On the Move features three different groups of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists in three
vastly different regions - the Central Sahara in Africa the Arabian Gulf and the Central
Eurasian steppes - highlighting crosscutting themes relevant to contemporary concerns about the
human condition and our planetary future. The book shares lessons we might learn from the ways
of pastoral nomads such as living lightly on the land and working creatively with and through
the sometimes challenging natural environments within which they move and know intimately.
Themes under exploration include mobility and self-sufficiency materialism consumerism and
environmental destruction the potency of experience-based knowledge both practical and richly
imaginative and how the concepts we use affect our appreciation of cultural differences. The
book seeks to highlight the gap between the ways these groups see and understand themselves and
the stereotypes - both negative and romantic - by which outsiders (from travellers and
architects to ecologists and state officials) have represented them or sought either to
appropriate or to control and change them. Working against tendencies to view such groups as
timeless or remnants of the past this exhibit follows a historical approach juxtaposing
different historical periods to show how the pastoralists' ways of living and possibilities for
flourishing have been affected by both environmental and political forces specifically from
key ruptures of the past century. At the same time it suggests that we have much to learn from
the pastoralist way of life.
