On the Move

On the Move features three different groups of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists in three vastly different regions – the Central Sahara in Africa, the Arabian Gulf and the Central Eurasian steppes – highlighting crosscutting themes relevant to contemporary concerns about the human condition and our planetary future. The book shares lessons we might learn from the ways of pastoral nomads, such as living lightly on the land and working creatively with and through the sometimes challenging natural environments within which they move and know intimately. Themes under exploration include mobility and self-sufficiency; materialism, consumerism and environmental destruction; the potency of experience-based knowledge both practical and richly imaginative; and how the concepts we use affect our appreciation of cultural differences.

The book seeks to highlight the gap between the ways these groups see and understand themselves and the stereotypes – both negative and romantic – by which outsiders (from travellers and architects to ecologists and state officials) have represented them or sought either to appropriate or to control and change them. Working against tendencies to view such groups as timeless or remnants of the past, this exhibit follows a historical approach, juxtaposing different historical periods to show how the pastoralists’ ways of living and possibilities for flourishing have been affected by both environmental and political forces, specifically from key ruptures of the past century. At the same time, it suggests that we have much to learn from the pastoralist way of life.