Anthropology of nomadism and alternative lifestyles - Fei

So I will rush through my points within a time limit. Wait, let me pull back first my slides. So thank you everyone for being here. So I would first like to start with the question, why am I here? What is an anthropologist doing in the room of Network Nations coming from a place where I know nothing about Web3 and AI?

coming from a place where I know nothing about Web3 and AI. So I think it's easy to start with what brings us here altogether. One thing that we can agree with is that certain concepts ingrained in how Western societies work, such as democracy, globalization, and modernization, these concepts are under heavy skepticism in today's society. and modernization, these concepts are under heavy skepticism in today's society. And uncomfortable questions are being asked in boardrooms, in university and classrooms.

Is there a time clock on this system that we take granted for? And do we need to tear up the rule books and draw a new social blueprint for the future? And I think the one thing that we tend to easily ignore when we're drawing such blueprints is that we look to what we think is the past and we look forward to what we think is the future, but we forget that these concepts themselves are ingrained in a very specific conceptual framework that is deeply ingrained in the colonial history. And sometimes we need to look at what is in the present that is different to us. We need to look at alternative communities whose narratives are being appropriated, being secluded, and being altered by the hegemonic climate.

And we need to learn from those communities that are still thriving under this hegemonic climate. And we need to learn from those communities that are still thriving under this hegemonic climate and we need to learn from them. So what do we think when we are thinking about the word nomads? There is a conventional image of nomads as wandering herders and hunters living secluded lives far away from a modern urban centers in rural settings. In a nutshell, we think that they are different from us and they have nothing to do with us, especially when we're trying to imagine a future that's promised by technology and new social innovations.

But however, is this really the case? So I will rush through these. Basically, my point is that how these alternative communities are studied by conventional academia is that they're skewed into these four categories. And what these four categories have in common is that, first of all, they're defined by their mobile nature, that they move from place to place. And the second is that when academics try to draw up these categories, we tend to focus on one distinctive trait, is that how they support themselves, how do they provide for themselves.

In a nutshell, the economic nature and the nature of their ways of production. However, there are certain drawbacks by making such assumptions. We probably don't have the time to cover all this, so I will rush through them. There are certain problems when we're taking these assumptions for granted. First of all, we're reducing the complexity of human life to bear economic and political features.

And second of all, when we're making such assumptions that moving from being nomadic to being sedentary is progress. And moving from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural society is a progress. We're enchanting the notion of progress itself. And therefore, we tend to focus. I think this brings in what Matt was saying, is that all these ideas of generating new social blueprints are very fixated on time.

And therefore, I think that drawing from these indigenous and alternative knowledge, what they can offer for us is for us to have a center point to rethink these concepts, to rethink that have we ever been modern, and what is modern? Why are there myths that some of us are more modern than others? For example, why are agricultural societies considered more modern from hunter-gatherer societies? When there are certain traits of hunter-gatherer societies that are considered very desired to us, for example, they're often more politically egalitarian and they often have stronger community ties and often have more peer support in comparison to sedentary and agricultural societies. And I think the point that I want to mention the most is that taking these concepts for granted solidifies the narratives that the centers of power, whether they're colonial empires or modern nation states.

They strengthen their narratives that play in their favors because they highlight the differences between different cultures over commonalities, and they highlight the conflict between different cultural entities over what connects us. And they have always conceptualized the labor and economic conditions as separate from issues of subjectivity, effect, sociality, and desire. But that is a very reductive way of conceptualizing human life. For example, when we're talking about our lives, we would all feel very uncomfortable if someone only defines us by what we do, are we married or not, what our kinship ties, when there's so much more to us. So how can anthropology, or an anthropology of no-badism, help us understand human connections and community bonding and being interconnected in our contemporary world.

First, I would like to talk about my case study. It is a combination of other anthropological works on the Bedouin community of Northern Arabia and also some of my own experience conducting field work there. And the second point, I would like to leave it to an open end for everybody to contemplate a bit, is how do we imagine other possibilities outside of what capitalism and globalization, all these very grand northern Atlantic vocabularies provide for us? So the Bedouin community is all scattered across northern Arabia, and my field side would be around here, the Sinai Peninsula, but as you can see on the map, the distribution of Bedouin tribes is kind of all over the place, and it's very hard to put them in a specific geographical border, and there's another layer of awkwardness when we're trying to define the question of who is a Bedouin. First of all, being a Bedouin is not really an ethnic concept, and it's also hard to define them by their language, because like other people in the area, they all speak Arab, and the origin of the Bedouin word actually just comes from Arab itself, if we're tracing it etymologically.

