A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia
As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change.
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Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP Colorado, 2025)
Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power distributed among mountain fortresses rather than centralized in cities. Through spatial analysis, the book demonstrates how systematic warfare, driven by imperial ambitions, shaped Urartian and Assyrian territories, creating symbolically and materially powerful landscapes.
Tiffany Earley-Spadoni challenges traditional views by emphasizing warfare’s role in organizing ancient landscapes, suggesting that Urartu’s strength lay in its strategic optimization of terrain through fortified regional networks. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes GIS-enabled studies and integrates archaeological, historical, and art-historical evidence, she illustrates how warfare was a generative force in structuring space and society in the ancient Middle East. Landscapes of Warfare situates Urartu’s developments within the broader context of regional empires, providing insights into the mechanisms of warfare, governance, and cultural identity formation.
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The Nomadic Origin of the State
Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as peripheral appendages to a centralized, agriculturalist empire. In his work, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene argues against what he calls “the Sinocentric paradigm” in favor of an interpretation of nomadic pastoralism as the origin of the premodern state. In this interview, we discuss the conquest theory of state formation, how mobility is essential to state control, and how nomadic state origins can be found globally beyond the Eurasian steppe.
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The Roma: A Travelling History
The word Roma conjures images of free-spirited nomads, creative and easy-going people who choose to eschew social conformity for personal independence and a life on the road. Few know the Roma’s long history of being harassed, expelled, deported, demonized, enslaved, and murdered. In The Roma: A Travelling History, Madeline Potter blends memoir and archival research to uncover Romani history across Europe and beyond, from the United States to Romania where she was born and raised; from sixteenth-century Spain to modern Sweden; from Nazi Austria to twenty-first-century France. Madeline tells the interwoven stories of joy and resilience, trauma and persecution, of Romani communities past and present, and reflects on what the future may hold for both nomadic and settled Romani families.
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The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century
From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence.
In her book The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (University of Cambridge Press, 2024), Dr. Zozan Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state, and society.
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South Africa