Anywhere they Roam: Nomads and the uprooting of the home/away binary

This photo story was one of the runners up for the 2021 Australian Network of Student Anthropologists (ANSA) Visual Ethnography Competition.

“Home is where the heart is” is a commonly accepted trope in the popular imagination. A symbolic space of familiarity, the metaphor paints a picture of refuge, relaxation and rejuvenation, held together (perhaps) by the bonds of family and friends. And yet, despite this seemingly uncontroversial claim, it actually stands in direct opposition to the sedentary biases of modernity that tethers home to territory.

Seen through the lens of traditional political and anthropological discourse, home isn’t a warm fuzzy feeling, but an address with a letterbox, a city or town that played a significant role in your biographical trajectory, or – at its most macro level – a nation-state to whom you belong. Home, as it were, is seen as a fixed point in space around which we orbit before returning (eventually) to this central gravitational node. 

However, for millennia, nomadic communities around the world have challenged this sedentarist conception of home. Living their lives and (literally) building their “homes” on the move, the nomads of Western Mongolia demonstrate that home isn’t necessarily fixed and familiar but mobile and multiple. A circular dwelling made from a lattice of wood and covered in felt and wool, Mongolian gers are portable tents that can be quickly built and dismantled – sometimes in as little as 30 minutes. With their mobile homes and pasture-driven mobility practices through the semi-arid grasslands of the steppes, these nomads not only re-imagine what home is or could be but also “uproot” the very binary of home/away itself.

Analysed through Cresswell’s “nomadic metaphysics” and Urry’s “mobilities paradigm,” home/away is a false dichotomy, a bogus binary built on the faltering foundations of a Western ideological discourse that stakes home to a fixed point in territorial space. But as nomadic people show, home isn’t necessarily tethered to territory per se, but to the territorial dwellers themselves who, as agents, can, do, and – in the case of nomadic herders – must move: on average four times a year (sometimes more if the grazing isn’t good) according to the Tuvan and Kazakh nomads I met in Western Mongolia. As Saussure’s relational theory of language argues, meaning is created by oppositions. Hence, with no rooted sense of “home” acting as its symbolic counterpoint, “away” loses its meaning; at least, in this particular cultural context. 

Indeed, home isn’t so much rooted in the ground, but routed through space and time. As nomads remind us, it isn’t the place itself that makes home, but the people in place. In lives of perpetual mobility, home isn’t so much felt beneath one’s feet and thus something left behind, but something inherently mobile – such as a ger. In a country of just over three million, the ger (meaning “home” in Mongolian) remains the primary place of residence for roughly one-third of the population. On average, they accommodate between five and 15 people, and sitting in their centre are wood-burning stoves. In a slight tweak to this common trope, for these nomads, home is where the hearth is, literally.