Historical Research Methods: Regional and Local Cases

We explore interdisciplinary methods for gauging pastoralists’ adaptive strategies against disasters, combining three study themes—regional memories of catastrophes, reorganization and adaptive diversities, and collapse and transformation of social capital networks. The themes combine interdisciplinary methods that combine elements of social science, history, political ecology, and natural ecological perspectives. The multiple techniques would help us better understand changing trends in pastoralism’s resilience over historical periods. Historical studies can capture rare events that short-term studies might have missed. Furthermore, the frequencies and cycles of the triggers that drove disaster processes can be identified. Data from such studies would recognize evolving adaptive strategies helpful in assessing and evaluating pastoralists’ resilience, collapse, reorganization, and transformation. For our regional scale investigations, the work used social memory in applying interdisciplinary research methods. For regional political inquiries on adaptive strategies, it used extensive colonial archives. At the same time, the post-independence local case studies combined local interviews and climatic variability data to gauge the resilience or collapse of pastoralism and the transformation of agropastoralism. Using biographies of individual herders, the work investigated adaptive responses of herd populations to long-term rainfall variability and the impacts of changes in stock populations on shifts in household wealth. Using repeated interviews, the work evaluated the performances of clans and women’s social capital networks, examining why the first collapsed and was transformed and the second also changed and sustained resilience.