Abstract The mobile phone has spread recently in rural Benin as one of the new technologies most widely adopted by Fulani pastoralists, who have generally been regarded as hostile to novelty. This article analyses the logic and forms of appropriation of mobile phones in connection with the socio-economic transformation that accompany it. An ethnographic approach was used, involving individual interviews with participant observation in various settings where mobile phones are used by Fulani pastoralists to meet challenges they face in their daily lives. It appears from the study that the mobile phone, while bringing significant changes in the livelihood strategies of pastoralists, especially in terms of social connectedness, has at the moment limited economic impacts due to various factors including accessibility and ease of use. With regard to the mass adoption of mobile phones by pastoralists, we argue that socio-economic continuity and change are to be regarded not as opposites but as interconnected realities, and this needs to be taken into account to improve development policies in connection with pastoral communities.

Abstract Jordanian Bedouin women performing Arabic Nabati poetry use oral and 'masculine' poetic genres to communicate politically with a wide audience, as the poetry's distance from women's personal lives preserves their modesty and morality as Bedouin women while providing a means of challenging their exclusion from public life. By focusing on individual poets and poetesses and their works within a dispersed international community, locating content and performance in its social setting, I examine poetry as a category-constructing practice where the gendering of expression and moral authority may be contested and reconfigured.

Abstract Most outside observers of current development in grassland areas of China see sedentarisation policies rather sceptically. Among other issues, the accelerated planning and implementation period, the poor quality of housing and facilities at the settlement sites, the lack of alternative livelihood opportunities and the loss of nomad culture are commonly mentioned in critiques of the rapid sedentarisation that has taken place in China in the past decade. Reports in the Chinese media tend to tell a different story, celebrating sedentarisation as a welcome step towards modernity among the grassland population. This paper examines one new settlement, Hor, where in 2009 locals confirmed the positive rhetoric of the government and averred that the advantages brought by sedentarisation outweighed its negatives. More recent research shows that the situation in Hor is, in fact, more complex and the touted successes of the sedentarisation policy may not be long-lasting.

Abstract Mongolian pastoral nomads traditionally consume meat during the cold season and milk products during the warm season. Among these is airag (fermented mare's milk), and Mongolia is one of the few regions that retains such traditional food. Through the Mongolian meteorological network, this is the first survey on airag , targeting 2,045 herders. We compared airag production between households producing it and households in general. Results revealed intensive production in central Mongolia, but less in surrounding areas, except along the western border. High horse-density in the central steppes and forest steppes provides an eco-climatological explanation, but this density pattern cannot explain inadequate production in eastern areas. Thus, culture and ethnicity may account for airag 's regional distribution.

Abstract Tibetan pastoralist communities in Amdo, the north-eastern region of the Tibetan plateau, have undergone tremendous change due to a number of state induced modernisation processes. Road infrastructure is but one development that aims to facilitate transition from subsistence to a market economy and to link remote pastoralist production into the global or regional market. This paper starts from the local perspective and examines how the expansion of road infrastructure and increased ownership of motorised vehicles has impacted on the mobility of pastoralists. It argues that motorisation and the increased availability of roads creates an interface for pastoralists through which they negotiate a newly emerging translocality. Roads are embedded into everyday movements and provide pastoralists with ways to integrate new developments into their lives.

Abstract The Bedouin constitute an important part of Syrian society, having pursued a nomadic way of life in the Syrian steppe ( al-Badia ) for centuries. However, since the 1960s, new challenges have emerged that threaten the Bedouin way of survival and their culture in Syria. Economic and environmental factors in addition to government policies have threatened desert culture and the traditional livelihoods of the Bedouin and have pushed them to give up their life in the desert and move to live on the outskirts of cities. Through a synthesis of ethnographic, economic, environmental and geographical data, this paper will explore changes among the Bedouin, with specific interest in how they relate to resettlement in terms of 'development-induced displacement'. The Bedouin in Syria, like mobile indigenous people all over the world, are facing a combination of challenges, from extreme climatic and environmental changes to increasing marginalisation and sedentarisation by the governments of the countries they live in. They also find it hard to influence policy-making in any projects initiated by international development agencies on their lands and migratory routes. This study will shed light on the policies of the Syrian government and international development agencies in dealing with the Bedouin in Syria and investigate how these policies have contributed to Bedouin settlement.

