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- Convenors:
-
Francesca Mosca
(Australian National University)
Andrew Leary (Australian National University)
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- Stream:
- Dwelling
- Location:
- Babel G03 (Lower Theatre)
- Start time:
- 4 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to explore the moral, political and affective dimensions of 'nomadism', a categorisation that does not account for emplacements that are temporally and spatially complex and often at odds with the imperatives of modernity.
Long Abstract:
Nomadism, long seen from the point of view of urban dominant societies as deviant, has oft been the foil against which good, sedentary and properly productive ways of life have been constructed and imbued with value. This panel aims to explore the moral, political and affective dimensions of nomadism.
The nomad categorisation is a reification of a way of life that does not account for emplacements that are temporally and spatially more complex than the simple designation allows for. Nomadism can in turn be a reason for the state to move you on or forcibly emplace you; a badge of honour and an important component in the construction of self and other; something tourists seek for an 'authentic' experience; and a form of resistance to capitalist modes of production.
Attention to nomadism illuminates assumptions about emplacement and belonging, and the perceived threat of uncontrollable mobility. It also opens a space for understanding subaltern ways of being in the world that are both forged in the crucible of modernity but also offer alternative means to survive its seemingly inexorable advance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I will discuss some of the complexities around issues of undocumented movement and rhizomatic nomadic crossings along the Thai-Burmese border.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will discuss some of the complexities around issues of undocumented movement and rhizomatic nomadic crossings along the Thai-Burmese border. In considering Deleuze and Guattari's concepts on nomadic movement and rhizome theory, I look at how my participants are indeed individual rhizomes who are acting out of response and reaction to the state apparatus that has failed them in a number of ways. In each participant's migration narrative, their nomadic movement is impelled or explained by a specific set of circumstances that are intrinsically linked to state failure (i.e. their movement is merely an innovative solution to their predicament or difficulty). I suggest that this resistance to the state apparatus is a largely un-noted consequence of nomadic action, rather than a deliberate product of nomadic conscious thought. In this view, the state's re-territorialising of the concept of migration is a way to sanction and control the innovative nomadic movement. These efforts often create a criminalization framework around migration regulation issues, which is explicitly moral in tone and practice as it presents the nomads as transgressors from the controlled and approved methods of movement. However, these irregular movements and nomadic crossings exist outside of the state apparatus largely because the state has failed those populations most vulnerable that exist on its periphery.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the moral underpinnings of the displacement of the Bedoul Bedouin from their home in Petra Jordan. It also highlights the counter morality, emerging from a history of mobility and sedentarism that the Bedoul propagate to hammer home their right to live and prosper in Petra.
Paper long abstract:
For many, the term Bedouin congers images of nomads navigating vast oceans of sand in an insatiable search for water. Bedouin were characterised as the scourge of farming communities on the desert-fringe and the human representation of the war between the "desert and the sewn" the struggle for survival of arable lands against the inexorable encroachment of the desert. For those who ruled the sedentary populations of the desert fringe Bedouin have always represented chaos. But this point of view is embedded in ways of life and forms of social order quite different to those that shaped Bedouin life. They carry a morality that does not contain the morality of Bedouin social life. Indeed the characterisation of Bedouin as nomads does not contain the historical diversity of a way of life in which mobility figured as one option among many, including sedentarism, available for meeting the changing socio-political conditions of life on the fringes of empire. Often those settled communities on the desert fringe that fell prey to marauding Bedouin were Bedouin themselves and where, perhaps, liberated from Ottoman rule; for a time at least.
These views of Bedouin mobility and lawlessness have carried on into the modern era, and are often used as a moral justification for the forced displacement, settlement and "development" of Bedouin. This paper investigates the struggle of the Bedoul Bedouin of Petra as they fight for their homeland against the imperatives of the tourism-industry, aspirations of the Jordanian state and competing claims to Petra.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how the Italian state, and non-Roma Italians, frame nomadism, and the responses this elicits from the inhabitants of ‘nomad camps’, who live lives of forced sedentarisation and struggle with the consequences of the assumption of nomad asociality and amorality.
Paper long abstract:
The stigmatisation of nomadism has a long history in Italy, which predates Giuseppe Mazzini's infamous definition of people without a country as "the bastards of humanity". To this day, 'nomads' is the everyday and legislative name that non-Roma Italians use to refer to Romani people. The mass media, policy, and everyday understandings of Roma/Gypsies suggest that they are untethered from the land on which they reside, and that they do not belong because their culture entails uncontrollable mobility. One of the important consequences of the stigma of nomadism is the institutionalisation of 'nomad camps', where approximately a third of Italy's Roma are made to reside. Here, disconnected from the social fabric of the city, apart from day-to-day interaction with Italians, people live lives of forced emplacement, which contrast sharply with the popular image of the carefree wanderers the nomad label conjures. One of the implications of nomadism is that it is amoral, because morality is implicitly tied to emplacement in Italian ways of framing discourses of belonging. This paper analyses some of the ways in which the Italian state, and non-Roma Italians, frame nomadism, and the responses this elicits from the inhabitants of the 'nomad camps'.