On November 4th 2015, the first workshop of the Nomadic Empires Project addressed economic and social institutions of mobile pastoralists through discussions with Dr. Daniel Murphy, a cultural anthropologist of the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Murphy’s work among herder groups of eastern and (more recently) western Mongolia was used as a platform for dialogues about the entangled spheres of pastoral labor, livestock management, and land use, as well as comparisons between revived pastoral institutions in modern Mongolia and historic practices documented among nomadic regimes in various parts of the world.