THE NOMADS OF POSTMODERN NOMADOLOGY

Research on nomads can be referred to as nomadology, a term that Deleuze and Guattari introduced to philosophy.(24)
At the beginning of the 1980s, with nomadology, they developed for the first time a nomadic way of thinking in philosophy that characterized nomadic life as anti-traditional and anti-conformist.
A nomadic way of thinking was presented that, ‘in a defensive way’, consciously turned against a centralized national model. The subsequent postmodern debate romanticized the nomad as a geographic metaphor par excellence.(25) Laptops, cell phones and credit cards are the preferred objects of a postmodern nomadic existence.(26) In this discourse, nomads belong to the economic, political and cultural elite: luxury, leisure, science and business nomads fall into this category. Here, not only does nomadic thinking serve as a metaphor, but a postmodern vision draws on a nomadic lifestyle – it is a collective emblem of cosmopolitan existence.(27)

Deleuze and Guattari’s nomads are creative and innovative. Their thinking opposes national thinking. Philosophical nomadology glorifies the nomads’ deterritorializing forces. The geographical metaphor of postmodern nomads is not just deeply masculine and individualistic, it is also Eurocentric. Postmodern nomadology appropriates a non-Western experience for the benefit of developing a European theory.(28) Modernity and globalization are associated only with privileged Western nomads.

Mobility is a metaphor for new postmodern urban nomads. Actually, one could presume that the nomadology discourse should also show some interest in rural ‘traditional’ strategies of mobility and their recent developments. But rural nomads are marginalized, and their habitat is pushed into the periphery of the globalized space or perceived as transit space at best.(29)
Until now only Claudot-Hawad (30) has analysed the movements of rural nomads in the Sahara in a nomadological way:
"This way of looking at the limits, viewing them as reversible (as places of friction or of contact), fits into a management of space that is open to the exterior, that is able to spread horizontally like a ‘rhizome’, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s image (2005), gathering other members to the existing body without changing the overall structure."



Urban Imuhar (Tuareg) nomads in the Sahara like the ishumar (31) are excluded from post-modern nomadology. Rural and urban nomads of the Sahara are marginalized in an ‘elitist’ postmodern nomadology and excluded from the globalization process.

- 1) Modern Nomads / Rural and urban Nomads
- 2) Nomadism / Pastoralism
- 4) Nomads and Globaliszation in the Sahara
- 5) Nomadology - New Approach in the Anthropology of the Nomads

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Chapters from the article:
Anja Fischer
Research and Nomads in the Age of Globalization
in:
Anja Fischer / Ines Kohl (eds.)
Tuareg Society within a Globalized World