| Title | : | Nomad: A Year In the Life of a Qashqa'i Tribesman in Iran |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0520070038 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780520070035 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 482 |
| Publication | : | First published November 19, 1991 |
During 1970 to 1971, Borzu and his people were faced with many difficulties. When the expected winter rains did not fall, pastures and crops shriveled. Unable to sell their starving livestock for any profit, Borzu's people saw their debts to urban merchants and moneylenders increase. At the same time, Iran exercised more bureaucratic control over the Qashqa'i by applying new policies over migratory schedules and the allocation of scarce pastures, and by introducing non-Qashqa'i agriculturalists and livestock investors as legitimate land users. All these measures threatened the nomad's way of life and eventually undermined the role of headmen such as Borzu. Lois Beck details the vicissitudes endured by Borzu's people and the strategies he devised to cope with them.
Blending ethnographic and historical material, this book contains information unavailable for other tribal and nomadic pastoral groups in the Middle East and central Asia. Through Beck's deft analysis, we come to understand why nomadic pastoralism was once an important part of this vast region, and why tribal society has endured.
Nomad: A Year In the Life of a Qashqa'i Tribesman in Iran Reviews
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…a nomad’s lot is not a happy one
And the readers of this book are not likely to be very happy either. The author wrote a book on the nomadic Qashqa’i tribe of Iran in a time of changes. Though the Qashqa’i had maintained themselves apart from the wider Persian society well into the 20th century, by the early 1970s, the government had taken them firmly under control. How their society did or did not change, plus an overall view of nomadic culture within the wider nation state (Iran), must have been the subject of that book. This is not it. She chose an unusual gambit and I didn’t find it very appealing.
Beck kept meticulous notes throughout her one year’s stay with a particular family, during their migrations and during their summer and winter stay in two separate locations. She swept all these daily notes together and compiled this enormous “diary” with a few comments interspersed within. She included some good black and white photos. In an appendix, she lists all the “characters” found in her description of Qashqa’i life over the year. These amount to 222 people, all named. You can peruse the genealogy in another appendix. However, the overall effect, as I kept thinking to myself, is one of “Pointillist Anthropology”! You read thousands of tiny interactions---herding, quarreling, fighting, bad weather, long migrations, the hostility or trickery of local non-nomadic Persians, family antecedents, marriages, dealing with cops and robbers, the hostility and contempt of the wider society towards nomads, debts, making yogurt, butter, and cheese, and even exploding camels (!). It’s all mixed up together. If you step back, you might perceive a picture of a whole culture, but you might just find it unreadable. To be fair, I would say that these details will have preserved for future generations a certain (very detailed) picture of Qashqa’i society half a century ago. This is no doubt a useful contribution, but not for many non-specialist readers. The reader is left as Borzu, the main character and Beck’s host, is left stalled in the rapidly chilling summer pastures as the Shah of Iran bans nomadic movement while he hosts his famous celebration of 2,500 years of Persian history. This abrupt command, highly damaging to the lives of the nomads, pretty well sums up the Persian majority’s attitude towards the nomads.
While Beck details her overall interaction with the particular family and how they accepted her and her husband in the first pages of the book, as you read the vast bulk of it, you never find out what her role was, how the myriad characters reacted to her presence or how it might have influenced various events. The major question for them at that time was “to settle or not to settle”. There were pros and cons to both. What has happened since then, we don’t learn of course. To top it off, there are no conclusions whatsoever. For the reasons above, I can’t really recommend this book, though again underlining its utility for scholars of nomadic cultures or Iran.
