As a cultural anthropologist, I had the privilege of living in societies and cultures very different from my American urban upbringing. Perhaps I could have had somewhat similar experiences if I had ventured in other parts of my own society, where people lived in villages or isolated farms and ranches, where people were primary producers of products that I saw only in finished or manufactured final results.
I also grew up in a Jewish ethnic and religious minority; my neighborhood and schools were largely Jewish. But we were, in my community, highly assimilated into American culture. More stringent Jewish communities diverged in more ways from mainstream culture. Exploring America’s religious communities, from the mainstream—and now far left wing—traditional churches to the conservative evangelical and the fundamentalist, I would have learned different religious cultures and their variations in American customary life.
But, as did most anthropologists, I chose to explore societies and cultures more distant from my own, distant both geographically and culturally. But, before I went abroad, I carried out a small study in the inner city Chicago Magistrate’s Court as part of my graduate training. What I saw was case after case of domestic violence, in which a spouse called the police because a husband or wife had, probably drunk, gotten unruly and abusive. The police hauled the offender off to jail for the night, bringing them to court the next day, where their spouse refused to make an official complaint and thus the offender had to be released, but not before the judge required that the offender behave in the future, which they all sincerely agreed to do.
I thought this legal process was intriguing because it did not proceed to legal penalties. As is sometimes the case, the punishment was the process. The police were acting not as enforcers of the law but as referees in a repeated social drama: “off to the penalty box.” The “law” served an important community function, but not as written in the law books. The lesson for me was that social processes and legal processes can diverge, while still being effective.
In my own middle-class community, there may have been domestic abuse, drunkenness, and disorderliness. But I never heard of it. And no one, to the best of my knowledge, ever called the police on a family member. In fact, I hardly remember seeing any police in my neighborhood. If there were family problems, people called a therapist.
During my graduate studies at the University of Chicago, I became intrigued by nomadic peoples, people who, rather than live in one place, move around, sometimes going long distances. People engage in regular migration for good reasons, usually to do with making a living. Some people are hunters and gatherers—or foragers, as those concerned with gender specific language call them. They move from place to place because natural resources are scarce and vary on the landscape. Once plants are picked, you have to move on to find the next patch. As for hunting, you have to follow wherever the animals have gone. Hunters and gatherers are not “roaming” or “wandering,” they are trying to make a living, to find food and water for themselves and their families. Examples well studied by anthropologists would include the Inuit of the Canadian North, the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in Central Africa, and the San-speakers—aka Bushmen—of the Kalahari in Southern Africa.
Pastoral nomads make a living by raising livestock—sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and camels are the major species—on natural pasture. Natural pasture is sparse, varies spatially and seasonally. So do water sources. In order to maintain their flocks and herds, pastoral nomads must move their flocks to the available pasture and water. This is even more complicated by raising multiple species, each of which has its own preferred type of vegetation, which might mean greater mobility between preferred areas or between livestock in different places. Among the well-studied pastoral nomads are the Bedouin camel-breeders of the Middle East and North Africa, the Mongol and Central Asian horse-breeders, the sheep-breeding mountain nomads of the Zagros range in Iran, and the cattle-breeding Maasai of East Africa.
There are also commercial nomads who regularly migrate with their families to buy and sell goods. For example, some nomads migrate with a small flock of sheep from lowland India into the Himalayas. The sheep not only provide milk sustenance for the nomads but are also burdened animals, carrying small parcels of cloth or other trading goods. Once in Tibet, they trade their goods for salt, which they then sell or barter in villages on the way back down to India.
My own first-hand knowledge comes from residence and ethnographic fieldwork in an Iranian pastoral tribe. The Yarahmadzai Baluch live in the highland Sarhad desert of southeastern Iran. During the time I resided with them—three stints for a total of 27 months during 1968-76—they lived in black goat-hair tents and migrated within their tribal territory around ten times a year. While most of their migrations were to benefit their livestock—sheep and goats at about as 2 to 1 ratio, and camels—as well as for reasons of household cleanliness, access to water sources, and to avoid conflict and diseases, their longest migration of the year was to their date palms in a lowland basin on the other side of the eastern mountains.
One thing that was quickly obvious was that our labels oversimplify reality. No subsistence producer—providing goods for their own consumption—depends on a single source to satisfy their needs. The Yarahmadzai were not only pastoralists; they were date palm horticulturalists. They also hunted and gathered wild onions from the mountains, for example. They engaged in opportunistic crop cultivation, built small mud dams, and sowed seeds at the bottom of rain runoff channels.
