A survey of social ecologies in the freshwater biomes of highland Lesotho and the adjacent Eastern Cape, South Africa

Abstract Maloti-Drakensberg environments are highly localised, susceptible to changes in regional weather patterns and, through marked variations of topography, prone to imposing differing conditions even within relatively small areas. The resulting ‘archipelago’ of ecosystems, with often correspondingly specialised endemics, poses an observational challenge to research and governance institutions inclined to process these conditions in aggregate, for whom localised variances may be difficult to parse. Local indigenous, or ‘contextual’, communities, by contrast, live these conditions, having developed idiomatic frameworks for processing and communicating environmental complexity. For research, knowledge-making partnerships with such communities thus have great potential, offering observational and data-processing capacities that stem from an ontological emplacement in situ. One significant complication is that some regional idiomatic systems used to classify the world have an inherently social basis, recognising the human element as just one layer of a greater socioecological whole, contrasting common Western-materialist approaches. This study presents classifications made of ‘river snakes’ among a range of Maloti-Drakensberg communities, as examples of where idiomatic systems may differ from research perspectives. The instability and contingency of these classifications speaks to a contextual/behavioural taxonomic system; one that makes things what they are by virtue of where and who they are to the observer. Given the role of ‘river snakes’ and the specialists who classify them in the (re)production of local knowledge systems, these factors require attention from researchers seeking constructive engagement.