Doctoral candidate in project 3 - Robert Weijs

The introduction of straight lines into a landscape in Africa, and in Europe the process of bending them. Two movements, different directions, the same structural axis, and very visual.

My name is Robert Weijs, filmmaker and visual anthropologist (BA Cultural Anthropology, Leiden University; MA Visual Anthropology, University of Amsterdam). This observation is part of my PhD research within the HEALENAE Doctoral Network, Project 3: Livestock and Natural Resource Management: Biodiversity and Zoonotic Diseases. I am supervised by Professor Salome Bukachi at the University of Nairobi and Professor Ciara Kierans at Aarhus University, across a dual PhD enrolled jointly at both institutions.

In Loita, Kenya, communally held land is being divided into individual plots, changing the herds and knowledge that depended on it. In the Netherlands, intensified farming is under growing pressure, from a different direction.

My research follows what indigenous knowledge already holds about disease, land and animals in Loita, knowledge that may anticipate rather than lag behind biomedical understanding, and asks what a structural comparison between these two sites, pressured from different directions, can make visible about zoonotic risk that neither could reveal alone.

I have filmed in Loita for over twenty years. That archive, revisited now against a changing landscape, is not illustration but method: montage can evoke what a single observation cannot, and footage watched years later resists the neatness that memory and fieldnotes tend to impose. I bring a comparable, if different, closeness to the European site: I grew up in the Dutch countryside, in the same region where this intensification took hold. Alongside long-term participant observation, I work collaboratively, including at times through film elicitation with the people in the footage.

What the line reveals, in both directions, remains to be filmed.