Desert Entanglements

The word “desert” comes from the Latin desertus, which means forsaken, empty. To this view, the Sahrawi camel pastoralists of Western Sahara contrapose the Arabic term badiya to describe an animated landscape. After five decades of exile as refugees in southwestern Algeria, the Sahrawi have struggled to reconfigure the badiya, recovering camel husbandry and access to part of the former rangeland, and weaving it back as seasonal nomadism. Desert Entanglements analyzes this process as an act of place-making focused on refugees’ agency. Drawing from approaches in environmental and multispecies anthropology, ethnobiology, and political ecology, it contributes to the exploration of human-nature relationships in these unraveling times.