Classical ethnographic interventions related to the conceptualization of the nomad have remained largely limited to their description through essentialized notions of mobility and their reductive representation as the Other. Influenced by positivist and evolutionary discourses, functionalist analyses prominent in early nineteenth century anthropological works engaged in the classification of the nomadic Other in contradistinction to the sedentary subject, often reiterated in the categorical distinction of primitive and modern. Constituted by colonialist discourses of control, the othering of nomadic communities was thus contingent on the interpretation of their movement as anti-authority. Moving beyond such extractivist narratives that are significantly involved in the visualization of nomadic people exclusively in positions of subordination and marginality, my contribution seeks to draws attention to the assumed association between territorial belongingness, presence and identity, implicit in thefigurative construction of the nomad and its significant difference with the actual lives of nomadic people. By deliberating on the performative practices of myths of origin among the Rabari in Rajasthan, a semi-nomadic community of camel herders whose lives remain uncomfortably positioned between discourses of nomadism and sedentarism, and of freedom and control, I argue that nomadic lives are characterized by the coexistence of tactics and acts of epistemic disobedience alongside the institutional presence of vigilance and control. Through subjective acts of worlding, the Rabari negotiate their territorial, historical and caste-imposed invisibility through a mythical retelling of their origin that justifies their claims of belongingness and mobility. Reading such practices as exceeding the bounded interpretations of subordination or subversion, this paper thus challenges exclusivist discourses by drawing attention to the need to understand the analytic constructs of movement, belongingness and home in nomadic studies, from the lived histories of mobile communities, their life-worlds, and from onto-epistemological contexts of their production as categories of representation.
