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AbstractThis article asks why Namibians complain that rural communities have become ǀowesa (boring) and why they describe a feeling of pointlessness. After Namibia gained independence in 1990, those who migrated to the towns often progressed economically, while those who remained in the rural hinterlands became the spectators of their success. At the same time, they experienced their efforts as having been 'blocked' (ǁkhaehe) not only by the economy, as the literature suggests, but also by the harsh arid environment, the state, others, and their own bodies. To theorize the shared affectivity these experiences create, I mobilize phenomenological theories that take emotions out of the 'box' of the psyche and consider them as atmospheres that hover in situations where they transcend people, things, and activities, creating rural boredom. ǀOweb rides on your back, people say. Turning emotions inside out allows them to be politicized by demonstrating how boredom grows in the gap created by promising a different future while at the same time preventing it. While people strive, and sometimes manage, to get ǀoweb off their backs, theorizing boredom as an atmosphere makes it clear that it will return unless these conditions change.

Many anthropological theories address food sharing as an intentional act, asking what motivates people to give. They show how one gives for generosity, reciprocity, or becoming virtuous. In these views, the answer to the ethical question of whether to give is to be found inside the giving self. However, for Damara pastoralists and others, sharing is often initiated by the beneficiaries. To address this, I propose using Bernhard Waldenfels's responsive phenomenology that locates and theorises the mainsprings of ethical action beyond the subject. According to Waldenfels, Fremdheit (alienness) is a salient dimension of how the world appears to us. This alienness solicits us; it causes a demand to which we must respond. With sharing, the 'needs' of others are alien. They include the needs of those giving and demanding, and of others present in the situation. The pre-reflective response to these demands is almost always mās |guisa ra hî, one just gives. Only in select cases is a reflective choice made, where (1) multiple demands compete and (2), importantly, the alien largely withdraws from the attempt, sticking out and exceeding the ethical orders of the everyday. I conclude by showing how sharing and its ethics can be theorised as an interplay between the habitual and creative response to the demands that situations create.

ABSTRACTThis article brings the two questions, how and what we know, into a productive dialog to explain the difference between indigenous and scientific environmental knowledge. In the case I explore, scientists and Damara pastoralists (ǂnūkhoen) both relate the arrival of the rains in arid Namibia to the interplay between two winds. However, when it comes to explaining those observations, their accounts could hardly be more different. While Indigenous people understand the arrival of the rains as a play between loving and caring winds, scientists recognize them as a consequence of a shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Building on Heidegger's phenomenology, I explore the relationship between the knower and the known. My main theoretical intervention is to show that Damara people and scientists have distinct ways of encountering the world: from someplace and from noplace. In those encounters, the weather is either enmeshed in forms of use in everyday skilled activity for rural pastoralists, or enframed by technology for scientists. By encountering the weather from someplace and from noplace, the world turns into a different place for each. The engagement with these weather worlds shows how ways of knowing the environment can be multiple, but they are not mutually exclusive. [Indigenous knowledge, weather, phenomenology, ontology, Heidegger]

'Cooperation and the emergence of social order are two key problems in the social sciences. This paper tests two models (kinship and reciprocity) to explain the selection of sharing partners among the Damara and Nama in Namibia. The second part of the paper deals with the social order that emerges from local exchange rules. Recently network science has demonstrated that many networks share one fundamental property: they are 'scale free'. Exchange networks among the Damara and Nama differ in many ways from this commonly observed typology. The overall network is better connected, less centralized and less vulnerable than most 'scale free' networks. Simulations show that these properties emerge from the most salient cultural sharing norm: reciprocity.' (author's abstract)|

In recent decades, water management in Namibia has profoundly changed. Beginning in the 1990s the Namibian state has incrementally turned ownership of and the responsibility for its rural water supply to local user groups. While the state withdrew from managing resources directly, it continued to circumscribe the ways in which local communities should govern them. In so doing, a "new commons" was created. Inclusive participation became the leitmotif of the new management scheme and in particular the participation of women was a major political and societal goal. In this article, we use the notion of travelling models as a theoretical guide to explore how the idea of participation emerged in international development discourses and how it was then translated through national legislation into the local context. The results of the analysis show that more than 20 years after the formulation of international conventions the average participation of women in local water committees remains low. However, older women do manage the funds associated with water and thus occupy one of the most important functions. Our explanation takes the wider social and cultural field into account and shows that gender and generational roles provide elder women with autonomy and authority which prepare their ways into these new official roles. We conclude by considering whether and how the travelling model of participation has been changing local social structures in general and the role of elder women in particular.