Abstract

This paper proposes Nomadic Exchange as a methodological framework for rethinking Central Eurasia beyond nation-state logics, institutional mobility, and extractive models of cultural exchange. Drawing from ongoing Indigenous-led, artist-run collaborations between Central Asia and Native North America, the paper argues that nomadic exchange is not merely a theme or metaphor, but a living cultural infrastructure rooted in kinship, land-based knowledge, and long-term relational accountability.

Dominant approaches to Central Eurasia often frame the region through geopolitical borders, imperial histories, or post-Soviet transition narratives. While analytically useful, these frameworks frequently overlook Indigenous epistemologies that understand space as relational, mobile, and continually negotiated. This paper centers Indigenous artist-led exchange as a counter-method—one that privileges lived experience, shared labor, and mutual obligation over institutional outcomes or state-centered cultural diplomacy.

The paper draws on the author’s sustained involvement with Nomadic Exchange, an Indigenous-led initiative founded by Kyrgyz artist Shaarbek Amankul in Kyrgyzstan that fosters long-term collaboration among artists, scholars, and culture bearers from Central Asia and Indigenous communities in North America. Since 2024, the project has intentionally shifted away from international “residency” models toward a kinship-based approach grounded in shared travel, communal making, collective authorship, and ongoing return. These exchanges operate without fixed curricula or hierarchical authority, emphasizing reciprocity, trust, and care as foundational structures.

Positioning Nomadic Exchange as a method, the paper explores three interrelated dimensions:

Infrastructure – how artist-run initiatives function as alternative systems of knowledge production and circulation beyond state and academic institutions; Mobility – how Indigenous-led exchange reframes movement not as access or privilege, but as responsibility to land, community, and relationship; and Power – how lateral Indigenous solidarities unsettle dominant narratives of representation, expertise, and cultural value.

By foregrounding artists as theorists and cultural workers as method-makers, this paper challenges conventional separations between scholarship and practice. It asks how Central Eurasia might be reimagined through Indigenous relational frameworks that predate and exceed modern borders, while remaining deeply entangled with contemporary political, economic, and ecological realities.

Ultimately, the paper contributes to Central Eurasian studies by offering an Indigenous, practice-based methodology for understanding space, society, and power as dynamic processes sustained through relationships rather than governance. Nomadic Exchange is presented not as a case study to be analyzed from a distance, but as an active method through which alternative futures are continually rehearsed and enacted.