Sedentary and migrant peoples: The sketch of a paradigm

Abstract

Often, during the modern age, the idea of the people was linked to the sedentariness of life on a specific territory, and there is no doubt that the essence of an environment, that is its morphology, its endowments in terms of resources constitute a strong influence on the culture of a human community. Nonetheless, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was often forgotten that many peoples developed within large human movements, just as for some cultures the transience of the environment of birth is a central element of their tradition. This article aims to give a partial and non-exhaustive vision of how stability and transience can both form the vision of the world of a people or of a cultural tradition, and to propose a draft of integration of these two perspectives within an institutional point of view.