Nomad lives

This book illustrates the extraordinary diversity of ‘nomad lives’ in time and
space, in a tribute to Claudine Karlin, comprising 28 texts signed by
economists, geographers, historians or sociologists.These case studies,
organized into five chapters, are invitations to meet women, men and children
from all over the world. The first chapter focuses on characterizing nomads
and nomadism through examples ranging from the Aka pygmies, hunter-gatherers
in the Central African forest, Yakut and Kazakh herders from the Central Asian
steppes, or “nomads of contemporary globalization”. The second concentrates on
the material culture of camps, from the Chatelperronians in the Grotte du
Bison at Arcy-sur-Cure (Yonne) to the Manteks, Kurds in contemporary Iraq. The
third examines the territories and circuits inherent to nomad lives, from the
first hominids of East Africa to the break in the fishing way of life brought
about by the arrival of Europeans in the Magellan Strait. Magdalenian mobility
trends in the Roc-aux-Sorciers (Vienne), changes in funerary practices during
the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Central Asian steppes (Kazakhstan), the sexual
division of labour among the Tchouktcha of Russian Siberia, etc.: the social
relations with the living and the dead, in and outside the group, are the main
themes of the last two chapters.But throughout the pages a single apparently
simple but extremely complex question emerges. The book ends with an attempt
to answer this question from the combined perspective of an archaeologist, an
ethnologist and a sociologist. Because, in the end, what does being a nomad
mean?