-
tance to precolonial slave raiding and domina-
tion or colonial military advancing and colonial
and postcolonial conscription, census, and taxes.
Thus, I do not seek to generalize over all the Fulbe
communities in history, but to focus on three
contexts where at least a part of their members
are still struggling for preserving pastoral activi-
ties; mobility is still a social, economic, and even
a political practice for preserving increasingly
narrow margins of autonomy; and contempo-
rary generations share a social memory of no-
madism and political autonomy as something
that has disappeared very recently, with colo-
nization, independence, or the droughts of the
1970s and 1980s, so that some elders still claim
to have experienced the dramatic change of be-
ing incorporated into a state, with what they call
the end of the bush (ladde).
In Mauritania, the external autonomy of the
FulaaBe lineage is clearly apparent in the cul-
tural representation of space and in the “tra-
ditional” political organization that they have
preserved until recently (1970s and 1980s) and
that is still in the living memory of older gen-
erations (Ciavolella 2008). As I similarly found
among marginal Fulani in Mali and Benin, for
Mauritanian FulaaBe, in the ancient context of
30 | Riccardo Ciavolella
political autonomy, the village (wuro) repre-
sented the domain of social security against
the bush (ladde). The magical idea of the bush
was defined by an ambiguous relationship. On
the one hand, the bush was the place of nonhu-
man forces, the domain of danger opposing the
culturalized space of the village. On the other
hand, the ladde—as a relative “smooth space”—
constituted the most important resource for the
nomadic or transhumant pastoral economy and
for political autonomy, representing the possi-
bility to escape from political centralizations by
movement, or to avoid internal conflicts by lin-
eage segmentation.
Due to this economic and cultural relation
to space, economic inequalities and political or-
ganization were very weak among the FulaaBe.
Differences in cattle property (jaawdi) were very
important for social prestige and moral values,
but hardly turned into a reason of domination
or exploitation outside the kin group. Power
relations stopped at the borders of patrilineal
groups living in the same wuro, leaving the spa-
tial segmentation as a constant possibility for re-
covering individual or family autonomy. There
were instead some figures, with no real internal
political power, whose role was to manage the
interaction of the community with the outside
world. For example, the “sorcerer”, or silatigi—
literally, “the one who stays in front”—assumed
the role of “leader” in guiding the community
in case of migration in the ladde, his magical
knowledge being indispensable for facing this
dangerous outer space. The ardo—“the one who
guides”—was another figure with no internal
authority, who played the role of interfacing,
or of “middlemen”, as they are called in the an-
thropological literature on nomadic societies
(Stenning 1959: 51; Salzman 1967), between the
community and the external centralized power
(laamu) in order to preserve autonomy.
This example seems to sustain the theory of
pastoral nomadism as a condition where politi-
cal autonomy is an active choice or strategy for
living freely in the interstices of larger polities.
Anthropologists of pastoral societies (Khazanov
1984: 215), and of Fulbe societies more partic-
ularly (Azarya 2001), have always stressed the
importance of their, at least partial, spatial ex-
teriority as a necessary condition for political
autonomy. This seems to confirm the alterpo-
litical imagination of critical theory and noma-
dology, in looking for ethnographic examples of
resistance in the dimension of exteriority. But
what happened to those free pastoral nomads
when they were incorporated into a saturating
modernity?
From spatial freedom to temporal crisis
The people I worked with in the three different
contexts generally share the idea that nomad-
ism has turned from a weapon for preserving
political autonomy into a critical disadvantage
once the open space of nomadism was com-
pletely integrated into state administration and
the market economy through sedentarization, a
problem that is seemingly shared by all pasto-
ral Fulbe communities in West Africa (Azarya
1996; Tonah 2003) and more generally by con-
temporary nomadic peoples (Ginat and Khaz-
anov 1999; Khazanov 1999). They experience a
multiscaled marginalization: on the global level,
they suffer from the environmental effects of
climate change and food price fluctuations fol-
lowing their integration into the global market
economy (Ciavolella 2010); on the local level,
they suffer from an irreversible decline of their
pastoral mode of life and from social and politi-
cal marginalization.
Pastoral Fulbe in the Sahel (Mauritania and
Mali) or in the more humid savannah (Benin)
are facing the saturation of any external spati-
ality left for preserving pastoral activities, mo-
bility practices, and finally political autonomy.
On the economic level, pastoral resources are
declining for several reasons. Lands are progres-
sively occupied by agricultural activities follow-
ing demographic growth, market demands for
cash crops, and the expansion of agricultural
lands. This is also in relation to more political
aspects and to dynamics fostered by neoliberal
governance in rural West Africa. As Ferguson

noted concerning Lesotho (1985), since the
1980s, state and nongovernmental organization
(NGO) governance is concentrating on agricul-
tural development, considering pastoralism as
an outdated and irrational mode of production,
and enforcing its conversion into modern and
market-oriented herding for milk and meat con-
sumption. Land reforms promote the liberaliza-
tion and the recognition of individual property
on all cultivable lands, converting pastures into
fields and breaking customary agreements be-
tween herders and peasants for sharing natural
resources of the same territory, as was the case
in traditional interdependent and integrated
economic systems. These land reforms have a
perverse effect, as only sedentary communities
are eligible for the “neotraditional” recognition
of “customary” property rights.
