Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath, The End of Nomadism? Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham, NC

Inner Asian nomadism is often conceived as a self-contained way of life driven to obsolescence by modernity, as in Nikita Mikhalkov's critically-acclaimed film “Close to Eden” (1991). Social anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath offer an extensive fieldwork-based study of Inner Asian “mobile pastoralists”—a term they use to avoid the holistic overtones of “nomadism.” They reveal mobile pastoralism as a flexible “series of local knowledges and techniques located in particular historical circumstances” that are applicable to a range of institutional contexts, deployable as part of “technologically advanced and profit-oriented economic activity,” and even compatible with an urbanized lifestyle. Rigorously grounded in a set of ten case-study sites throughout post-socialist Russia, Mongolia, and China, the book shows how speci- ficities in local cultures, regional environments, and state policies differentially inflect global market forces, yielding divergent social and economic outcomes. True to the strengths of British social anthropology, the authors bring out the ways in which new forms of social networks that cross-cut ties of kinship, ethnicity, class, and proximity are shaping the economic and institutional frameworks in which pastoralism will continue to develop throughout this region

China · Economic geography · Genealogy · Geography · Kinship · Modernity · Pastoralism · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · State formation · Anthropology · Arctic and Russian Policy Studies · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology