Nomad
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Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads.[1][2] In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased, reaching an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world as of 1995[update].[3]
Nomadic hunting and gathering—following seasonally available wild plants and game—is by far the oldest human subsistence method.
Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are various
Etymology
The English word nomad comes from the Middle French nomade, from Latin nomas ("wandering shepherd"), from Ancient Greek νομᾰ́ς (nomás, “roaming, wandering, esp. to find pasture”), which is derived from the Ancient Greek νομός (nomós, “pasture”).[8][dubious – discuss]
Common characteristics
Nomads are communities who move from place to place as a way of obtaining food, finding pasture for livestock, or otherwise making a living. Most nomadic groups follow a fixed annual or seasonal pattern of movements and settlements. Nomadic people traditionally travel by animal, canoe or on foot. Animals include camels, horses and alpaca. Today, some nomads travel by motor vehicle. Some nomads may live in homes or homeless shelters, though this would necessarily be on a temporary or itinerant basis.[citation needed]
Nomads keep moving for different reasons. Nomadic foragers move in search of game, edible plants, and water. Aboriginal Australians, Negritos of Southeast Asia, and San of Africa, for example, traditionally move from camp to camp to hunt and gather wild plants. Some tribes of the Americas followed this way of life. Pastoral nomads, on the other hand, make their living raising livestock such as camels, cattle, goats, horses, sheep, or yaks; these nomads usually travel in search of pastures for their flocks. The Fulani and their cattle travel through the grasslands of Niger in western Africa. Some nomadic peoples, especially herders, may also move to raid settled communities or to avoid enemies. Nomadic craftworkers and merchants travel to find and serve customers. They include the Gadia Lohar blacksmiths of India, the Roma traders, Scottish travellers and Irish travellers.[citation needed]
Many nomadic and pastorally nomadic peoples are associated with semi-arid and desert climates; examples include the Mongolic and Turkic peoples of Central Asia, the Plains Indians of the Great Plains, and the Amazigh and other peoples of the Sahara Desert. Pastoral nomads who are residents of arid climates include the Fulani of the Sahel, the Khoikhoi of South Africa and Namibia, groups of Northeast Africa such as Somalis and Oromo, and the Bedouin of the Middle East.
Most nomads travel in groups of families, bands, or
In the case of Mongolian nomads, a family moves twice a year. These two movements generally occur during the summer and winter. The winter destination is usually located near the mountains in a valley and most families already have fixed winter locations. Their winter locations have shelter for animals and are not used by other families while they are out. In the summer they move to a more open area in which the animals can graze. Most nomads usually move within the same region and do not travel very far. Since they usually circle around a large area, communities form and families generally know where the other ones are. Often, families do not have the resources to move from one province to another unless they are moving out of the area permanently. A family can move on its own or with others; if it moves alone, they are usually no more than a couple of kilometres from each other. The geographical closeness of families is usually for mutual support. Pastoral nomad societies usually do not have large populations.
One nomadic society, the Mongols, gave rise to the largest land empire in history. The Mongols originally consisted of loosely organized nomadic tribes in Mongolia, Manchuria, and Siberia. In the late 12th century, Genghis Khan united them and other nomadic tribes to found the Mongol Empire, which eventually stretched the length of Asia.[9]
The nomadic way of life has become increasingly rare. Many countries have converted pastures into cropland and forced nomadic peoples into permanent settlements.[10]
Modern forms of nomadic peoples are variously referred to as "shiftless", "gypsies", "rootless cosmopolitans", hunter-gatherers, refugees and urban homeless or street-people, depending on their individual circumstances. These terms may be used in a derogatory sense.
According to
There are two different kinds of war. The one springs from the ambition of princes or republics that seek to extend their empire; such were the wars of Alexander the Great, and those of the Romans, and those which two hostile powers carry on against each other. These wars are dangerous but never go so far as to drive all its inhabitants out of a province, because the conqueror is satisfied with the submission of the people... The other kind of war is when an entire people, constrained by famine or war, leave their country with their families for the purpose of seeking a new home in a new country, not for the purpose of subjecting it to their dominion as in the first case, but with the intention of taking absolute possession of it themselves and driving out or killing its original inhabitants.
Primary historical sources for
Hunter-gatherers
Hunter-gatherers (also known as foragers) move from campsite to campsite, following
, are classified as hunter-gatherers; some of these societies supplement, sometimes extensively, their foraging activity with farming or animal husbandry.Pastoralism
- Pastoralism: This is a mixed economy with a symbiosis within the family.
- Agropastoralism: This is when symbiosis is between segments or clans within an ethnic group.
- True Nomadism: This is when symbiosis is at the regional level, generally between specialised nomadic and agricultural populations.