As well, historically, up to the Persian government conquest in the 1930s, the Baluch were inveterate camel-riding raiders, invading Persian provinces to capture agricultural products, luxury goods such as carpets, and inhabitants to be enslaved. The matriarch of the kin groups I lived with had been a young girl living in a distant Persian village carried off by a teenage raider who then married her without having to pay a bride price. The descendants of slaves had long been freed by the government, but lived amongst themselves in separate communities, and were looked down upon by the Baluch. (No, slavery was not invented by white men in America or Europe, but was part of many previous and contemporary societies, including in Africa and Asia.) The Baluch illustrate the general observation that every society depends upon multiple sources of production to make a living.
The Yarahmadzai and other Baluch of the highland Sarhad region were organized in tribes. Tribes are not large families, but rather political organizations that provide regional security for members. Tribes are based on different principles—such as age or descent—in different places. Baluchi tribes are based on patrilineal descent, which allows distinct groups to be formed. Small groups are defined by ancestors only a few generations away. The farther up the genealogy you go, the larger the groups encompassed.
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The significance of these groups is that they are vested, among the Baluch and others, such as the Arab Bedouin, with protection and defense. The rules are that, in the case of conflict, you must come to the aid of your group, and that, always, you must side with closer kin against more distant kin. When members of closely related kin are in conflict, only those small groups are involved, and others remain neutral. If members of distant groups are in conflict, then all of the small groups unify into large blocks. Anthropologists call this complementary or balanced opposition. Group solidarity and opposition to situational opponents are the underlying principles.
The purpose of these security groups is to protect what is valuable and needed:
- The men, women, and children. Even the loss of a drop of blood to violence justifies retaliation, and it is the duty of all of the members of the group to see that justice is done. Each group member is responsible for whatever any other member of the group does, and every member must act on behalf of another member or other members. This is called “collective responsibility.”
- The livestock upon which the livelihood of the group is based.
- Control of any built assets, such as wells, which people depend upon.
- Free access to natural resources such as pasture and natural water sources.
- The tribal boundaries are upon which all of the rest depends.
The Baluch know that you do not own something or have rights to something unless you can defend it. Is this not a general lesson for everyone in all places and at all times?
Territorial organization is based on other considerations. Local groups, which we can descriptively call “herding camps,” are formed by an annual contract between one or more shepherds and a group of livestock owners whose animals for the period of the contract form one herd. All of the livestock owners in the contract live in one camp and decide collectively on herding strategies. Arrangements for camel herding are made independently, usually among several families. The entire tribal territory is the tribe’s property collectively, and outsiders may only enter with the permission of the tribal chief, whose authority rests upon the consent of the tribesmen. Borders matter, and must be enforced. Another general lesson?
What struck me about the Baluch was that they were directly responsible for their own lives. They themselves produced most of the food that they ate. They decided who was welcome to their residential communities and who would be permitted to enter their territory. They were ready to defend themselves and their property. Decisions were made by discussion and collective sentiment. Leadership was based on community consent. In more abstract terms, this was an egalitarian and decentralized society. In this sense, it was the opposite of state societies, which are centralized and hierarchical. Which is why tribal societies resist being integrated into state societies.
Two other pastoral societies I studied were the Reika sheep breeders of Rajasthan, India, and the Highland Shepherds of Sardinia, Italy. Both were part of state societies that were differentiated economically. They produced in part for the market and bought from the market what they did not produce. In both societies, market orientation has increased in recent decades and centuries.
The mobility of the Sardinians and the Reika was somewhat different. The Sardinians lived in permanent villages in large territories, and the shepherds, leaving the women, children, and elderly behind, engaged in transhumance, leaving the villages to take their flocks to the mountains in the summer and to the lowland coasts in the winter. That way their livestock was not subject to extreme temperatures and could find pasture to eat. The Reika, including some wives, left their villages in the Rajasthani desert unless it rained generously, which it rarely did, and took their flocks long distances to rainier and greener provinces, sometimes not returning for a year or more.
Both the Sardinians and Reika lived under governments, and so could be considered peasants, but they were only partly under government control. They did not fully accept the authority of the government, preferring local control in their own hands. Sardinian shepherds in the distant pastures sometimes engaged in rustling of livestock and arson of sheep stations, which led to vendettas and frequently to killings. But these activities were the work of individuals or, at most, their immediate families. There was no large defense group because the state would not allow such competition. (This is taken to an extreme with socialist and far left governments, which aim to destroy the nuclear family so that individuals have no recourse in life but the government.) The Reika, migrating in large groups up to a hundred people and their large number of animals, were not averse to intimidating local communities on their migration route to discourage resistance. Neither of these societies surrendered all of their coercive power to the state.
Anthropologists leave their own societies to increase their understanding of the wide range of variation in social life and culture, and to gain detailed knowledge of how particular societies work. Anthropologists are not moral philosophers or theologians whose job is to evaluate and judge different societies. Those who measure other societies by their own values exhibit ethnocentrism, and those who measure the past by contemporary standards are presentists. Neither will gain a greater understanding of human reality or humanity.
Image: “Iran Pakistan India” by Gryllida on Wikimedia Commons
