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This article explores the relationship between continuity and change in Central Asian domestic felt textile production. In order to set this in the context of a pastoralist perspective, the paper draws on regional practices such as oral poetry and movement through landscape, as well as human–environment relations in order to reveal the dynamic and creative improvisatory process through which local textile production can be understood. In so doing, it examines whether Euro-American anthropology's rejection of a ‘static’ notion of ‘tradition’ for one of hybridity (reflecting a critique of its own nostalgia), has inadvertently moved us away from a focus on the historical narratives of those we study, which is often at odds with their own concerns. The author argues that for ‘moving people’, it is the dynamics of orality, human–environment relations and the practice (rather than the evidence) of material culture that elucidates our understanding of the relationship between continuity and change. The power of felt is thus reflected in the apparently ephemeral, non-enduring, aspects of these practices, which are what makes them endure, continuously bringing the past into being for new cultural futures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]