Formal education and pastoralism in western India: inclusion, or adverse incorporation?

Abstract

The education exclusion of pastoralists is increasingly recognised as a critical area for attention in progress towards Education For All. This article sets out two interlinked propositions as to what underlies barriers to education inclusion for pastoralists in India: a conflation of ‘education’ with schooling; and ambiguity over whether pastoralism is a relevant contemporary livelihood. Taking an adverse incorporation and social exclusion perspective on marginality, policy narratives of education inclusion are explored using its construct of ‘terms of inclusion’. Empirical evidence showing how pastoralism and formal education intersect demonstrates multi-faceted exclusions which simultaneously drive demand for schooling and impose highly adverse terms of incorporation for pastoralism in the globalising economy. Policy strategies currently undervalue ‘education’ as situated learning with a crucial role in pastoralist livelihood sustainability, recognition of which is essential to considering how such ‘education’ can interface with institutional arrangements and tackling the delegitimisation of pastoralism by hegemonic, place-based schooling.

Keywords:

• schooling
• education
• nomad pastoralist
• marginalisation
• India
• policy

Notes

1. Pastoralists are livestock keepers who adopt varying patterns of mobility to identify and exploit the natural resources on which their herds thrive. Movement is flexible and responsive to animal requirements, rather than a defining feature of a particular kind of ‘nomad’ which is erroneously suggested in the essentialising typology of nomadic, semi-nomadic, transhumant, etc. (see Galaty and Johnson 1990; Rao and Casimir 2003) commonly used in education discourses.

2. See http://www.gujaratindia.com.

3. Funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

4. Funding from the Nuffield Foundation Small Grant Scheme is gratefully acknowledged.

5. A view is now emerging that post-primary (early secondary) schooling is the threshold level (e.g. the second Chronic Poverty Report of 2008-09 [CPR 2009]).

6. In the federal polity, individual States follow this framework to design strategic interventions to fit their specific context.

7. The term ‘habitation’ is used rather than the ‘village’ of earlier planning documents, which is normally understood to be larger and may wrongly imply spatial and/or social homogeneity.

8. Pastoralist ‘households’ often include members who no longer migrate, such as the elderly who have ‘retired’, those in poor health, women in caring roles, and those who have diversified from pastoralism into an alternative livelihood. No data are available for Gujarat to assess the proportions of the population or households displaying particular patterns.

9. Rabaris use ‘jungle’ (the English word derives via Hindi from the Sanskrit jāngala, rough and arid terrain) as a figurative word that describes the land they move over and feel at home in; part of their own social identity derives from an historical role as trusted guides to the jungle. They are also aware of its current pejorative use and when they describe themselves as ‘jungli’ it connotes a term of rightful belonging now shaded in this pejorative way.

10. Summarised on the government’s web portal at http://www.gujaratindia.com.

11. This school was privately founded and is state-aided: it uses the State curriculum and its teachers are state employees, but hired exclusively from among pastoralist communities in order to ensure a validating social ethos so far as possible.