With the process of decentralization of state
authority, increasing importance is given to the
idea of “local citizenship” for having the right to
participate in local politics and in the partition
of local resources. Local farming communities
then become “autochthons” (Geschiere 2009),
while former pastoral nomads are increasingly
considered “outsiders”: as former nomads, they
cannot be “from here”. With the spreading idea of
local democracy, all local communities should
participate, in principle, in assemblies for de-
termining development priorities by consensus.
Nevertheless, in all three contexts, I found that
marginal and scattered Fulani camps are not
recognized by local censuses as autonomous
communities and are attached to other commu-
nities’ villages, which have in turn the right to
participate to local decision-making processes.
In northwest Benin, Fulani have been asked to
create a neotraditional chiefdom (jowuraako),
which previously did not exist, in order to rep-
resent these communities before public author-
ities and “autochthon” land chiefs; but their role
is only to implement and inform Fulani of for-
mal and customary local authorities and of the
decisions they make.
Interstitial pastoral Fulani are now in a para-
doxical and liminal position between their pas-
toral nomadic heritage and “modernity” (Cia-
Alterpolitics or alterotopies | 31
volella 2012b). From a spatial point of view,
they live “in the margins”. On the one hand,
they are excluded from accessing state services,
schools, administrative power, and markets.
This modernity is sometimes repellent, as they
are persecuted or discriminated against by civil
servants, local authorities, or more generally the
“people of the city” (Haabe siire), who master
perfectly the occult knowledge of writing, state
laws, and market flows. On the other hand,
“modern” life is attractive, since they cannot
rely on traditional activities anymore and the
majority of them have almost completely seden-
tarized. They consciously admit that only state
facilities, NGO projects, education, and open-
ness to the social and economic outside world
could bring them out of their condition of mar-
ginality, toward “development”. Thus, they feel
marginalized by a society in which they never-
theless need to be included. In Djougou, Fulani
usually express this idea of marginality with the
term seera, a spatial metaphor evoking the idea
of separation, exclusion, and exteriority. Seera is
an exterior space to modernity, that of the bush,
only remotely connected to villages and urban
centers. Once it was the condition of freedom;
now it evokes condemnation, as the former no-
mad, from a free man mastering the ladde, has
become a laddeejo, a “savage” unfit for the world
in which he lives.
This spatial liminality also has a temporal di-
mension, turning into a sense of “crisis” of tra-
ditional cultural and social organization: to use
Gramsci’s words, “the old is dying and the new
cannot be born.” (Gramsci 1971: 276). The idea
of crisis is emic: most of the Fulani I interviewed
shared the feeling of a decline in their “customs
and traditions”, especially linked to the decline
of pastoral activities. The sense of decline of a
better past couples with a sense of vulnerability
for the future, condensing in a nostalgia for a
mystified “Fulani tradition” and the perception
of an inability to cope with the new world they
live in. Indeed, crisis is often referred to as the
loss of tawaangal, a term literally meaning “what
is found (at birth)” and evoking the idea of pas-
toral and nomadic “tradition”, while a new cul-
32 | Riccardo Ciavolella
ture, needed to successfully cope with the world
of the “others”, still remains to be invented.
In this marginal and critical situation be-
tween spatially and temporally conceived tra-
dition and modernity, postnomadic Fulani are
facing dilemmas. In all three contexts I studied
(Ciavolella 2010; Ciavolella 2012c; Ciavolella
forthcoming), the sense of crisis comes with a
growing moral conflict between elders and the
youth. The decline of rural economic activities
has resulted in a sharp disconnection of the
youth from the traditional economic activities
to which the elders are still nostalgically devoted.
Young age groups (waalde) are inevitably at-
tracted by other, more urban, lifestyles, emanci-
pated from traditional activities considered too
tiring and not very useful. Tastes and lifestyles
are turning more and more toward the market
and consumption society, where the aim is accu-
mulation and wasting monetary wealth, which
does not have much in common, in their eyes,
with the physical and moral sacrifices made for
the “irrational” collective interest of conserving
wealth in cattle stocks.
