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Short Abstract
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Extending anthropological work on uncertainty, contingency, and indeterminacy, this panel invites contributions that closely reflect the ways mobile people experience their lives and look towards the future. We hope to move beyond a focus on marginality, to explore such things as how mobile groups make certainty (Hope forthcoming) and experience themselves as agentic, at a time when the rest of the world is in crisis.
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Long Abstract
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What is the future of nomadic studies? Following on from a plenary round table (UIAES 2021) and other recent work defying the ‘end of nomadism’, the subsequent step is to ask: ‘If nomadism, what next?’ We suggest moving beyond framing mobile peoples’ lives around political projects, to take their terminology, practices, and experiences seriously, and present their lives in all their complexity. Much previous work has focused narrowly on mobile peoples’ responses to uncertainty and contingency. Starting from work challenging such overly simplified accounts (Fotta 2019; Howarth 2023), this panel plans to make further interventions, producing innovative ethnographic theory on mobile peoples and beyond. This panel invites contributions that extend anthropological work on uncertainty, contingency, and indeterminacy to closely reflect the ways mobile people experience their lives and look towards the future with degrees of certainty. We aim to move beyond a focus on marginality, to explore such things as how mobile groups make certainty (Hope forthcoming) (for example, through resource management, rituals, kin-making, and cosmological certitude) and experience themselves as agentic, at a time when much of the world is in crisis. Rather than choosing between emic and etic analysis of the agency/marginalisation of these groups, tensions between the two will be used as starting points to consider how to approach mobile peoples’ lives. With the conference theme in mind, we invite panellists to draw on past ethnographic theories, and reach forward to develop new ones, in order to enliven the past and envision the future of nomadic studies. Panellists are invited, but not limited, to respond to these questions: How do those considered nomads not only negotiate uncertainty, but also make certainty? What roles do the past and present have in shaping their futures? How do mobile peoples’ (dis)orientations regarding the future shape their everyday lives?
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