Paper short abstract:

This paper explores tracking as a method of attending to landscapes movements in the face of forces growth in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Tracking notices how more-than-than human movements are crucial to stories of emergent landscapes that push back against the constraining boundaries of growth.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the practice of tracking as a method of attending to the lively movements of landscapes in the face of insatiable forces and infrastructures of "self-devouring growth" (Livingston. 2019) in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Here, movements of growth and development - evidenced by roads, mines, veterinary fences and the stampeding expansion cattle ranches -have reduced parts of the world's longest continuous wildlife dispersal area to a mere, narrow corridor, thwarting more-than-human mobilities indigenous to the desert. Against these encroachments, this paper elaborates tracking as a way of noticing how landscapes come together through the gatherings of different actors - both human and nonhuman - and their movements despite the infrastructures and boundaries that seek to constrain them. As both emergent indices and sedimented histories of movement, tracks tell stories about how more-than-humans do landscapes and make worlds through movement, even as roads, fences, and cattle ranches cut-off and constrain those movements. Through a close examination of the phenomenology of tracking, this paper argues that tracking involves processes that exceed the usual association between human-tracker and tracked-animal relationship, and is a reflexive practice of submerging oneself into, and attending to, more-than-human world making practices that disrupt the territorializing ambitions of developmental growth. In doing so, tracking appears as part of a broader set of practices, like gathering, that attends to more-than-human mobilities in Kalahari sands, while pushing back against dominant forms of movement that make boundaries in wire, asphalt, and concrete.