The problem is that this market society is
far from absorbing the labor mass of rural il-
literate youth. Sometimes they leave their com-
munities, as they say, for “adventure” (wayne),
migrating to cities or other countries. Illiterate
and adrift, these youth are rapidly trapped by
regional networks of activities that their fami-
lies consider immoral. In central Mali, for ex-
ample, petrol dollar salaries offered by radical
terrorist groups of the northern regions attract
young Fulani, following the instable war situa-
tion of the Tuareg rebellion and the al-Qaida in-
surgency. In northeast Benin, young men often
leave for Nigeria to work in trafficking and the
informal economy and then come back to Djou-
gou with Chinese motorbikes, allowing them to
move rapidly in the bush and profitably steal
roosters and other goods from rural commu-
nities. While being criticized by their families
for becoming “bandits”, the Fulbe youngsters
are stereotyped and accused by authorities and
other communities of prolonging the nomadic
habits of being mobile savages escaping laws
and infringing upon morality—not with cows,
but with motorbikes.
Youth banditry could be considered a typical
form of subaltern resistance against exclusion-
ary logics of modernity. However, it could also
show the inability of the entire subaltern group
to create a collective opportunity for emanci-
pation. This is an immense dilemma for politi-
cal anthropologists trying to interpret subaltern
margins of freedom. In the marginality of for-
mer nomadic Fulbe, one can still find several
forms of resistance of the kind. In their private
“social site”, they ironically criticize power. For
example, Mauritanian FulaaBe refer to politi-
cians with the sorcery-like term sukuñaaBe—or
bush spirits eating children’s souls. After being
persecuted and expelled from Mauritania for
ethnic reasons in 1989 by state authorities, many
of their communities also engaged in transbor-
der banditry and rural militias of darinaaBe—
literally, “those who resist”—to counteract state
exclusionary policies and marginalization (Cia-
volella 2012a). In all three rural contexts, people
do all they can to avoid state taxation and still
recover mobility to escape state controls. Nev-
ertheless, one should not confuse these micro-
forms of resistance as effective possibilities of
emancipation. They allow survival and coping
with reality, showing people’s force and shrewd
obstinacy in resisting and in not accepting their
situation. But they do not change the social and
political basis and the conditions of production
of subalternity.
It is rather surprising to see that people con-
sider, as the sole condition for collectively get-
ting out of marginality, the acquisition of a new
type of “culture”, “knowledge”, or “conscious-
ness” (hakillo, annal, wumtere) in order to cope
with “modernity”. This new culture would in-
evitably provoke a definitive cultural drift away
from what is seen as traditional, especially being
in strict relation to sedentarization. That is why
people see having “intellectuals” representing
them politically as the only solution for hav-
ing a place in local and national development.
In Djougou, Fulbe use the word janguDo, liter-
ally meaning “literate”, to refer to their eventual

political representative, someone who could
operate not only as the interface between the
community and the outer world, but also as a
vanguard for negotiating their definitive inte-
gration into it.
Conclusion
In his famous passages on the history of sub-
altern classes (1975: 25 § 7), Antonio Gram-
sci identified an “indirect source” of subaltern
groups’ critique of the hegemonic society in
their utopian narratives, like those that follow
the “trend of attributing to foreign peoples the
institutions that one desires to see in one’s own
country [giving rise] to the practice of extolling
primitive peoples” (ibid.: 6 § 157). But for the
Italian Marxist, this subaltern “critique” is at a
stage where “specific wills … are incapable of
relating means to ends” (ibid.: 6 § 86) and thus
to bring people out of their subalternity. Gram-
sci stressed the need for subaltern groups to
refuse “a political ideology expressed … in the
form of a cold utopia (or) as learned theorising”
and rather to pursue “the creation of concrete
phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shat-
tered people to arouse and organise its collective
will” (ibid.: 318). After an ethnographic voyage
in former nomadic Fulbe experiences, I fully
support the idea that critical political thinking
should develop through confronting subaltern
people’s capacities for resisting power domina-
tion with today’s neoliberal global injustices. I
also maintain the idea that anthropology rep-
resents an extraordinary tool for grasping real
political potentialities and alternative possibili-
ties emerging “from below”. Nevertheless, I find
that experiences of subaltern groups, such as
former nomadic pastoral Fulbe in West Africa,
reveal something different with regard to the
expectations of contemporary theory for altero-
topies. Their cases show that the exterior spati-
ality to domination is something referring to a
past situation—both real and mythicized—but
that their contemporary marginality is much
more similar to an interior exclusion. Thus, the
Alterpolitics or alterotopies | 33
critical issue is not how to re-create a different
spatiality to power, but how to actively trans-
form the spaces of power: for a common eman-
cipation rather than for a subjective evasion.
Riccardo Ciavolella is an anthropologist at the
CNRS and a member of the IIAC-LAIOS depart-
ment of the EHESS in Paris, where he teaches
political anthropology. His research focuses on
a Gramscian interpretation of politics among
subaltern groups, especially in West Africa. He
is the author of Les Peuls et l’Etat en Mauritanie:
Une anthropologie des marges (Karthala, 2010)
and Antropologia politica e contemporaneità:
Un’indagine critica sul potere (Mimesis, 2013).
Email: riccardo.ciavolella@ehess.fr
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