Sedentarism Made Material
If the metaphysics of sedentarism were limited to the internal scribblings of geographers, sociologists, and cultural theorists, it could be considered harmless enough. But the view of the world that attaches negative moral and ideological codings to mobility extends well beyond the ivory tower to pervade thought and practice in multiple domains of social and cultural life. Indeed, the view of mobility as threat and dysfunction in the social sciences is only a reflection of the wider world. Malkki introduces the idea with reference to the assumption that people belong in particular places particularly to national “homes.” Refugees, seen through this lens, are a worrisome moral threat. It is worth considering political, state-led reactions to other kinds of mobile people—nomads, gypsies, and the internal migrant—people without place
Nomads, Gypsies, Migrants
State reactions to mobile people are, of course, diverse. What is remarkable, however, is how similar reactions have been in a variety of unrelated instances. James Scott notes how the state seems to have been the enemy of mobile people in modernity. This is certainly true of some mobile people. Take the Bedouin in Libya under Italian fascism, for example. David Atkinson has described how the Sanussi tribe of about two thousand men took on the colonial Italian army in 1923. The Italians could not figure out how to govern these nomadic people. The problem for them was that guerrilla warfare is based on mobility rather than territory the Sanussi could attack and then melt away into the desert. As the British anthropologist Evans Pritchard put it, “the Sanussi were fighting in their own country and the Italians had to adapt themselves to the kind of fighting which seldom fails to upset the orthodox military mind. Ordinary tactics are useless against an enemy who wanders at will over the country with which he is familiar, among a population all friendly to him, and whose tactics are little more than the three guerrilla imperatives, strike suddenly, strike hard, get out quick.”
The Sanussi rebels were not tied to any particular conception of placebelonging, and therefore had no static space to defend. In addition, they were liable to turn up in any place at any given moment. As the Italian General Graziani put it, “(the Bedouin are) rebellious against every tie of discipline, used to wandering in immense, desert territories, bold in mobility and ease of movement, and pervaded by a fascination with independence, they are always ready for war and raiding, the nomads have always resisted every governmental restraint
The Italians responded through the lens of sedentarism. They divided the desert as best they could with enormously long barbed wire fences to limit the Sanussi mobility. But they also responded by confining the nomads in concentration camps that were the epitome of rational spatial planning. Beginning in 1930, nomadic and semi nomadic groups were put into the camps. They were kilometer square enclosures arranged so that the inmates would set their tents up in a grid pattern with broad corridors for surveillance. As Atkinson put it: “the camp and its barbed wire fences materialised European notions of a bounded territoriality; they finally forced the Bedouin to live within a disciplined, controlled, fixed space in contrast to their traditional conceptions of group encampments and unfettered movement across territory.”
Perhaps the Italian concentration camps can be thought of as functional spaces of imprisonment ensuring the safety of Italian troops. The same cannot be said about the migrant camps constructed in California under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during Roosevelt’s