White Guys in the Borderlands: Boundary Surveying, Imperial Technoscience, and Environmental Change in the Nile Valley and at Lake Rudolf (Turkana), 1898–1909

Abstract

Through a focus on British imperial boundary surveys in Anglo-Ethiopian borderlands, this article argues that an elite White masculine subjectivity emerged from surveying’s technical practices. I suggest, drawing on Barad (2007), that ontological interpretations of surveying practice could help us understand how this elite subjectivity was formed through both surveying’s drive to abstraction and its embodied, “nomadic” (Deleuze and Guattari 2013) mode of production. I also note, in line with Singh’s (2018) notion of mastery, that the subjugation of natures involved in this practice was matched by surveyors’ subjugation of people: racialized divisions of surveying work and the racist mistreatment of survey personnel.