Empty land, empty time? Anthropological theory and the challenge of nomadic civilization

This paper, based on lectures given at the National University of Mongolia, examines the effect of treating land and time as ‘empty’. It argues that the force of those effects is felt particularly acutely by nomadic peoples, and therefore that the study of nomadic civilizations has a crucial part to play in developing anthropological theory that can resist this misrepresentation. In particular, sedentary presumptions have exerted a powerful influence on our understanding of both land and time, treating unenclosed land as ‘waste’ and erasing the rhythm and time-depth of ‘unsettled’ landscapes. So what happens instead if we make mobility and movement the starting point for social theory?