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Interstitial EP013 11/19/2019	 November 19, 2019
Self-Devouring Growth
by Julie Livingston
Tracing the change in scope of political responsibility in Botswana amidst unchecked development, anthropologist Julie Livingston offers an urgent parable for understanding the world as a web of relationships that condense past, present, and future.
Transcript Transcript
JULIE LIVINGSTON: When I started, I had no idea that there was something called degrowth. When I started, I wasn't really writing about economic growth at all. I just started writing a little piece about rainmaking and happiness, and why rain is a source of happiness. And from that I slowly began to discover that rapid economic growth had these effects, and before you know it, by the end, in conversation with other people, I began to recognize that I had sort of organically been writing about and discovering a tidy iteration of something that other people had been talking about.
My name is Julie Livingston. I'm a professor of social and cultural analysis, and of history, at NYU. And I'm the author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable As Told From Southern Africa.
The book is part of a larger scholarly and activist conversation that says that economic growth may not be the promise that we think it is. It is written about a problem that I trace through the specificity by which it unfolds in Botswana, but it is a problem that is occurring everywhere around the world. So I wanted this one case to also always be referring to that dynamic in all the other places that it takes hold. And the parable form puts you into a framework that says the lessons of the parable are deep and compelling, and they are for you to think through and discover. Rather than: I have an argument, and then I have a bunch of evidence that I'm using in order to support that argument, and my conclusion is a reiteration of the argument.
Botswana is a place where I've long worked. It's a place I know pretty well, though I'm not Batswana. And it is a place that has accomplished really impressive, beautiful, amazing things. The British colonized Botswana, they ran it as a migrant labor reserve for South African industry. They systematically impoverished the place while they were there, and when they left in 1966 it was one of the poorest countries on the continent. Since then they've discovered diamond wealth in their country, and they have used that wealth in order to develop, fairly rapidly, a whole set of infrastructure, social contracts, safety nets, welfare programs, systems of upward mobility, you name it. So in many ways, if you think about development in the Global South, Botswana is the best-case scenario. And yet I see that there's an end point, a horizon, a vanishing point at which that's going to fold back in on itself.
So the first chapter is about water and this shift from rainmaking as a political technology to hydraulic water engineering technologies. And what you learn in that chapter is that the groundwater is starting to dry up and the dam that's the central water service for the southern half of the country has been through periods where it also has dried up completely as the rains are becoming more and more fickle. And then the second chapter turns to cattle and beef. Botswana is Africa's leading beef exporter. And it shows how cattle, which have always been a form of wealth and meaning in Botswana, got harnessed to a growth industry of beef; but also how, as the cattle population grows and they're fed by borehole kind of wells that tap into the underground aquifer, the cattle are drinking down the water table. And then the third chapter is about roads. Roads are the basis of certain kinds of economic development. They're part of the platform by which it takes place, but they also are a way of understanding how growth can never be satisfied. Because the more roads you build and the more wealth you have, the more cars you have, and then you need to constantly expand the road because you have traffic. What you learn in that chapter is that the roads are made by digging sand out of riverbeds, quarries, and beaches, and that that in fact changes the runoff of the river systems, which further prevents the aquifer from recharging, contributes to desertification, and is terraforming.
Rainmaking is a political technology. This is rainmaking in Botswana in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that I'm talking about. The conditions of possibility for creating rain required that people within the society, according to the norms, rules, and expectations of their society, did not take more than their share. That's not to say that these were not hierarchical societies with wealth differentials, but there were limits to which people could take more than their share without it having a toxic effect that would withhold the rains. So A) people had to cooperate and agree to some extent, with some basic ethics of distribution; and then B) that they didn't pollute the landscape. These two things being the conditions of possibility for the rain to fall is something that I think we can think about the hermeneutics of in the present as still being necessary in order to have the rain fall gently in some places, rather than torrentially, and in other places to fall at all.
In addition to that, the technology itself had to material component to it. A professional rainmaker, or a chief who might be a rainmaker themselves, would collect a set of rain medicines. Those rain medicines worked in what I call a metonymic form. So it would be small pieces of plant, animal, and mineral material taken from across the ecological world, and all of those pieces would be crushed, burned, and mixed together. They would be put into what's called a rain horn where the medicines that had been used previously would be kept, preserved in fat and ash. So something from the past and something from the present would be combined, and that condensation, that microcosm of the entire ecological world would then be used in order to ask the people of the past, the ancestors, to please release the rain for the people of today and for the things that would grow in the future.
When you move to those hydraulic technologies, the scope of personal responsibility narrows in the sense that you're no longer having to communicate with ancestors or to demonstrate your moral worth to receive rain as a gift. You do not have to work in concert with the entire political community in order to access water. Now there are much more kind of static and technocratic sets of responsibilities by which this state is meant to simply produce water as a resource.
So when I say that rainmaking was metonymic and created a microcosm of the world, what it was drawn as a microcosm of is something that I call the animated ecology. And that's a way of understanding the world—including the rocks and minerals, and not only the plants and animals—as being related to one another; but also being lively, having metaphysical relationships that keep time moving, that connect the past and the present. There's a way in which the animated ecology condenses, like the rain does, past, present, and future. There's a way in which the elements of the animated ecology are not static resources. They're not simply things where you just take as much as you want and then they reproduce themselves. This is not a world in which the human being is like the master of their domain. I mean, you know, it's a world of farmers. If you've ever tried to be a farmer, your sense of, like, human agency is rapidly checked.
I am not proposing that we go hire a bunch of rainmakers. I'm proposing we think through what's at the core of how that technology worked and take it quite seriously.
Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa
Julie Livingston
Duke University Press
Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her work is at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. She is the author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2019); Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012), and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press, 2005). In 2013, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Julie Livingston recommends
The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents
She is our prophetess. She laid it out. She shows you a different political form. She shows you self-devouring growth as naked as can be. She shows you all the perils. She shows you California on fire. I believe strongly in this moment that there are people who have been working in other forms to try to grapple their way to the tools that we may need, the imagination we may need, in order to create a new world. And some of the most brilliant people at doing that have been people who've been working in speculative fiction.
Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care
Giorgos Kallis
It's a really curious, provocative read that gets underneath both environmental and economic thought simultaneously, through a novel reading of Malthus. There is so much to think with in this slim book.
Water & Power: A California Heist
Marina Zenovich
It's a fantastic documentary that shows you in part how almond farming in California's Central Valley worked as a way to basically privatize the aquifer. My point in showing you the cattle economy or beef economy in Botswana is not to say, Now everybody should become vegan and we won't have this problem (although if you choose to become a vegan, I salute you). But it is a system of agribusiness and growth farming that is the deeper problem. The film, I think, really shows it quite clearly.
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