Tracking Meat of the Sand

Abstract

This article explores the skilled arts of tracking and gathering as methods for noticing and theorizing multispecies landscapes in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Tracking is typically used to describe a practice of following animals, usually for hunting, whereas gathering primarily refers to the collection of plant and fungal materials. The author presents a case in which these terms have been scrambled during long-term ethnographic field research. The author and his interlocutors tracked the Kalahari desert truffle, an experience that demonstrates how aspects of tracking extend to gathering, but also how the practices are attentive to the movements of landscapes more broadly. This form of tracking attends to multiple spatial and temporal movements that include nonanimals and other nonhumans. It represents a way of noticing the assemblages of more-than-human relations that make up landscapes. These convergences, first identified through tracking, are then explored through the more distributed analytic of gathering. Inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s call to describe stories of gatherers and collectives in her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the article argues that thinking tracking through the gathering analytic helps articulate a “carrier bag approach” for understanding landscapes through the gatherings of relations with which they emerge.