Tracking Knowledge: Science, Tracking, and Technology

1. What they did

This is an anthropology master’s dissertation about how knowledge is made and shared when scientists and local trackers work together. The author studied the Western Kgalagadi Conservation Corridor (WKCC) project in Botswana, sponsored by Conservation International, which aims to set up a wildlife corridor between the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The project collects data with aerial surveys, animal collars and a CyberTracker spoor survey; the dissertation looks only at the spoor survey.

For the spoor survey, twelve men from seven villages in the corridor, aged from 22 to 54, were hired and trained to record tracks and signs on CyberTracker, an icon-based handheld computer with Global Positioning System (GPS). They walked transects of 8 to 12 km in pairs, and one tracker recorded from each vehicle while driving. Data were collected twice a year, in the wet and dry seasons, in rounds of about two months.

The author joined two rounds of fieldwork in 2009 (February and March, and June and July). At first he observed, then drove trackers to and from the transects, walked transects with them, and in the second round coordinated data collection. He interviewed all the trackers and the project’s Biodiversity Manager, Moses Selebatso, at least once, and some trackers several times, and learned most from informal conversations. He drew on thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, David Turnbull and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to ask whether “scientific” and “indigenous” knowledge can be discussed without setting them against each other.

2. What they found

The trackers

• The elder trackers generally knew far more about tracks and signs but had less schooling and lower literacy; the younger ones used the devices more easily. They learned from each other.
• All the trackers said they learned to track from their parents, mostly fathers and uncles, with real teaching starting between about nine and twelve. School, hunting restrictions from the 1970s onward, and hunting with dogs, donkeys and horses meant younger men had less chance to build these skills. The elder trackers said the younger ones “only know the big animals”.
• Three of the most knowledgeable, !Nate, Karoha and Nxjouklau, came from near Lone Tree. !Nate and Karoha had taken part in persistence hunts of large antelope such as kudu and had worked with Louis Liebenberg in the work that led to CyberTracker.

Tracking in practice

• Walking with the elder trackers, the author saw them move silently in single file into the wind, read the ground while scanning ahead, and use hand signs to show freshness of spoor, species, sex and direction of travel.
• When unsure of an identification they conferred and followed the spoor further until they agreed. They counted spoor in groups (21 gemsbok twice), then found the herd and saw it was larger than their count.
• They showed how to tell male from female steenbok by hoof shape, how to tell where a steenbok had lain down, and the sand piles steenbok dig to cover their droppings.
• !Nate said he tracks mostly with his eyes and his knowledge, listens when trapping, uses touch to feel the freshness of tracks and droppings, and rarely uses smell. Three trackers once left a fire saying their bodies told them a lion was near.
• The elder trackers spoke of animals as persons with houses and families, re-enacted an aardwolf’s movements from its tracks, and said their god put them and the animals in the same bush. Younger trackers did not speak of the same closeness.

CyberTracker and the data

• The trackers called themselves “Cybertrackers”, and !Nate called his own knowledge his “cybertracker”. They valued that what they saw was stored and would not disappear.
• The data keep the location and identification but not the trackers’ senses, stories and relationships with the animals. The data stayed with the scientists, and the youngest tracker asked where the data go and how the work would benefit the trackers.
• Trackers and the project manager both said they were learning from each other, and the manager relied on trackers’ local knowledge to plan transects.

3. What they concluded

• Knowledge cannot be split neatly into “science” and “indigenous knowledge”: knowledges move, mix and change through people, animals, places and technology.
• CyberTracker is neither wholly empowering nor wholly disempowering. It strips away much of the trackers’ embodied knowledge and keeps control of the data with scientists, but the trackers have made it their own, and it keeps tracking skills in use when hunting is restricted.
• The data carry traces of the tracks, the animals and the trackers’ knowledge, and the trackers’ way of relating to animals also shapes how the scientists see the data.
• CyberTracker cannot carry knowledge between trackers and scientists on its own: it needs ongoing conversation between both at every stage, including analysis.

4. How tracking was or was not used

Tracking is both the subject and the method of the project studied. The trackers identified tracks and signs (footprints, droppings, lying places, freshness of spoor) on foot transects and from vehicles, counted spoor, and sometimes followed spoor further to confirm an identification or to find animals. The author walked with them and recorded how they tracked and what they said about it.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. The thesis describes some trackers as among the most knowledgeable and the elder trackers as more skilled, but no evaluation or certification of their skill is reported. The project planned to give all trackers certification “in recognition of their tracking skills” at the end of the project.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• CyberTracker software on Windows Mobile handheld computers with GPS. It records time, date, position and observer name for each observation, and a track log of the observer’s path. Trackers chose “foot count” on transects and “4x4 count” in vehicles.
• Detailed maps of each part of the study area were uploaded to the devices with the day’s transects marked. Routes were planned each evening in ArcView, a Geographic Information System (GIS) program, together with trackers who knew the area.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• Projects that bring trackers’ knowledge into science risk turning it into data that only scientists control. Trackers need to see where their data go and what the project means for them.
• Data that depend on trackers’ knowledge should recognise the trackers’ ownership and contribution.
• Employing trackers in conservation keeps tracking knowledge alive at a time when there is little other reason to use it.