Mobility

It only makes sense that someone who studied mobility and pastoral nomads should continue living a rather mobile life herself even as she navigates into her 90s.

Myrdene Anderson maintains her ethnographic study of the Saami of Finoscandia that began in the early 1970s when she was a graduate student at Yale. Space, Time, Motion, Habit, and Saami Reindeer ‘Nomadism is one of her earlier papers that I feel give a look at her work, at ethnography for the novice reader, and Myrdene’s unique perspective and integrative capabilities. I recommend this article an introduction to these contexts as well as her early shaping of nomadism as a concept non-nomads could understand.

I suppose I should really label Myrdene as semi-nomadic herself. She has made in her home in West Lafayette, Indiana since the late 1970s. She needed a home base not so much for a roof over her head as a place for her thousands of books to reside. For someone so intertwined with the study of nomadism she has a significant material load of paper, binding, wood, rocks, and cloth over which she exacts curation with the care of an archivist who understands the method of curation is just as instructive as the content of the items in the collections.

Myrdene had finished the expansion of her home to house the library and archival when I visited last summer. Shelving, card catalogs, and places for researchers to work were still being built by local craftspersons she had charmed and hired who were copasetic with her goals and practices.

One of the truly transformational influences on my outlook on life learned from Myrdene is that mobility and even nomadism is not not just moving through space. Even trees and plants move through time, in a way. Most people have sculpted their lawns and property to look a certain way. Then they spend huge amounts of money and time to make their property appear frozen in time.

Others take a very different approach and believe in the benefits of allowing yards and lawns to re-wild. The trees may stay in the same place and are not nomadic. But if you look at them over time, trees grown, change shape, and take up more and different space than they once did. Maybe this is mobility, just in a different direction/dimension?

In any case, if mobility and yard nazis intrigue you, check out: https://ethnobiology.org/forage/blog/ethnobotanist-faced-yard-nazis-does-ethnography.