Our February 2025 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, February 26 at 5:30pm in UNC’s HHIVE Lab, Greenlaw 524, with options for members to join via Zoom as well. 
We discussed Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa by Julie Livingston (Duke UP, 2019). Specifically, we focused on the following:
- Prologue: “A Planetary Parable” (pp. 1-10)
- Ch. 1: “Rainmaking and Other Forgotten Things” (pp. 11-34)
If you missed the meeting, you can still access the text on the Readings page of this site!
You can also access the recording of our meeting here.
All of our meetings for spring 2025 will take place at 5:30pm eastern time on the last Wednesday of each month in the HHIVE Lab (Greenlaw 524) with options for people to join via Zoom as well.
We’ll be posting information about our March meeting soon!
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Livingston, Julie. Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa. Duke UP, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478007005.
Meeting Notes (courtesy of LMCC Co-Director Mindy Buchanan-King):
- Different, more ecological approach; a different perspective from our other readings.
- Desire: Interested in Paul’s perspective, and contemporary re-narrativization of the relationship between secular and non-secular; machineries as its own type of technology. Also, the geographic moves are interesting, the interconnectedness; skillful, provocative listing of technologies
- Paul: Multiple times, calling back to California—since 2019, we’ve seen that get catastrophically worse in terms of droughts and wildfires
- Desire: Livingston’s leaning on the term of technology throughout Ch. 1; her re-tooling of how we think about self-devouring growth. Toxic positivity, born out of similar rhetorical moves grounded in industrialization, anticipating capitalism, where there’s a positive spin on what’s happening, but we need to take a moment to rethink this kind of growth as limiting. Growth is a tool used by capitalism to say one thing.
- Paul: It feels like so much of her project is thinking about opening up a new space, a new way to rethink about the repressed and discarded. Thinking about retail: Growth means somebody isn’t getting as much. We just accept it, and accept very small victories.
- Desire: What are reactions to the moment Livingston talks about the cost-benefit analysis; it’s cheaper to just treat the GI problems and diarrhea rather than make clean water accessible. These efforts have not evolved to the point of public health.
- Carmen: Highlighting cost-benefit analyses as a symptom of self-devouring growth, that it’s cheaper in the end to treat conditions than to maintain water infrastructure. This reading depicts African nations as more complicated environments; Livingston starts off by talking about Botswana as a developmental “miracle.”
- Desire: This piece has a “both/and” quality; not having to disavow science, but also rethinking history and reading rainmaking as a way of bringing experiences of the past into the foreground. Contemporary science can be good, but it’s limited; there’s a way to braid these experiences, and how Botswana is doing that.
- Paul: To be a purely technocratic state is part of the problem; it’s in the best interest of the status quo to call these methods (such as rainmaking) “primitive,” as part of the past. Thinking about how different populations migrate through Botswana, and Livingston taking the time to give a history. It’s not just a so-called developing nation.
- Desire: How Livingston’s bringing this postcolonial history to awareness, and even pre-colonial history; she’s doing some interesting thing with language. Even with the concept of form—integrating moments in where she’s breaking down an academic form. But also bringing in balance between things typically framed as being opposing.
- Paul: Talking about playing around with form; also style as well. It’s reading more as a creative nonfiction essay, using short, declarative statements. Talking about the rudimentary nature of water, but emphasizing the point that even people are selling it.
- Desire: The form has texture; Livingston orients the focus of a sentence, to keep moving the focus, while keeping it centered around her core messages. It almost sounds like approximating the movement of water itself. In Ch. 1, at no point does she give way to prioritizing science, or prioritizing traditional academic methodologies. She does well to alternate.
- Paul: Mentioning this sense of movement, the author is always moving onto something else, while also doing traditional academic research. Even the margins (in terms of the layout) feel intentional, making it more accessible.
- Desire: Tradition of growth even in academic, and the longer the sentences become. Maybe that’s playing into her decisions. There is an affect to this that we can’t discount.
- Carmen: Like the idea of the structure of her work offering an alternative to the idea of self-devouring growth.
- Desire: Has anyone previously encountered the term “underclasses”?
- Carmen: Maybe that’s a social process, that puts people beneath in a hierarchy.
- Regan: It looks like the idea of underclass is to talk about hierarchy isn’t a way of only talking about it in terms of economics. She uses it to talk about how 19th-century missionaries were trying to impose a hierarchy; it’s a different type of hierarchy.
