First Quarter: Living with land(s)

Hello. It's Friday, and the dawn chorus seems louder by the day, and the very first flowers have started blooming, including some intriguing rogue snowdrops that I just found a few towns over. Very soon, the seedlings that my owner and I started at our indoor grow station will need to go into larger pots. As the land wakes up, this is when it always feels most natural to look away from modern artifice and think about living not just "off" the land, but rather with it.

I write here periodically about personal and peer aspirations of living with the land, whether through communes or through solo homesteads, both as a means of transitioning out of a far less connected lifestyle and also as a matter of preparedness for when a lot of unsustainable infrastructure that we take for granted crumbles into dust. The most recent piece to this effect was sent just last month to paid subscribers, but anyone can find other pieces further back in the archives. But I myself have generally taken something for granted in writing these pieces: the premise that living with the land means living with one specific portion of land.

This would of course be my bias from growing up in a culture where one's home is a sedentary thing. It's true that based on where we can find work, we may each have more than one home throughout our lifetimes; but we still place high value on eventually finding the place to always live, or on going back to the home of childhood. Being "adrift" suggests incompleteness. This goes hand in hand with most Euro-colonial culture originating largely among peoples who had been sedentary agrarians for millennia and who viewed nomadic populations with prejudicial suspicion. Simultaneously, though, the mindset is not purely Euro-colonial, as sedentary agrarians have populated many, many parts of the globe for as long as agriculture itself has been practiced. And very frustratingly, it can sometimes be hard to draw a tidy, comfortable line between the violent settler and the untethered (perhaps even trafficked) migrant — not that some newcomers to a region aren't overtly exploitative and terrible, and not that xenophobes are ever correct, but rather that non-indigenous residents of a given land may have varied reasons for living there, and that the human world does not operate through members of every given tribe and culture forever living exactly where they are born.

In terms of how to be a responsible traveler or develop a lasting connection to land where your ancestors did not live, I am not yet anywhere near practiced enough or even knowledgeable enough to write comprehensive advice, only partial, and I would always first recommend that fellow white settlers specifically prioritize listening to what indigenous thinkers already have to say in this regard. But I bring up that whole situation as a means of introducing how complex it really is to say "live with the land" when there are many reasons throughout history why certain communities have lived with multiple lands, never actually anchoring themselves to just one place.

First, avoiding some confusion

Before I go too deep into the weeds, it's important to be clear that when I speak of sedentary vs. nomadic cultures or communities, I am not actually distinguishing between agrarian vs. hunter-gatherer societies. These dichotomies are very, very, very frequently conflated and I find this mistake to produce very unfortunate effects.

Admittedly, the confusion probably results from how many sedentary cultures are composed of agrarians, and many nomadic cultures are hunter-gatherers. But looking at the whole scope of human history, it is hard to reckon whether this correlation is absolutely true the majority of the time, and either way we need to remember that where people live is not synonymous with how people feed themselves. Most of today's post will comprise reflections on examples of what sedentary vs. nomadic cultures look like, but to start with some key, distilled points for you to bear in mind as I expand on them later:

• A nomadic culture may grow crops and keep livestock on a specific tract of land for a few months, years, or decades before they move on.
• A sedentary culture may hunt and gather consistently within the same landscape for many generations.
• A common trait of various nomadic and sedentary cultures is pastoralism, e.g. keeping livestock that graze in open pasture and need to be periodically moved in order not to over-graze. This can happen in nomadic cultures that bring their livestock with them as they migrate, and it can also happen in sedentary cultures that rotate which nearby pastures are considered suitable for grazing.
• It has been rarer than you would think for any pre-industrial society[1] to exclusively practice hunting and gathering vs. farming; once agriculture is invented or introduced, it does not de facto supplant hunting or foraging activities. As usual I highly recommend Graber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything for a detailed analysis here.
• Similarly, while we can meaningfully distinguish between sedentary or nomadic cultures a lot of the time, many traditional indigenous communities have not strictly been one or the other, which suggests "pure" sedentary living is more a hallmark of modern urban imperialism.[2]

Throughout the rest of this post, hunting and gathering will come up a bit, as will farming; I simply wish to make certain that I'm implying a 1:1 identity relationship that doesn't exist. Hopefully the above is a solid disclaimer.

Nomadic models

So what does it really mean to live nomadically? There are at least a few different ways to do it, and I'm going to outline some models that I've assembled out of my own amateur study of such topics; they are not necessarily the models a trained anthropologist would use, nor the breakdown you will find on Wikipedia, even though some of the same distinctions will come up. I'm speaking from my own philosophical perspective instead. Likewise, since I'm deeply unqualified to write about the minutiæ of most cultures I don't belong to, I will not be offering any in-depth ethnographies here; however, I will provide concrete, limited cultural examples wherever it feels most appropriate.

