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Contemporary research on globalization and human mobility seems at odds with any idea of humankind being a sedentary species. However, we argue that sedentarist presumptions underlie central notions and units of analysis in social science such as "a culture", "a society", "an economy" — entities that too easily are operationalized as sharing borders with the nation state. The idea that globalization and migration essentially belong to our own age introduces a sedentarist postulates into studies of mobility. A reversal of sedentarism — seeing mobility as the normal, sedentary living as the exceptional — may seem a possible remedy, but is only to make the same mistake in another guise. We conclude that human life-forms, including diaspora, transnational communities, and migration, can only be understood when the sedentary and the mobile are seen as equally fundamental and the relation between them as dialectic.