We compare the mobility of people linked to livestock in the Chilean-Argentine Patagonian Andes, with the livestock of the Apennines in the Southern -Central regions of Italy, as a way of recognizing the importance of a much greater mobility than that linked to animals, because in these regions the mobility of livestock is linked to the marginal, peripheral, remote and empty character of the inhabited space.
We will show how mobility, in addition to the specific strategy with animals, has to do with broader networks. As Tsing reminds us, all cultures are shaped and transformed through long histories that articulate local and global networks of power, commerce and meaning. From here, we seek to understand how the universals from which the marginality that concerns us was configured, that is, the urban/rural or modernity/tradition dichotomies, operate in the world, taking specific forms through the friction that is produced from the heterogeneous and unequal encounters that establish new arrangements of culture and power, which are both local and global. Today these changes increasingly go through the relationships that pastoral practices and rural mobility have with technologies, communications, and with a modified perception of space.
A possible approach to address mobility would be based on Ingold's work on "lines" and "paths", in the particular decline of the relationship between spaces and practices. Understanding it as a line, where we must not only pay attention to the traces of the footprints, but also to the threads that are linked in the middle to give meaning to that layout. Above all because mobility, like the line, was subjected to a stripping of meaning from the National State, which in these marginal spaces is the institutionalization of a Western gaze that sought to reduce lines to straight lines and mobilities to fixed exchanges and bounded.
