Barbara Löhde Awarded the Dissertation Prize of the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology
The German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (GASCA) has honored Dr. Barbara Löhde’s research on “Cattle Economies and Social Reconfigurations in the Urban Space. Pastoralist and Capitalist Entrepreneurship in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso” with its Dissertation Prize. The award ceremony took place on Wednesday, October 1, 2025, during the association’s biennial conference.Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2016, Barbara Löhde, then a researcher at the Institute of Anthropology and the research project GlobE – Urban FoodPlus, studied residents of the West African metropolis Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, who organize their urban livelihoods economically, socially, and culturally through cattle keeping. Her work builds on a long tradition of research on nomadic pastoralists but brings this focus into the urban and peri-urban spaces of the Sahel region. She demonstrates how cattle husbandry in the West African city becomes the basis for innovative forms of entrepreneurship that not only generate income but also contribute to food sovereignty and food security.
Löhde accompanied Fulani pastoralists to urban backyards where they keep dairy cows, as well as Mossi civil servants and businesspeople to their peri-urban farms, where they pursue capital-intensive stall-fed livestock production. Drawing on meticulous long-term observations and in-depth interviews, her study analyzes how urban market mechanisms profoundly shape social structures, labor relations, and gender roles. It provides new insights into the diversity of West African livestock systems and their adaptive strategies, showing how climate change, dwindling resources in savanna regions, and rapid urbanization are deeply transforming the knowledge and practices of formerly nomadic populations. At the same time, the study reveals how strongly sociocultural norms shape economic change, while the specific conditions of the urban environment give rise to new forms of value creation, social relations, and cultural identities.
With its focus on livestock keeping, urbanization, ethnicity, entrepreneurship, and gender relations, Barbara Löhde’s work makes a significant contribution to current scholarly debates. It also highlights how anthropological research can help to understand socioeconomic transformations in times of climate change and food crises. Her study provides important insights into possible future directions for West African cattle economies in the 21st century and underscores the importance of innovative entrepreneurship and urban spaces for food sovereignty and food security.
The dissertation will be published Open Access within the Göttingen Series of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Link) by Göttingen University Press.
