Of Men and Cattle
The relation between cattle and Nilotic people in East Africa is characterised by the intermingling of two collectives commonly designated as « cattle complex ». Subsistence relationships and poetic practices are the two aspects of this complex ; one exists through the other and can thus never be observed separately. However, the existing literature reduces the cattle to two equally reductionist functions, either as symbol or as resource. These two functions are then linked through a mental disposition of herders : obsessiveness. This disposition permits, it is suggested, to justify one by the other : either the symbolic idiom is so important that it permeates practices, or the productive resource is so necessary that it permeates social and religious matters. Against this analysis, I argue that cattle in Mursi land offers people a ubiquitous aesthetic material. I thus suggest that paying attention to the processes through which these forms are produced allows accounting for pastoral relationships. In this article, I aim to show different cattle forms (e.g. names, poetries, plastic forms) and their involvement/uses in everyday life by Mursi agro-pastors who live in South-Western Ethiopia. I will show how the attachment between humans and their cattle is a disposition which emerges from an array of practices through which people relate to each other.