- Paul: Ways to reframe our ideas, and the collective approach. Thinking about how masks were politicized during COVID; it was so hard for people to conceptualize the collective. Rainmaking required a concerted effort, but also a respect for the plants and animals and all these other aspects; the metaphysical.
- Desire: Just the moves to engender connectivity; to use that as the basis of what can and should happen. What is most sustainable is connectedness; Livingston does acknowledge there were problems, but to say there are things we can borrow from traditions and bring together that dismantles the impulse to hierarchies. In the prologue and Ch. 1, she connects rain to cattle. Thinking about conversations about cutting funding to, say, NIH, what do you mean that measles will spread? It’s a disconnected way of thinking; it’s really modular. What Livingston is giving us is a model, a way of stepping away from five bullet points.
- Paul: Thinking about connectivity between people/community, but also with non-human entities. Even just the idea where bodies of water change, and all the ramifications of that. Most public health experts say, they’re doing their job if they’re not seen. We see the doctors, but we don’t see the public health initiatives. Maybe we need both water and ORT (prevention and treatment); navigating that balance as we reshape approaches.
- Desire: Beautiful model of decentering the human, without devaluing the concept of human. To attend to the problems that threaten the basis of being alive, like the profound impact water quality has on the living. An interesting way of bringing all of these agents, or participants, together.
- Steven: The piece chooses not to engage with conversations about economic policy, even Marxism. Growth is an economic phenomenon, but is that an intentional choice to think about growth culturally and socially. Not talking about growth as a discipline.
- Carmen: Maybe she didn’t focus on specific economic theories because self-devouring growth is an intrinsic feature in capitalism, but you could see it in a communist regime because it is empire. She was arguing that self-devouring growth can be seen in a variety of economic conditions.
- Desire: Livingston seems to want to move away from the transactional, in thinking about resource management. Trying to nudge us into ways of thinking about ways that don’t pay homage to economics.
- Paul: It’s a good point that she intentionally steers away from economics, to think about the collective.
- Carmen: She may also want to make her work more accessible; talking about Marxism may have turned people away.
- Reagan: There’s a chance she wouldn’t mention Marxism, because that’s highly rooted in European economics. The terminology she’s using is more subaltern. She clearly doesn’t want to go into categories of Enlightenment/European ideologies.
- Steven: Is Livingston critiquing at all public health as a concept as being an imported concept; she purports a secular version of rainmaking, but maybe that binary becomes imposed upon by Western ideals of controlling water, making it secular. Does she critique economic development as an ideal that has been forced onto this area?
- Desire: That’s such an interesting way of thinking about public health; thinking about components of public health, that we use as an academic thing, that is then connected to Eurocentric models of thinking. Livingston seems to be advocating that public was never that; public health was always operating on multiple plains and roots in traditions. The problem is that we keep trying to control it, instead of allowing modes of thinking to synthesize.
- Steven: The monolithic idea of control; do we think that she provides a convincing alternative to control? Is there a middle ground between the secular and the sacred? It feels like we’re going to let make rainmaking happen, we know how to control it, but we’re going to step back from it. We’re going to bring back tradition, but it doesn’t quite feel convincing to bring back tradition more like a supplement.
- Desire: I wonder if what she’s proposing isn’t an alternative; it’s something that is, and it’s something that is operational. We can recognize successes in this particular thing, but to recognize it, we need to scale back and see it as a public health approach. It’s not perfect, but it’s functional. That’s part of the parable she’s telling, using that to carry to all these different geographies. I don’t think she’s saying reintroduce tradition, because it’s never really gone away, because it’s always been present. It is happening, and what do we do with that?
- Steven: Suitable as its own system, not an incomplete off-shoot of what public health is. It’s an imperfect, uncertain system; challenging the idea that there is no perfection.
- Paul: It’s both/and, not either/or; even critiquing the very way we conceptualize public health. For several decades, the problem with public health was that it’s so paternalistic, without a care for traditions. There seems to be a move toward being less paternalistic approaches. She’s focusing on water, beef, and railroads; curious about the last chapter, is there a solution offered? Also interested in the beef chapter (chapter 2), beef as a form of currency and political clout in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Note: The featured image for this post is a cropped image of the cover of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke UP, 2019) by Julie Livingston.