While pastoralist lands and livelihoods are increasingly under threat, the role of pastoralists has been largely undertheorized within the Anthropocene framework. Historically, through tropes of modernity, understandings of pastoralist livelihood systems in Africa (and elsewhere) have been prey to misjudgments, negative stereotypes but also continue to be mischaracterized by policy makers and experts in fields like development, climate change and biodiversity conservation. Anthropologists and their scholarly kin are well placed to be critical translators across these multiple and complex global and local entanglements. However, in face of the increasing global framing of socio-ecological crises as “techno-complexes” – largely driven by natural science epistemologies – we are often confronted with epistemological subjugation and hierarchies ourselves. Anthropocene discourses bring forth new solutions centered around technologies of calculation and prediction, underpinned by ideologies of control. However, as Ian Scoones (2022) has recently pointed out, in face of climate change the world is moving more towards non-equilibrium conditions which means that pastoralists hold crucial knowledge about how to live with unpredictable ecological change. In this paper, we draw on ethnographic and linguistic research, and compare lived experiences of the Anthropocene among the Fulani, Hamar and Maasai people. We ask how pastoralist ways of knowing and being in the world – which are intricately connected – can help to dismantle disciplinary divides. Firstly, we demonstrate how pastoralist epistemologies need to be considered as embedded within relational ontologies that are brought into being by weaving meaningful relations between animals, people and changing landscapes. Secondly, we argue that plural ecologies of knowledge (Haines & de Wit 2024) approaches are needed in the sciences to contribute more equitable forms of knowledge production for the Anthropocene.