The recently developed walking ethnography, or go-along method, to study pastoralists in a participatory manner provides data that the usual sit-down interview is unable to realise, not least because it shifts the power dynamic between researcher and researched. The herder’s practice takes place outside — a mobile activity that is best understood or learnt in action. This project with Nama pastoralists in the arid regions of the Northern Cape, South Africa, has been walking with herders and learning from them, literally on the hoof. In our interactions, the herders lead us as they follow the animals and as these, in turn, seek out and engage the plants. The method allows us to see herders as the developers of unique knowledge of the ecology, the animals and the management of these resources in a challenging environment. The paper demonstrates the novelty of this method and explores the walking ethnography as a multispecies and multisensorial world that is a sympoietically intertwined cosmos. What emerges is a world that is neither science nor indigenous knowledge but rather an endogenous system that syncretically draws on science, herder knowledge and novel information to make possible the sustained practice of herding in this marginal ecology.

最近开发的步行人种学，或沿用方法，以参与式方式研究牧民，提供了通常的静坐式访谈无法实现的数据，尤其是因为它改变了研究人员和被研究人员之间的权力动态。牧民的实践发生在户外——一种最好在行动中理解或学习的移动活动。这个项目与南非北开普省干旱地区的纳马牧民一起与牧民一起行走并向他们学习，实际上是在蹄上。在我们的互动中，牧民带领我们跟随动物，而这些动物又会寻找植物并与之互动。该方法使我们能够将牧民视为在具有挑战性的环境中对生态、动物和这些资源的管理具有独特知识的开发者。该论文展示了这种方法的新颖性，并探索了作为一个多物种和多感官世界的步行民族志，这是一个 sympoietically 交织的宇宙。出现的是一个既不是科学也不是本土知识的世界，而是一个内生系统，它融合了科学、牧民知识和新信息，使这种边缘生态中的持续放牧实践成为可能。