The pastoralists are sedentary to a certain area, as they move between the permanent spring, summer, autumn and winter (or dry and wet season) pastures for their livestock. The nomads moved depending on the availability of resources.[15]
History
Origins
Nomadic pastoralism seems to have developed first as a part of the
The first nomadic pastoral society developed in the period from 8,500 to 6,500 BCE in the area of the southern
This lifestyle quickly developed into what Jaris Yurins has called the circum-
Yamnaya steppe pastoralists from the Pontic–Caspian steppe, who were among the first to master horseback riding, played a key role in Indo-European migrations and in the spread of Indo-European languages across Eurasia.[18][19]
Increase in post-Soviet Central Asia
One of the results of the
Since the 1990s, as the cash economy shrank, unemployed relatives were reabsorbed into family farms, and the importance of this form of nomadism has increased.[citation needed] The symbols of nomadism, specifically the crown of the grey felt tent known as the yurt, appears on the national flag, emphasizing the central importance of nomadism in the genesis of the modern nation of Kyrgyzstan.[23]
Sedentarization
From 1920 to 2008, the population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased from over a quarter of Iran's population.[24] Tribal pastures were nationalized during the 1960s. The National Commission of UNESCO registered the population of Iran at 21 million in 1963, of whom two million (9.5%) were nomads.[25] Although the nomadic population of Iran has dramatically decreased in the 20th century, Iran still has one of the largest nomadic populations in the world, an estimated 1.5 million in a country of about 70 million.[26]
In
In the 1950s as well as the 1960s, large numbers of
At independence in 1960,
As many as 2 million nomadic
Lifestyle
Pala nomads living in
Nomadic diets in
Perception
Ann Marie Kroll Lerner states that the pastoral nomads were viewed as "invading, destructive, and altogether antithetical to civilizing, sedentary societies" during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Lerner, they are rarely accredited as "a civilizing force".[38]
Allan Hill and Sara Randall observe that western authors have looked for "romance and mystery, as well as the repository of laudable characteristics believed lost in the West, such as independence, stoicism in the face of physical adversity, and a strong sense of loyalty to family and to tribe" in nomadic pastoralist societies. Hill and Randall observe that nomadic pastoralists are stereotypically seen by the settled populace in Africa and Middle East as "aimless wanderers, immoral, promiscuous and disease-ridden" peoples. According to Hill and Randall, both of these perceptions "misrepresent the reality".[39]
Contemporary peripatetic minorities in Eurasia
This section may contain material not related to the topic of the article.(July 2013) ) |
Peripatetic minorities are mobile populations moving among settled populations offering a craft or trade.[40]
Each existing community is primarily endogamous, and subsists traditionally on a variety of commercial or service activities. Formerly, all or a majority of their members were itinerant, and this largely holds true today. Migration generally takes place within the political boundaries of a single state these days.
Each of the peripatetic communities is multilingual, it speaks one or more of the languages spoken by the local sedentary populations, and, additionally, within each group, a separate dialect or language is spoken. They are speaking languages of
Asia
Afghanistan
India
Dom people
In Afghanistan, the Nausar worked as tinkers and animal dealers. Ghorbat men mainly made sieves, drums, and bird cages, and the women peddled these as well as other items of household and personal use; they also worked as moneylenders to rural women. Peddling and the sale of various goods was also practiced by men and women of various groups, such as the Jalali, the Pikraj, the Shadibaz, the Noristani, and the Vangawala. The latter and the Pikraj also worked as animal dealers. Some men among the Shadibaz and the Vangawala entertained as monkey or bear handlers and snake charmers; men and women among the Baluch were musicians and dancers. The Baluch men were warriors that were feared by neighboring tribes and often were used as mercenaries. Jogi men and women had diverse subsistence activities, such as dealing in horses, harvesting, fortune-telling, bloodletting, and begging.[citation needed]
In Iran, the Asheq of Azerbaijan, the Challi of Baluchistan, the Luti of Kurdistan, Kermānshāh, Īlām, and Lorestān, the Mehtar in the Mamasani district, the Sazandeh of Band-i Amir and Marv-dasht, and the Toshmal among the Bakhtyari pastoral groups worked as professional musicians. The men among the Kowli worked as tinkers, smiths, musicians, and monkey and bear handlers; they also made baskets, sieves, and brooms and dealt in donkeys. Their women made a living from peddling, begging, and fortune-telling.
