Many histories of Ottoman property relations in nineteenth century Syria defined communities involved in mobile pastoralism as the main obstacle to the state's attempts to control and increase local production through intrusive land reforms. Assuming the state's project to create a "rule of property" was a natural step towards an externally defined modernity, much of the literature has imagined communities engaged in pastoralism as "nomadic tribes" inherently opposed to and separate from state initiatives, agricultural production and settled cultivating communities. Recent studies have problematized this characterization, noting the linkages and overlap between pastoral and cultivating communities in addition to the integrated role mobile pastoralists played in agricultural and other types of production as well as in the movement of goods. However, these studies have not addressed the political tensions attending Ottoman attempts to define and manage property relations between communities using land for agricultural purposes and those involved in transhumant pastoralism. This paper investigates the contested administration of modern land reform by focusing on the discourse through which Ottoman jurists and bureaucrats, as well as local communities understood the boundaries, connections and contests between those using land for agricultural and pastoral purposes. Incorporating material from both the imperial and local levels, I explore the categories that shaped the administration of property reform in a provincial district of Ottoman Syria during the high point of attempts to implement the Land Code and related Regulations (1880-1915). Through a reading of unpublished Shari'a court records of disputes over property and property registration, I identify the terms court scribes and judges employed to define various members of the rural population and to attempt to regulate their control over land and its use. I then investigate the meaning of these terms, including "tribe" and "tent-dweller", as administrative categories in empire-wide property reforms and the extent to which they represented a break with former orderings. Utilizing property-related legislation as well as memoirs of late Ottoman bureaucrats and jurists, I explore the discursive frameworks through which reformers understood local connections and contestations between pastoralists and cultivators and the tensions involved in their promulgations of modern reforms. Highlighting the politics of administration in a complex local economy, this paper argues that local actors involved in pastoralism both reified and contested the boundaries of imperial administrative categories employed in attempts to increase state control over land use.