Model 1: Locally specific itinerant populations. These are people who may be a subpopulation of a wider ethnicity, or an ethnicity unto themselves, who have remained in the same relatively small geographic area and cultural milieu for untold generations, but who tend to move within that range from one community to the next, living temporarily on societal margins. They may be fairly insular and self-sufficient, negotiating with a sedentary majority about where they can temporarily inhabit, or they may provide particular services to that majority as a trade for having their presence accepted, or both. A key example of this model are the Mincéiri (also known as Irish Travellers), who have long lived in Ireland, did not apparently migrate from anywhere else, and simply operate much more nomadically than the mainstream Irish majority. They have their own language (Shelta), customs, and increasingly genetics, and they do have some diasporic presence in the UK and USA, where they may still live nomadically; but they have a documented homeland in which they originally have lived nomadically. Some ways in which they have historically or currently interfaced with sedentary communities is through metalworking (including household item repair and scrap metal collection) and horse trading. Unfortunately, they have long been subject to intense discrimination.

Model 2: Diasporic itinerant populations. These are people who (like anyone else) originated from a culture dwelling in a particular landscape, whether nomadic or not, but have since come to live nomadically beyond that landscape in such significant numbers as to eclipse any lingering population within that origin point. As with Model 1, they may live in a fairly insular manner or they may interface with the sedentary communities they pass by. However, if we look at the Jewish diaspora they may be considered less voluntarily nomadic, insofar as nomadism has periodically occurred as an integral part of Jewish life but it has often been the result of fleeing from pogroms or having governments forcibly expel them from a certain country.[3] Or if we look at Romani communities, nomadism may still be a more foundational, voluntary principle of identity, but this is to such an extent that the diaspora does not carry any oral history of their South Asian origins; unlike in Model 1 nomadism, they have developed their culture among dozens if not hundreds of cultural geographies far beyond where they began, even (like Jews) hybridizing in complex ways with the majority cultures they meet. Of course just like the preceding examples, the Roma have been rampantly victimized and mistreated in many places they've traveled.

Model 3: Nomadic empires. These are characterized by people who travel in large numbers for warlike purposes, such that if they pass through a sedentary culture they certainly do not live on the margins and are most likely arriving there to subjugate the local population. They may or may not succeed at doing so, but over time their empire builds through whatever conquests do occur. I am sure that the Mongol Empire is what enters most readers' heads as an example here, and it's certainly a good example, but there have been others like it, especially on the Eurasian steppe where the open landscape is conducive to rapid and far-ranging migration on horseback. It's also important to understand that these empires have virtually never been 100% free-floating "hordes" that arrive at a town, take everything they can from it, destroy it, then move on. They have often had sedentary centers of government and maintained sedentary outposts in tributary regions in order to continuously extract resources from other people. What's made these empires nomadic has been qualities like elaborate confederations forming out of numerous nomadic tribes, or the empire's primary expansion/enforcement mechanism being nomadic cavalry units.

Model 4: Seasonal nomads. These are what I meant earlier by populations who are neither fully nomadic nor fully sedentary. They are usually indigenous to a particular ecoregion or the intersection of a couple ecoregions, and what migration does take place does not span vast distances because it would mean encroaching on other peoples' territory. However, they do not live in the exact same dwellings year-round. Depending on what season certain animals can be hunted, trapped, or fished, and where certain plants can be foraged, and/or depending on what season prime farmland is available for certain livestock and crops, the community may move between two or more geographically distinct living centers in order to facilitate shifting seasonal food production; they may also move in order to fulfill custodial obligations to the landscape, such as being in the right spot at the right time to perform a controlled burn. All of this could look like bouncing between different permanent structures, or it could mean having living in permanent structures for part of the year, then living in collapsible dwellings while moving much more frequently for the rest of the year. It could likewise come with shifts between a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and an agrarian lifestyle, or these things could remain intermingled even as the specific food sources change.

In all of these cases, there can of course be overlap, although I suspect certain kinds of overlap are more likely than others.

Which model seems to best serve living with the land?

This is a question I'm especially ill-equipped to answer, but I would like to hypothetically argue that any of these nomadic models can live with the lands they cyclically or erratically inhabit. Historically, all nomads had to have done so by varying degrees, because with a hunter-gatherer and/or agrarian configuration you really don't have a choice; as Tyson Yunkaporta says, "Move with the land or the land will move you." At its core, nomadism itself seems like the ultimate expression of that sentiment, an acknowledgment that the flow of life means nothing is ever totally fixed or stable. Why should our homes be?