The Ghorbat among the Basseri were smiths and tinkers, traded in pack animals, and made sieves, reed mats, and small wooden implements. In the Fārs region, the Qarbalband, the Kuli, and Luli were reported to work as smiths and to make baskets and sieves; they also dealt in pack animals, and their women peddled various goods among pastoral nomads. In the same region, the Changi and Luti were musicians and balladeers, and their children learned these professions from the age of 7 or 8 years.[citation needed]
The nomadic groups in Turkey make and sell cradles, deal in animals, and play music. The men of the sedentary groups work in towns as scavengers and hangmen; elsewhere they are fishermen, smiths, basket makers, and singers; their women dance at feasts and tell fortunes. Abdal men played music and made sieves, brooms, and wooden spoons for a living. The Tahtacı traditionally worked as lumberers; with increased sedentarization, however, they have taken to agriculture and horticulture.[citation needed]
Little is known for certain about the past of these communities; the history of each is almost entirely contained in their oral traditions. Although some groups—such as the Vangawala—are of Indian origin, some—like the Noristani—are most probably of local origin; still others probably migrated from adjoining areas. The Ghorbat and the Shadibaz claim to have originally come from Iran and Multan, respectively, and Tahtacı traditional accounts mention either
Kochi people
Yörüks
Still some groups such as
Bukat People of Borneo
The Bukat people of Borneo in Malaysia live within the region of the river Mendalam, which the natives call Buköt. Bukat is an ethnonym that encapsulates all the tribes in the region. These natives are historically self-sufficient but were also known to trade various goods. This is especially true for the clans who lived on the periphery of the territory. The products of their trade were varied and fascinating, including: "...resins (damar, Agathis dammara; jelutong bukit, Dyera costulata, gutta-percha, Palaquium spp.); wild honey and beeswax (important in trade but often unreported); aromatic resin from insence wood (gaharu, Aquilaria microcarpa); camphor (found in the fissures of Dryobalanops aromaticus); several types of rotan of cane (Calamus rotan and other species); poison for blowpipe darts (one source is ipoh or ipu: see Nieuwenhuis 1900a:137); the antlers of deer (the sambar, Cervus unicolor); rhinoceros horn (see Tillema 1939:142); pharmacologically valuable bezoar stones (concretions formed in the intestines and gallbladder of the gibbon, Seminopithecus, and in the wounds of porcupines, Hestrix crassispinus); birds' nests, the edible nests of swifts (Collocalia spp.); the heads and feathers of two species of hornbills (Buceros rhinoceros, Rhinoplax vigil); and various hides (clouded leopards, bears, and other animals)."[43] These nomadic tribes also commonly hunted boar with poison blow darts for their own needs.
Europe
Roma
Image gallery
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Nomad camp near Tingri, Tibet. 1993
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Snake charmer from Telugu community of Sri Lanka.
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AIli river, Pazyryk, c. 300 BCE.
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Yeniche people, 15th century
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Kyrgyz nomads in the steppes of the Russian Empire, now Uzbekistan, by pioneer color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, c. 1910.
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Tuaregin Mali, 1974.
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Kyrgyz nomads, 1869–1870.
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Nomads in the Desert (Giulio Rosati).
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Gros Ventre (Atsina) American Indians moving camps with travois for transporting skin lodgesand belongings.
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House barge of theSama-Bajau peoples, Indonesia. 1914–1921
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Photograph of Bedouins (wandering Arabs) of Tunisia, 1899
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Indian nomads (1893), by Raja Ravi Varma
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Indian nomad Banjara
See also
- Nomadic peoples of Europe
- Seasonal human migration
- Nomadic conflict
- Sea Gypsies
- Pastoral society
- Pastoralism
- Transhumance
Figurative use of the term:
- Global nomad
- Digital nomad
- Snowbird (people)
- Military brat
- The Nomadic Project
- Perpetual traveler
- RV lifestyle
- Third culture kid
- Overlanding
References
- ^ "NOMAD". Archived from the original on 2022-12-10. Retrieved 2022-12-10 – via The Free Dictionary.
- ^ "nomadism | society | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Archived from the original on 2021-05-05. Retrieved 2018-07-09.
- ^ "Nomads: At the Crossroads – The Facts". New Internationalist (266). April 5, 1995. Archived from the original on April 28, 2021. Retrieved January 10, 2013.
- ^ "Subsistence". explorable.com. Archived from the original on 2021-04-26. Retrieved 2019-02-24.
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- ^ Teichmann, Michael. "ROMBASE: Didactically edited information on Roma" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-04-21. Retrieved 2014-04-20.
- ^ Rao, Aparna (1987). The concept of peripatetics: An introduction. Cologne: Bohlau Verlag. pp. 1–32. Archived from the original on 2016-06-29. Retrieved 2017-09-10.
[...] peripatetics, [...] endogamous nomads who are largely non-primary producers or extractors, and whose principal resources are constituted by other human populations [...].
- ^ English dictionaries agree that the word came from French in the 16th century but incorrectly claim that the French word referred to pasturing. (See the American Heritage Dictionary Archived 2017-07-14 at the Wayback Machine and the Digitized Treasury of the French Language Archived 2018-07-23 at the Wayback Machine (in French). The meanings of the Latin and Greek predecessors are irrelevant and in fact misleading for the meaning of the English word.)
