Funding agency: IDRC, Government of Canada.
This project essentially comprises the disciplines of mathematics, history, sociology and ecology, and seeks to explore the evolutionary behaviour of pastoral nomadism in the South Asian context, specifically as it sustains today in the Indian Thar Desert region. The project aims to study and understand the interaction dynamics of the Solanki Rajput pastoralism social-ecological system of Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan state, India, from a complex system-theoretic perspective. In this project, we articulate questions that propose to examine the extent to which the collective behaviour emerging out of a range of polyadic interactions of the constituents of this social-ecological system exhibits the defining signatures of a complex adaptive system.