Nomads In The Sedentary World

Studies the role played by nomads in the political, linguistic, socio-economic and cultural development of the sedentary world around them. Spans regions from Hungary to Africa, India and China, and periods from the first millennium BC to early modern times.

The interaction between Eurasian pastoral nomads and the surrounding sedentary societies is a major theme in world history. This volume explores the mulitfarious nature of nomadic society and its relations with China, Russia and the Middle East from antiquity into the contemporary world with emphasis on the Mongol and Turkish peoples.

Studies the role played by nomads in the political, linguistic, socio-economic and cultural development of the sedentary world around them. Spans regions from Hungary to Africa, India and China, and periods from the first millennium BC to early modern times.

Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.

Throughout their entire history, the sedentary civilizations of China and Europe had to deal with nomads and barbarians. This unique volume explores their drastically different responses: China 'chose' containment while Europe 'chose' expansion. Migration played a crucial role in this interaction. Issuing from two population centers, the sedentary one in the West and the nomadic one in the East, two powerful population streams confronted each other in the Eurasian Steppe. This confrontation was a crucial factor in determining patterns of Eurasian history - it destroyed existing states, created new ones, and drastically changed the balance of power. Even today, while Russian populations in Asia contract, the population pressures in China and Central Asia continue to build and are likely to spill over across the border. This book shows how we are witnessing the beginning of a new cycle of the age-old contest.

We have lost the plot when it comes to migration. In our collective consciousness, the term 'migration' conjures up images of hordes of refugees fleeing 'their' country, escaping on rafts and coming to invade 'ours'. When we think of migration, we think of (largely unwanted) immigration and its ills. We've got it all wrong. Far from being abnormal, the act of going in search of a better life is at the core of the human experience. And now a new kind of nomad is emerging. What used to be a movement largely from east to west, south to north, developing to developed country is becoming more of a multilateral phenomenon with each passing day. Young people from everywhere are moving everywhere. Or rather, they are moving to where they expect to improve their lives and are turning the world into a beauty contest of cities and regions and companies vying to attract them. They are doing so because movement has become a key to their emancipation. After centuries of becoming sedentary, the future of humanity and the key to its enlightenment in the 21st century lies in re-embracing nomadism. Migration fosters the qualities that will allow our children to flourish and succeed. Our times require more migration, not less. Part memoir, part generational manifesto, The New Nomad is both the chronicle of this revolution and a call to embrace it.

Presenting a ground-breaking study of the emerging phenomenon of location-independence, this book examines the way in which the practices of 'global nomads', who live on the road, without fixed abode, place of employment or localised circle of friends, question many of the unwritten norms and ideals that characterise settled life in societies. With the lifestyles of global nomads blurring the boundaries between travel, migration, and dwelling, Global Nomads and Extreme Mobilities draws on in-depth interviews with a worldwide group of location-independent travellers, together with virtual and instant ethnography and discourse analysis, to show how lives oriented around extreme forms of mobility offer researchers in migration, tourism and mobilities a unique opportunity for examining the complex subjectivities and power relations associated with multi-mobility. With close attention to the nationalistic, political, and travel-related attachments of global nomads and the ways in which their own representation and justification of their lifestyles and subjectivities constitute a power negotiation, the book examines 'global nomads' social and intimate relationships and the forms of exclusion and discrimination that they encounter, raising the question of whether they live inside or outside societies - and indeed, whether there can be any life outside societies. A re-assessment of much contemporary research in the fields of mobility, migration and tourism studies, Global Nomads and Extreme Mobilities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences.