219 Chapter 10 Moving to Remain the Same An Anthropological Theory of Nomadism 1 Morten Axel Pedersen In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss famously described the native peoples of Australia as snobs: Few civilizations seem to equal the Australians in their taste for erudition and speculation and what sometimes looks like intellectual dandyism, odd as this expression may appear when it is applied to people with so rudimentary a level of material life. But … these shaggy and corpulent savages whose physical resemblance to adipose bureaucrats or veterans of the Empire makes their nudity yet more incongruous … were … real snobs. … When one considers them in this light, it seems less surprising that as soon as they were taught accomplish- ments of leisure, they prided themselves on painting the dull and studied water- colours one might expect of an old maid. (1966, 89) I open with Lévi-Strauss’s provocative and outrageously anachronistic characterization of Aboriginals as armchair sophists and conformist hobby artists because I wish to set up a similarly provocative—but I hope productive and strictly contemporary—analogy between Mongolian nomadic cosmology and the petty-bourgeois ideals I witnessed growing up in the Danish prov- ince. I base this unlikely comparison on more than two years of fieldwork among especially Darhad Mongolian pastoralists but also Tuvinian reindeer breeders in the Shishged Depression, which is situated in the far northwest corner of Mongolia’s Khövsgöl Province in a remote area that marks not just the geographical but also the cultural, religious, and ethnic border between Siberia and Inner Asia. At first glance, it is hard to imagine two contexts of social and cultural life any more different than Danish small town suburbia and Northern Mongolia’s mountain steppe. Yet, what brings together the lives and the worlds of Danish suburbians and Mongolian nomads, I propose, Charbonnier et al_9781783488575.indb 219 19-09-2016 16:36:31