Transhumance Revisited: On Mobility and Process Between Ethnography and History

Abstract

This paper advances the argument that transhumance, the seasonal movement of pastoral people and their livestock, is a useful site for critical reflection on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1988) and its importance to the understanding of mobility and process. It does so by bringing into dialogue ethnographic and historical perspectives on the resonance between transhumance and Deleuzian configurations of both nomadism and relations between human and non-human animals. It concludes that adjacent juxtaposition and syncretic ordering of diversity, rather than any ontological reconstruction, may be key to a more effective engagement with the complexities of contemporary existence.