A Relational View of Pastoral (Im)Mobilities

Abstract

Pitched against the apparently more civilised and modern ‘settled’, pastoralists have historically been penalised for the seemingly primitive and outdated practice of mobility. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in western India, this paper challenges this reductive dichotomy and unpacks the many (im)mobilities produced, accessed, experienced and imagined by pastoralists. Adopting a relational lens, it shows how mobilities and immobilities co-constitute and are contingent on each other across social, geographical and temporal scales. Embedded within their own social and political history, the many forms that mobility can take dispel, ontologically, the homogenising effects of rigid typologies, but it also practically offers the capacity to adapt to changing times.