Nomadism is the concept used to name a way of organizing social and economic life around mobility rather than a fixed home. In its main historical form, pastoral nomadism, communities live off herds of domesticated animals and move with the seasons across arid land that cannot support farming. As an analytical category it groups the mobile herding societies of the Eurasian steppe and other dry regions — including the empires that repeatedly reshaped the settled world — and it carries a long argument about whether such mobility was a primitive stage or a specialized adaptation.
Ask a herder of the dry grasslands where home is, and the question misfires. Home is not a place on the map but a route across it, walked with the animals as the seasons turn. Everything the family owns is built to move at dawn: the tent folds flat, the wealth walks on four legs, and by nightfall the household stands somewhere new. To the settled people who kept the records, this looked like aimless wandering, the mark of those who had never learned to stay. They could not have been more wrong about their neighbors — or, it turned out, more afraid of them.