But of course, under present conditions it's harder to see any intrinsic nomadic advantage for maintaining steadfast land connection. Majority sedentary cultures, already prone to punishing nomads in their midst, have in modern times made it harder and harder for a nomadic community to just freely exist. Euro-colonialism and capitalism are especially to blame here, given the enclosure of the commons and the theft of innumerable territories from indigenous custodians. Modern xenophobia has also enforced cartoonishly strict border policies that pretend most kinds of migration don't even happen, and that any real border-crossing is always for wicked reasons. Creating an intentionally nomadic community is probably even more difficult than starting a sedentary commune, and in that regard I would sooner spend my time performing advocacy work for extant nomadic people who need help.[4]

But leaving present conditions aside, and looking at the wider historical context again, I think it's safe to say there is no reason why any kind of nomadic life precludes land connectedness. It simply involves connection to multiple lands, and requires a special nimbleness and adaptability — a willingness to learn about and integrate with the land one visits. I will not even claim that nomadic empires are wholly exempt from this. I would just say that any imperial operation is going to run into sustainability roadblocks, no longer living with any land in the long run, and this is what makes those endeavors fall apart; so a nomadic empire's land connection is relatively ephemeral. By contrast, I personally feel as if seasonal nomadism would be the most sustainable option because of how someone living that way will a) grow intimately acquainted with the cycles of their ecoregion over generations, even as they move around repeatedly in the process, and b) consistently hold a territory that they don't necessarily have to negotiate with others just because they're migrating.

That still may show some of my own sedentary bias, though, so it's not the note I will end on today. Instead...

In defense of the true drifters

I may have an intellectual preference for seasonal nomadism even over staying sedentary, fancying that if I could live in any kind of culture, that is probably what I would prefer. But I still admire people who live with multiple lands in a more irregular fashion, and I do not even mean this in terms of any specific ethnic groups.

I mean all traditional itinerant peoples, of course, but also refugees who have to move when their visas expire or their asylum claim is denied. I mean people who are involuntarily unhoused within their own sedentary cultures, migrating wherever they can sleep rough, find a shelter, or afford a motel for at least a few nights. I mean people of all backgrounds who voluntarily live in mobile transport to go wherever the work is: the van lifers, the trailer haulers, the train hoppers. I mean gutter punks and squatters.

As long as you arrive in a spirit of embassy wherever you are, your eyes open to the rhythms around you, you will probably learn more about the land you're on in a faster time than most of any sedentary settlers around you — myself likely included.

[1] And even for nominally post-industrial societies. See: how prior to the Second World War, hunting and foraging were still pervasively practiced by large numbers of rural Europeans.

[2] I need to further clarify here that "modern urban imperialism" is a concept that's more than the sum of its parts. For indeed, traditional societies have had cities and even empires, exemplified through the cities of the Aztec Empire. While I am not the right person to argue whether creating an empire negates indigeneity, I want to be clear that there is at least a definitely not-indigenous modern manifestation of centralized urban economies that rely in an extractive, imperialist fashion on rural spokes beyond that hub. This is an uncomfortable framework for progressive/left urbanists to confront, but they will have to eventually if they want to understand why reactionary rural denizens resent them so much, or if they want to meaningfully support indigenous sovereignty and ecological initiatives. Cities are not an absolute evil, but we need to radically reimagine what they can and should involve.

[3] This is not to downplay the discrimination that people in Model 1 like Irish Travellers experience; my point is that although they may be regarded as outsiders to be driven from local communities, and although they are sometimes even conflated with foreign-originated populations like Roma, as far as I understand it Irish Travellers have not had Jews' experience of attempting to build sedentary settlements only to be chased out.

[4] It does not feel coincidental that by the late 19th century the Jewish diaspora had widely cemented a deep pride in wandering beyond their historical homeland, in fostering kinship and working class solidarity, in belonging wherever they are, expressed through the Yiddish word doikayt (literally "hereness") — and that the forces of capital, empire, and white supremacism intervened to foster Zionism instead, demanding that Jews "go back where they came from." I've encountered numerous Jewish scholars who argue that Zionism is a betrayal of earlier Jewish identity and that it even contradicts a religious prohibition against returning to Jerusalem before the building of the Third Temple (or possibly ever).

Thank you for reading, and I hope that wherever you live, for however long you live there, it feels at least temporarily like a real home amid this time of great disruption. Next week's post for paid subscribers will center around Nordic mythology, and the following week's post for all readers will revisit some issues I've addressed in the past about anti-technology or anti-civilization beliefs.