SUMMARY:

This is a contribution to the discussion forum “Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation.” Bogdan Pavlish offers an exposé on the early modern entanglement of polities and cultural worlds that rendered human experience ultimately incommensurable with national narratives. Constantly on the move and regularly finding themselves in contact zones, people of the era, according to Pavlish, need to be studied using an equally itinerant kind of history. Based on his research, Pavlish elaborates a mode of history writing that combines several spatial perspectives and constantly switches from one to another. Metaphorically, he characterizes such a history as nomad science, in contrast to stationary national territorial history. Instead of construing teleological narratives of fixed groups, itinerant history is structured by analytical problems and new questions that alone determine the spatial limits and unique selection of facts and circumstances for each case study.