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- ^ Chaliand, Gerard (2007). The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda. University of California Press. pp. 85–86.
- ^ "Steppe Nomadic Warfare". Oxford Bibliographies. Archived from the original on 2021-09-13. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
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- ^ Yee, Danny (1991). "The Development of Nomadism in Ancient Northeast Africa Karim Sadr [Book Review]". Archived from the original on 2021-03-12. Retrieved 2018-02-01.
- ^ Nomads of the Middle East Archived 2009-04-28 at the Wayback Machine, David Zeidan, OM-IRC, 1995
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- ^ a b "Patterns of Subsistence: Pastoralism". Archived from the original on 2016-02-03. Retrieved 2008-09-10.
- ^ Gibbons, Ann (21 February 2017). "Thousands of horsemen may have swept into Bronze Age Europe, transforming the local population". Science. Archived from the original on 25 September 2022. Retrieved 29 October 2022.
- ^ Curry, Andrew (August 2019). "The first Europeans weren't who you might think". National Geographic. Archived from the original on 2023-03-06. Retrieved 2022-10-29.
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Fouché, Leo (1936). "V: Foundation of the Cape Colony, 1652–1708". In Walker, Eric Anderson (ed.). The Cambridge History of the British Empire. Vol. VIII: South Africa, Rhodesia and the Protectorates. Cambridge: CUP Archive (published 1963). p. 136. Retrieved 2016-11-16.
[...] van der Stel recognised the roving tendency among the colonists and tried to arrest it. A proclamation of 1692 illustrated his fears: it stated that colonists were making a living by grazing cattle and bartering in the interior [...]. This seems clear proof that the trekboer, as a distinct type, was coming into existence during the time of van der Stel. [...] Generation after generation of these hardy and self-reliant nomads pushed the frontiers of civilisation further into the wilderness.
- ISBN 9780803292154. Archivedfrom the original on 23 April 2023. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
[...] the early nineteenth century witnessed 'the nomad gaucho of the colonial period converted into the loyal gaucho of the estancia.'
- ^ Pastoral Livestock Development in Central Asia Archived 2010-01-28 at the Wayback Machine, FAO Rural Development Division
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- ^ "Persian & Iranian Nomads at Best Iran Travel.com". Archived from the original on 20 September 2016. Retrieved 29 April 2015.
- .
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- ^ Sellato, Barnard (1995). Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest: The Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Settling Down. University of Hawaii Press. p. 56.
Further reading
- Jen Grimble (10 Jul 2021). "A different way of living: the last surviving nomads". MSN.
- Oberfalzerova, Alena (2006): Metaphors and Nomads, Triton, Prague. ISBN 8072548492
- Sadr, Karim (1991). The Development of Nomadism in Ancient Northeast Africa, University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812230663
- Cowan, Gregory (2002). "Nomadology in Architecture: Ephemerality, Movement and Collaboration" University of Adelaide (available: Nomadology in architecture: ephemerality, movement and collaboration. Adelaide University Public View)
- Chatty, Dawn (1983–2009). Articles on Nomadic life
- Chatwin, Bruce (1987). The Songlines
- Deleuze and Guattari (1980). A Thousand Plateaus
- Melvyn Goldstein: The Impact of China's Reform Policy on the Nomads of Western Tibet
- The Remote World of Tibet's Nomads
- Grousset, René (1939). L'Empire des Steppes (in French)
- Michael Haerdter. Remarks on modernity, mobility, nomadism and the arts
- Kradin, Nikolay (2004). "Nomadic Empires in Evolutionary Perspective". In Alternatives of Social Evolution. Ed. by N.N. Kradin, A.V. Korotayev, Dmitri Bondarenko, V. de Munck, and P.K. Wason (pp. 274–288). Vladivostok: Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; reprinted in: The Early State, its Alternatives and Analogues. Ed. by Leonid Grinin et al. (pр. 501–524). Volgograd: Uchitel'.
- Kradin, Nikolay N. (2002). "Nomadism, Evolution, and World-Systems: Pastoral Societies in Theories of Historical Development+. Journal of World-System Research 8: 368–388.
- Kradin, Nikolay N. (2003). "Nomadic Empires: Origins, Rise, Declin"e. In Nomadic Pathways in Social Evolution. Ed. by N.N. Kradin, Dmitri Bondarenko, and T. Barfield (pp. 73–87). Moscow: Center for Civilizational Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences.
- Kradin, Nikolay N. (2006). "Cultural Complexity of Pastoral Nomads". World Cultures 15: 171–189.
- Beall, Cynthia and Goldstein, Melvyn (May 1993). "Past becoming future for Mongolian nomads" National Geographic Magazine
- Vigo, Julian (2005). "Nomadic Sexualities and Nationalities: Postcolonial Performative Words and Visual Texts". Inscriptions in the Sand Famagusta: Eastern Mediterranean University Press.