Administrations, herders, and experts. Crossing sources and scales to write a social history of overgrazing in Soviet Kazakhstan (1960–1980)
Résumé
Throughout the second part of the twentieth century, the world’s major
pastoral areas underwent a promethean exploitation, which was promoted by
Socialist states (USSR, Mongolia, and the People’s Republic of China) and
post-colonial development policies (e.g. in the Sahel Belt) alike. Everywhere,
but with varying intensity, these endeavours brought on forms of settlement,
the development of mixed farming, urbanisation, and the deterioration of ecosystems.
2 In Central Asia, overgrazing or desertification affected a significant
part of the steppe and semi-arid and arid lands.
Over the years, this region had been shaped by interactions typical of
pastoral nomadism between humans, animals, and their milieus, but also by
cautious and conservative water management, partly inspired by the technical
culture of neighbouring oasis societies. The Soviet industrial and technological
shift led to a more intensive and invasive form of exploitation. A history
of Soviet high-productivity development cannot be confined to its ‘technical’
dimension: it must rely on a variety of sources and the comparison of multifarious
documents and actors. Because the Soviet State was the driving force
behind transformations, one cannot do without sources emanating from it;
these, however, tend to steer the reflection towards political and economic
objects. The prolific nature of Soviet bureaucracies at all levels can narrow
the field of investigation of the historian, whom the profusion of data might
seduce or overwhelm. This chapter means to compare this plethora of documents
with the voice of the parties involved in animal husbandry, thus addressing
the perspective and experience of all social groups involved in pastoralism,
from herders, animal-husbandry officers to scientific experts. Different genres
of sources are thus used: written documents (archives and press articles) are
cross-referenced with testimonies, photographic documents, audio-visual
sources, and more. Besides offering counterpoints to administrative sources,
this method presents a view of the history of overgrazing through different
angles and at various levels – herders, communities of experts or ministries.
Importantly, it allows us to grasp the role of each actor in the ‘objectivation’ (in
a Durkheimian sense) of overgrazing as a social, economic, and environmental
issue, and the leeway these actors enjoyed in the face of the Soviet central
planning steamroller.
Domaines
Histoire
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