Blogpost | Thinking about the figure of the sheep across geographies
On October 18th, 2023, EHS postdoctoral research fellow, Dr Annika Capelán gave a seminar titled "Losing Face: Troubling human subjectivity through character development with merino sheep on southern rangelands." In this reflective blog, I think about the ways in which I have encountered the sheep and how these experiences relate to Capelán's treatment of the subject matter at hand.
Growing up in the South African township, Rammolutsi, the North of the Free State, there are several encounters that I have had with the sheep as a non-human figure. Although Capelan's seminar was not about all forms of sheep, it invoked memories. Capelan focused the attention on the wool farming of the merino sheep and how this animal, through trade, Hollywood cinema, and "Disneyfication", has been assigned value.
In general, we are all implicated in the capitalist modes of production, in so far as fast fashion and garment production are concerned. This, however, does not take the focus away from the question of who owns these modes of production. And how Capital accumulation is currently constituted across different regions of the world.
In my own immediate life, an experience familiar to the majority of black and landless people in South Africa, sheep's presence always emerged in three ways: in line with traditional practices of honouring my family's ancestors: funerals, ceremonies, and rituals. In Rammolutsi, there were few black people who owned livestock. My uncle, Mohlolo, specialised in rearing these. His work was to look after the livestock of middle-class families, some of whom owned shops across parts of the township.
And although I had encounters of working on farms on which my aunt, Mmenyana, also lived, the figure of the sheep was not for the purposes of wool farming.
Sheep, then, in my memory of growing up, brings about notions of land, labour, class, grief, the transgenerational modes of thinking across temporal orders, and the politics of being. Large-scale industrial farming of sheep had never been something I actively thought about until I came across documentary films that aimed to bring attention to land-clearing practices and how animal farming impacts the environment.
In her seminar, Capelán addressed Human subject formation, and how anthropomorphism, through cinema, contributes to the imaginaries dominant in contemporary and historical narratives of the sheep. With fieldwork that spans three continents, Capelán travels across regions, including Australia, Patagonia in Argentina and Chile, the Karoo in South Africa, and Lesotho Highlands to deploy embodied ethnography through what might broadly be categorised under filmic anthropology.
Capelán's offering, then, raised questions about the researcher's experiences in the subject they are researching. As well as the ways in which non-fiction filmmaking in research can generate new questions.
For the South African and African context, I was left curious about the African cinema, indigenous knowledge systems, settler colonial imposition, and how research methods might be affected when we consider the field of Environmental Humanities in the so-called Global South.
Further, the question of racialised subject formation and human/non-human relations in the age of neoliberal capitalism is something I was left wondering about. I found Capelán's work generative.
Words by mpho ndaba
ndaba is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar of African environmentalism, migration, cities, and spatial politics.