Abstract This article explores sedentarisation as a process of inherent tension between the rupture and preservation of values associated with mobility. This tension is compelling when mobile pastoralists settle in refugee camps. Refugee camps may resemble nomadic encampments in material infrastructure and (alleged) non-permanence. Yet refugee camps contrast with nomadic encampments in facilitating control and evoking, through its disruption, rootedness. In the case of refugees of mobile pastoralist heritage from the disputed territory of Western Sahara, the tension in the meeting of nomadic encampment and refugee camps sees the nomadic encampment reproduced and transformed in the refugee camp. This creates ambiguities of space and control.

Anti-pastoralism policies are outdated--hence the word 'still' in the title. Apart from the important moral and political considerations, they are now outdated on economic grounds. There is an emerging consensus among scholars and practitioners concerned with range management and livestock production that in most of the world's dry belt, mountainous areas and tundra, reliable food production depends on mobile livestock-keeping (for a global overview, see Khazanov and Schlee 2012). All healthy pastoral systems include dry-season grazing reserves. These are relatively small areas of higher fertility that could also allow some crop farming. However, to take these areas out of pastoralist production and dedicate them solely to other uses would damage the pastoral system to an extent that would exceed the benefits of those other uses. If the output of the overall economy is the aim- which, unfortunately, might not be the case, as is suggested below--then, in such eases, the alienation of lands from pastoralist production has a negative economic output and should therefore be avoided. This case is convincingly made by several scholars in the recently published collection Pastoralism and Development in Africa: Dynamic Change at the Margins (Catley et al. 2013), such as Roy Behnke and Carol Kerven ('Counting the Costs: Replacing Pastoralism with Irrigated Agriculture in the Awash Valley'), John Galaty ('Land Grabbing in the Eastern African Rangelands') and Mustafa Babiker ('Mobile Pastoralism and Land Grabbing in the Sudan: Impacts and Responses'). This position paper has grown out of a comment on that volume. Behnke and Kerven find that large-scale, irrigated cotton or sugar cane production yields less per hectare than simply leaving the land to the pastoralists, not even counting the losses of surface suitable for any kind of crop or fodder production caused by forms of irrigation that lead to increased soil salinity. Galaty compares the revenues from extensive livestock production favourably to those from a number of alternative uses, including hunting concessions and photosafaris. To some extent, these other uses need not exclude pastoralism, because, with a bit more good will and organization, wildlife, tourism and extensive pastoralism can be made to coexist, and the income from various activities could then be combined when calculating the productivity of a region. While Babiker gives no figures to compare the income derived from the transition to mechanized crop production with the losses that this process entails to pastoral production, his discussion of the negative impact that this transition has on pastoralists and the wider society suggests that the losses caused by this kind of development exceed the gains--or at least diminish them considerably. The costs include the following: hostility between pastoralists and large farmers (a 'security' issue, which, like all such issues, also has a financial side); decline of the remaining, congested rangelands; high costs of supplementary fodder, a factor that squeezes out small herd owners; and intensive litigation about 'trespassing', caused by the expansion of agriculture into long-established but no longer properly enforced livestock corridors, which, after having been reduced from grazing areas to mere routes, are now often blocked completely by cultivated fields. With unintended irony, one of Babiker's sources speaks of 'the encroachment of herding on croplands', while historically the encroachment has, of course, happened the other way round (Babiker 2013: 179). On the side of benefits, Babiker lists only the enrichment of 'a few well-connected elites whose livelihoods are already secure' (ibid.: 177). In their introduction, the editors of the volume ask 'why [do] governments seek to replace pastoralism with alternative land uses?'--and answer, 'An important reason is the interest of governments in raising tax revenue and, more generally, to exert greater control over economic and political life at the margins. …