On 23 October, the Nomadic Empires project team hosted a workshop with Thomas Barfield, Professor and Chairman at the Department of Anthropology, Boston University, and President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies.

During the workshop, titled Pastoral production in northern Afghanistan: the case of the Central Asian Arabs, Barfield delivered a rich visual narrative of the annual migration and production cycle of that pastoral nomadic community, whom he had studied in Afghanistan during the 1970s. He explained how nomads organized and prepared for migration, what activities they carried out in different seasons and areas of habitation (food preparation, dwelling construction, textile making, animal rearing, training and trading), how their society and economy functioned while they moved on a seasonal basis, and how they were integrated within the larger regional community and economy through labor division, trade, social exchange, ecology, and religion. Special attention was paid to the material culture of the nomads in different contexts and different environments as they moved through changing landscapes and seasons and interacted with other regional groups of Afghanistan. Part of this workshop discussion also focused on nomadic and regional identities expressed through verbal and non-verbal communication patterns (such as dress, religious practices, and gendered activities). These patterns of communication and exchange were especially pronounced at such venues as regional and local market places, shrines, and during interpersonal encounters on the migration routes.

On 16 October, 2017, the Nomadic Empires project held a workshop in Oxford entitled “Assembling a Nomadic Archive”, presented by Kathryn Babayan, Associate Professor at the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, who specializes in medieval and early-modern Persianate studies; cultural, social, and political histories of Iran, Iraq, Anatolia, and Central Asia; as well as in the studies of gender, sexuality, and subaltern groups.

Kathryn Babayan delivered a presentation about her experiences with assembling a nomadic archive for her case study of the Qizilbash—a tribal Turkic-speaking community with pastoral nomadic roots that served as a backbone for the Safavid imperial ascendance in Iran in the 15^th century—the focus of her well-received monograph “Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs” (2002). She discussed sources, media, and technologies of nomadic archives and how their material culture is impacted by mobility and displacement. She shared her ideas with the team about the cultural and ‘materialist modes of analysis’ of such archives, while stressing the importance of epics, poetry, and visual media as sources for writing nomadic histories.

The team and Dr Babayan explored the questions of who controls the nomadic archive—how and by whom it is constituted and which sources should be considered representative of nomadic lives and agency. The issues of gender (i.e. female presence vs. exclusion in royal scenes of authority) and ethos and aesthetics of mobility (i.e. dynamism, portability) were also the focus of the group discussion. Another central topic of this workshop was the role of Sufi and Shia mysticism and the importance of the religious dimension in nomadic politics, authority, and sovereignty, as it was demonstrated by Babayan in her discussion of the Qizilbash, and corroborated by the case studies of the Golden Horde Mongols, the Khazars, and the Rumies—some of the subjects of the Nomadic Empires team’s monographs.

On September 2^nd  2017 research associate Dr. Marie Favereau took part in the Vth European Congress on World and Global History (ENIUGH) in Budapest. Her panel, entitled ‘Empires, exchange and civilizational connectivity in Eurasia’, was organized by Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle; PI of the ERC-funded project “Realising Eurasia”).

In Hann’s own words “the baseline for this panel is a turning point in world history: the urban revolution of the Bronze Age, as outlined by anthropologist Jack Goody (1919 – 2015), following archaeologist Gordon Childe. This revolution launched multiple civilizations of Eurasia on unprecedented paths of development that culminated in industrial capitalism (…) Empirically, the papers analyse various societies and empires, their immaterial as well as their material constitution, and the concrete ways in which they fertilized each other in pan-Eurasian encounters.”

Dr. Favereau’s presented a paper in which she discussed the concept of “Mongol Peace”. She showed how in the 1260s the Mongols transformed their old empire into a kind of commonwealth; how they changed the rules of exchange in Eurasia; and how actually their “peace” meant a new global economic order.