ABSTRACT
Some recent studies of nomadic pastoral communities have emphasised the significance of the social and political environments within which these communities exist: the fact that these communities are by now more or less stably included inside centralised political structures. 1 Racing the nomadic pastoral communities within larger economic and political systems, today equivalent to the structures of nation states, is a phenomenon that cannot be analysed in formal terms. The phenomenon, known as encapsulation, 2 is not just the simple super-imposition of larger economic and political structures on the ‘more limited’ structures that are characteristic of the nomadic pastoral communities. On the contrary, encapsulation causes changes and new social dynamics within the encapsulated communities, acting in particular on the mechanisms which assure their reproduction and social cohesion. The case of the nomadic communities in Saudi Arabia is typical.
