Nomads
The majority of Davidson's work has been traveling with and studying nomadic peoples. While she is often called a social anthropologist, she has no academic qualifications and claims to be "completely self-taught". Davidson's experiences with nomads include traveling on migration with nomads in India from 1990 to 1992. These experiences were published in Desert Places.
She has studied different forms of the nomad lifestyle—including those in Australia, India, and Tibet—for a book and a documentary series. Her writing on nomads is based mainly on personal experience, and she brings many of her thoughts together in No Fixed Address, her contribution to the Quarterly Essay series. Sullivan writes about this work:
One of the questions we need to ask, if we are to have a future, she says, is "Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?" One answer is: when we were nomadic. "It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment," she writes, and then later adds: "I shall probably be accused of romanticism."
Read more about this topic: Robyn Davidson
Famous quotes containing the word nomads:
“But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)