The Dictionary of Human Geography

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stasis. However, studies of nomadic societies

find that their mobility is neither socially nor

ecologically aimless, but rather shaped by the

physical availability ofresourcesand by the

social networksrequired for security and

maintaining access to these resources.

Moreover, the degree of mobility (rate and dis-

tance of displacements) varies significantly

among nomadic households, reflecting the

different opportunities and constraints that

they face. mt

Suggested reading

Khazanov (1994).

nomadology Although they do not provide

an explicit definition of the term, Gilles

Deleuze and Fe ́lix Guattari (1987) present

the discipline of nomadology as the opposite

of history, which they associate with a seden-

tary,state-centric point of view. For Deleuze

and Guattari, the point of nomadology is not a

historical study of nomadic peoples but, ra-

ther, a study of different spatial practices.

Unlike the state, the nomadic (or rhizomatic,

seerhizome) ‘war machine’ is understood to

occupy space without ordering, counting or

surveying it. Nomadology is thus the study of

what these philosophers call ‘smooth space’, a

space of creativity, emergent properties and

intensive becomings. ajs

Suggested reading

Cresswell (1997); Deleuze and Guattari (1987).

nomos The matrix of laws, norms and

conventions that orders conduct within aso-

ciety. Thenomosis: (a) socially constructed,

and so varies over space and time; and (b)

generally accepted, and so serves as a template

for political–moral ordering. The term

emerged with the rise of democracy in fifth-

century Athens, where the political structure

of the classical city-state implied that thenomos

is also (c) spatially articulated (in the sense of a

distribution or assignment of powers). The

term entered geopolitics through the

German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985),

who invoked the concept to argue that ineur-

opein the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

the theological–moral model of thejust war

yielded to the secular–juridical model (i.e. the

nomos) of a regulated war between sovereign

statesthat claimed a monopoly of the legit-

imate means of violence. Unrestrained

violence was then projected ‘beyond the line’

into the non-European world: ‘Europe sub-

limate[d] its animality by establishing the

americasas an extralegal zone in which bes-

tial deeds [could] be ‘‘acted out’’ far away’

(Rasch, 2003). Schmitt identified this zone

with ‘thestate of naturein which everything

is possible’ and with the space of exception

(see exception, space of). He argued that

by the early twentieth century the line had

dissolved, and the wild zones of colonial

violence had appeared within the ruins of the

European order (Schmitt, 2003 [1950]).

Schmitt’s writings have attracted renewed crit-

ical attention today, through the bearing of his

political theologyon the Bush administration’s

waron terror (seeterrorism), and through

the radicalization of his work in the political

philosophyof Giorgio Agamben (see Minca,

2006). In both cases, considerable interest has

attached to Schmitt as ‘above, all, a spatial

thinker’, where the concept ofnomosis central

(Dean, 2006, p. 7). dg

nomothetic Concerned with the universal

and the general. The term derived from the

German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband

who, in 1894, used it to identify one of two

possible goals of concept formation:

The theoretical interests associated with

nomothetic concept formation highlight

those common qualities of objects of experi-

ence that lead to the formulation of general

laws of nature. The process is one of con-

tinual abstraction in which the special qual-

ities of an object are filtered out and the

object is seen as a general type that exists

with certain relations to other, general types.

(Entrikin, 1991)

Windelband contrasted this withidiographic

concept-formation, which is concerned to

achieve a complete understanding of theindi-

vidualcase (seekantianism; cf.ideal type).

Windelband’s views were considerably more

nuanced than the caricatured oppositions be-

tween idiographic and nomothetic that were

propelled intogeographyafter the middle of

the twentieth century. These versions ignored

Windelband’s insistence that both approaches

were directed towards the formation of

analytical concepts. Instead, in the wake

of the Hartshorne–Schaefer exchange over

exceptionalism, the proponents of spatial

science ridiculed regional geography in

particular for its focus on the unique – its

supposedly inherent inability to provide con-

ceptual rigour or intellectual substance – and

claimed that geography should focus on

generalization and work towards the formula-

tion of scientific theories and laws of spatial

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_N Final Proof page 502 31.3.2009 3:13pm Compositor Name: ARaju

NOMADOLOGY