Sapere Aude research project explores how the cattle industry shaped the Kalahari landscape
How has commercial cattle production shaped not only landscapes and wildlife, but also the relationship between people and nature in the Kalahari? AIAS-AUFF Fellow anthropologist Pierre du Plessis from the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies will investigate this in a new research project awarded a prestigious Sapere Aude: DFF-Starting Grant.
Pierre du Plessis has received DKK 6,3 million from the Independent Research Fund Denmark to investigate how Botswana's cattle industry has, over decades, left its mark far beyond the areas where cattle actually graze in his project ‘Beyond the Hoof: How Cattle Production Shaped the Landscapes and Anthropological Knowledge of the Kalahari Desert.’
Bridging a knowledge gap
While the economic and ecological impact of cattle at sites of production is well documented, the more indirect impacts that ripple across landscapes, ecosystems and communities are far less studied. This is the knowledge gap Pierre du Plessis aims to address to uncover the entangled histories of colonialism, industrial livestock and how they influenced the history of anthropology in the Kalahari Desert.
"The environmental consequences of industrial agricultural production are often much more far-reaching than we imagine. The effects do not stop at the production site, but spread through landscapes and affect both humans, animals and ecological systems over great distances," says Pierre du Plessis.
The project will study the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, where veterinary control fences, boreholes and other infrastructure linked to the cattle industry have for decades fragmented wildlife migration routes, transformed patterns of vegetation growth and regeneration and affected the traditional territories and way of life of the San people, former hunter-gatherers.
When landscapes shape knowledge
A key feature of the project is that it examines not only landscape and ecological changes. As wildlife migration routes, vegetation patterns and human livelihoods change, so do the conditions under which researchers make their observations. The project will therefore investigate how the cattle industry's imprint on the landscape may have shaped the knowledge that anthropologists have developed about the Kalahari.
The project examines, among other things, a 300-kilometre-long veterinary control fence that has contributed to a mass die-off of migrating antelope. At the same time, a vegetation study will shed light on how the loss of these large herbivores may have altered the ecological trajectory of the Kalahari.
The aim is to show how changes in the landscape have also helped to shape researchers' opportunities to observe and understand the relationships between humans and nature.
Interdisciplinary collaboration
The research project will be based at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, running from September 2026 to July 2029, and will bring together expertise from anthropology and ecology. In addition to Pierre du Plessis, the project will include a postdoc who will investigate the current expansion of cattle production in the Kalahari, ecologist Thoralf Meyer from The University of Texas at Austin, who will conduct vegetation studies, and experienced anthropologist Robert K. Hitchcock from University of New Mexico who will contribute as an advisor.
“I think this interdisciplinary project will contribute to our understanding of the planetary scale of the current environmental crisis. The specificity of local actions is crucial not just for understanding problems at those locations but, in a globalized world, they can have ecological and social impacts across long distance,” Pierre du Plessis remarks about the Beyond the Hoof project.
About Pierre du Plessis
Pierre du Plessis is an environmental anthropologist from Botswana and currently an AIAS-AUFF Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. His research focuses on the relationships between people, animals and landscapes, with a particular focus on southern Africa. He received the 2019 AUFF's PhD prize for his dissertation on the Kalahari and has contributed to establishing Environmental Humanities as a leading international research field.
About the Beyond the Hoof project
Project title: Beyond the Hoof: How Cattle Production Shaped the Landscapes and Anthropological Knowledge of the Kalahari Desert
Grant: Sapere Aude: DFF-Starting Grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark
Amount: DKK 6,335,653
Period: 1 September 2026 – 30 July 2029
Anchor: Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University
About the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF)
Read about all the 2026 Sapere Aude recipients here:
About the Independent Research Fund Denmark here: https://dff.dk/en
Contact
Pierre Louis du Plessis, Principal Investigator, AIAS-AUFF Fellow
E-mail: pierredup@aias.au.dk
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) &
Department of Anthropology
School of Culture and Society
Aarhus University