Resisting Extinction Narratives and Sedentist Bias: Exploring hope for nomadic lifeways in urban and rural contexts
Panel 19 / Quinto Convegno Nazionale SIAC “SPERARE / DISPERARE / DESIDERARE”
Matera, 25-27 settembre 2025
Proponenti: Stefania Pontrandolfo (Università di Verona), Ariell Ahearn (University of Oxford)
Abstract
For centuries, state authorities predicted the extinction of nomadic ways of life amongst groups as diverse as the Roma and Sinti in Europe and mobile pastoralists groups in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond. Early extinction narratives were underpinned by a contradictory mix of melancholy for the exotified figure of the nomad, seen as incompatible with modernity, as well as explicit anti-nomadic policies of forced sedentarisation. Today, the idea that nomadic ways of life are fading away are prevalent in climate change adaptation and securitization discourses, which posit that the lands that mobile pastoralist inhabit will become uninhabitable or too climatically volatile for herders to survive in. Likewise, in Europe development discourses take a more patronising approach by presenting nomadism as an insecure or unsafe way of life. In this panel, we aim to examine how extinction narratives have been resisted by nomadic peoples encompassing both urban and rural livelihoods. How have responses to anti-nomadism enabled forms of resilience and political astuteness amongst nomadic peoples? What does hope look like in this context, where the future projected publicly for this way of life is always predicted to fail by development practitioners and governments? Extinction narratives also raise critical methodological questions. How can we as scholars create spaces for hope through everyday academic practices of teaching, fieldwork, writing and advocacy for communities?
Keywords: Nomdic Peoples, Pastoralists Groups, Roma and Sinti, Extinction Narratives, Sedentist Bias
Lingue accettate: English
Sessione Unica
Venerdì 26/9/25, ore 9.00-10.45, aula C002, piano terra
Takahiro Ozaki (ozakit@leh.kagoshima-u.ac.jp) (Kagoshima University), What mobility is crucial to nomadic lives? -from a case study of Mongolian and Inner Mongolian pastoralists
In 1999, C. Humphrey and D. Sneath published “The end of nomadism?”. It underlined the seasonal mobility (nomadism) to sustain Mongolian pasture ecology and pastoralism, criticizing Chinese sedentarist pastoralism policy. However, the subsequent history was not so simple in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. Mongolia was hit by cold and snow disaster severely that year. Pastoralists who lost livestock rushed into suburban pastures, where they could easily get cash income. However, they found it difficult to make seasonal movements for social reasons, as they could only keep their rights over the pasture by being there. Recently, they started to build fixed houses. On the contrary, as not a few pastoralists moved to cities in Inner Mongolia, remaining pastoralists got chances to use the absentees’ pasture. It made livestock’s mobility possible to some extent. Pastoralists often carry ger with them for leasehold pastures. In sum, mobility of Mongolian and Inner Mongolian pastoralists is composed of three elements. That is, houses, livestock, and people. Mobility of houses seems to be important from the eyes of sedentist government, even if people may own and use ger occasionally. On the contrary, mobility of livestock is not directly linked with the recognition of nomadic lifestyle. Additionally, livestock cannot go across the national border in general. However, it is common that some household members go abroad for wage labor among Mongolian pastoralists, although sedentary people also do so. We may conclude that the most important element in the sedentist discourses about nomadism is mobility of houses which can be linked with land tenure, regardless of real mobility of livestock and people living there.
Daniel J. Murphy (murphdl@ucmail.uc.edu) (University of Cincinnati), Understanding pastoral possibilities in Mongolia: Disaster and hope in a climate-changed world
This paper explores place-based understandings of risk, opportunity, and hope in the context of climate change-induced disaster in Mongolia. Since decollectivization in 1993, livestock herds in Bayankhutag, a rural district in eastern Mongolia, have grown substantially. Despite divergent and unequal loss rates during somewhat small and infrequent disaster events, many households have seen their herds weather such risks and continue to grow in those 30 years. Along with the increase in herd size, herders have also drawn on diverse ontological logics and sources of meaning to explain such comparatively extreme growth in livestock wealth. Yet, during the winter of 2023-2024 a massive, unprecedented winter dzud disaster unfolded where nearly 80% of livestock in the district perished. Many households who have consistently owned over a thousand animals in the preceding decades saw their herds reduced to below subsistence levels. One would imagine this might challenge their ideas about the long-term sustainability of livestock herding and contradict their local explanations for livestock wealth, but many see the moment as an opportunity to rebuild their herds albeit differently. In fact, they draw on those same cultural logics and meanings to craft a vision of hope that extends our understanding of pastoral resilience beyond the materiality of herds, labor, and markets to the broader array of animating forces that make pastoral livelihoods possible.
Sarah Lunaček (sarahlunacek@gmail.com) (University of Ljubljana), Disappearing or transforming: nomadic herding in Niger between identity and livelihoods
Spending time with Tuaregs in cities and on the countryside, which are related through family ties and economic arrangements, I came across different opinions regarding nomadic aspect of life of Tuareg, among them the idea nomadic life is doomed to disappear in face of modernisation. There was a range of other more moderate and nuanced opinions and actions. Simultaneously, the images and items of nomadic life (like children with goats, camel races, milk, tea) were/are praised in social media and appreciated in everyday life and celebrations as markers of identity. It seemed like nomadic identity for urban Tuareg was something to ‘develop’ and something to long for simultaneously.
Giorgia Decarli (giorgia.decarli@univr.it) (Università di Verona), Movements. Evangelism as an itinerant way of life. An ethnographic insight into a Sinti community of northern Italy
Italian State and media narratives, conditioned by a pervasive sedentarist prejudice (Malkki 1992; Gilbert 2014), portray the nomadic lives of Sinti as delinquent lives. Local policies, at the same time, inhibit any form of cultural and economic mobility of italian Sinti families. The present time seems so still as to leave no room for Sinti counter-narratives of desired mobilities. Ethnography, however, observes that Sinti have not renounced a life on the move and in their today practices (more than in words) a sense of resistance to annihilation can still be glimpsed. The paper focuses on affiliation to the Evangelical Church as an invisible strategy for reconstructing (in a protected environment such as an official religion) an itinerant Sinti identity that mainstream narratives and policies attempt to demolish. The relationship between Sinti and Roma communities and the Pentecostal/Evangelical Church is the subject of studies that look at the movement development (Williams 1987, 2012), religious mobilisation (Roman 2018), dynamics related to peculiar political contexts (Foszto 2006), precepts as measures to counter social decline (Bizzini 2019) and biblical principles as means of cultural transformation (Montañés Jiménez 2024). They seem, however, to overlook the conservative power that Sinti glimpse in it in terms of spatial and cultural mobility. Although the histories of adherence to Evangelism of my Sinti interlocutors also reveal behavioural changes with respect to certain Sinti customs, evangelical rallies of believers offer opportunities for mobility and family gathering that Sinti transform into preservation strategies of significant dimensions of the itinerant Sinti life. The ethnographic gaze attempts to explore them.