It actually just means, it actually comes from the word bad, which means desert, which means desert dwellers, in a sense, being nomadic in the desert. But what really differentiates who is a Bedouin and who is a fellahin, which means peasant in Arabic, in contemporary Arabic. It's not how they produce, if you remember in the beginning of my presentation, academics tend to define nomadic communities by their means of production. But how they support themselves are not really that different from the Falahins. Sure, they keep animals.

They herd their animals throughout the deserts between different orchards. But they're also heavily relied on sedentary agriculture as well. They have orchards in the deserts. They also bring crops and fruits in their orchards. So what distinguishes them from being a Bedouin, what distinguishes a Bedouin and a Falahin?

The general consensus is that Bedouin communities tend to operate further from the center of authority of Cairo. They're more self-governed, and they kind of operate between what is legal and what is not legal. And it is very difficult for central government to tax them. And they uphold a certain level of governance sovereignty from whether the Ottoman Empire or the British mandate system or current day Egyptian government. And a third thing that I would like to mention that I think is very interesting about the Bedouin community and what network nations might learn from them is that their tribal lineage is often not defined by blood.

You don't have to be born into a tribe to be considered a tribal member. Actually, a lot of Bedouin young men, to be born into a tribe to be considered a tribal member actually a lot of Bedouin young men they were born into a certain tribe but they join another tribe when they come of age and they are considered as just as a member of that tribe compared to other Bedouin young men who are born into that tribe okay so this is kind of the field site. Okay, a lot of jumping going around. And then what I want to bring forward is how their idea of work and home can help us understand what it means to be resilient and alternative in the contemporary day. So for Bedouin young men, a major part of their lives has been a labor migrant, whether that is in Cairo, Alexandria, or other tourist towns over Sinai Peninsula.

And they are very resistant to an idea of a security, of a sedentary job. Even though the Egyptian government actively funds them to keep them away from urban centers, but they find that less attractive to being a labor migrant in those towns. They like to maintain a certain distance between government-promoted schemes and their conventional way of life. And that plays a lot into their order of the household, because the Bedouin household is more of a matriarch composition rather than, you know, how Islam is often perverse in the West, perceived in the West. Islam is often perverse in the West, perceived in the West.

The Bedouin matriarch has a lot of authority over their domestic affairs. And that reality is kind of ingrained in the distance that the labor migration brings in. Because the men are always very far away from home, so the women would have more say. So we can actually see that these are some pictures of their orchards that I've taken in Dahab. So what we can see is that the labor condition and their community ties, their moral codes, they're deeply ingrained.

And for a community to really thrive, we need moral and ethical bondings over reorganizing very tangible things, such as how labor is organized. These social scrutiny contribute actually less to community building rather than moral and ethical bondings. And another thing that I want to mention is the entangled and interconnected nature of being human. This goes back to the point I was making when I'm talking about the interconnectedness between work and home. So, I also want to mention a little bit of my personal research experience.

So I was there in Dahab during the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza. And what I noticed quite interesting about the local Bedouins is that compared to Egyptian nationals, even though their home base are far closer to Gaza, but they care less about what's going on in that region. They're not really that enthusiastic about nationalistic agendas or who's having a conflict with who. For them, it's just part of their history, and it's already a part of what they're used to. And I think that this is something that's very interesting for us to take away, is what defines a border and what defines an identity?

What defines a community? And what brings us together and what defines an identity, what defines a community, and what brings us together and what keeps us apart. So the central point of my presentation is what can anthropological knowledge offer resilient collective attempts such as network nations to reform and innovate social governance technologies. That sometimes we don't have to trace back to history or imagine a future that is completely different from the contemporary, but rather it is important to learn from other alternative communities and grassroots indigenous communities that are thriving in the contemporary, that are not less modern than us, that are not really in essence exotic to us and their knowledge can be of great value for us to imagine a different and alternative future so I tried to rush through all the points within the time limit