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What Was a Nomadic Tribe?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Rudi Paul Lindner
Rudi Paul Lindner
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Historians dislike nomads. This feeling is perhaps understandable, since our sedentary habits keep us from a full comprehension of people whose prosperity depended so much on continual movement and opportunistic raiding. The primary historical sources reinforce this dislike with their universally pejorative attitude: their authors were sedentary beings also who saw nomads as predators and described them from a safe distance. Why should we impeach these witnesses in the absence of an alternative body of sources containing the nomadic perspective? It is ironic that the very practices which led to the nomads' success have doomed them to ignominy in our modern eyes. Why should mounted archers have preserved archives? Paper, always heavy, would restrict mobility, range, and speed of horses. In short, travelling light gave military advantages to the nomads, but it also gave their history into the hands of their settled prey.

Type
War without a State
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 1982 , pp. 689 - 711
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1982

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References

I am grateful to those audiences who have, over the last few years, heard me out on various points raised in this essay and given me of their wisdom: Harvard University's Committee on Inner Asian Studies, the History Department of the University of California at Berkeley, the American Oriental Society, and the American Historical Association. My wife Molly has given me unstinting and affectionate assistance, and my debt to her is as pleasant to acknowledge as it is immense. I would also like to thank friends who read this paper and improved it with their comments: John Masson Smith, Jr., Clive Foss, Joseph Fletcher, Jonathan Marwil, Norman Itzkowitz, John Fine, John Eadie, Jeffrey Bale, and Walter Goffart. I am especially indebted to E. A. Thompson for his kind comments. I have also benefited from conversations with three patient scholars: Geoff Eley, William Schorger, and William Irons. I alone am responsible for the errors which they could not persuade me to recant. I wrote this essay to honor those closest to me in lineage and shared interests: may it be for a blessing on my father, Frank Lindner, and the memory of my mother, Clare Kalman Lindner.

1 Part of a colloquy between Mrs. Morris, a Hupa, and Princess Brantner, President, Yurok Tribal Association, Inc. Quoted by Fried, Morton, The Notion of Tribe (Menlo Park, California, 1975), 76, from a 1955 California Indian claim hearing.Google Scholar

2 The destruction of nomads' political power lessened their reliance on horses. Barth, Fredrik, Nomads of South Persia (Oslo, 1961), 6, 13Google Scholar. In general, see Barth, Fredrik, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Oslo, 1969), 36.Google Scholar

3 For a comparison of airplanes with armored cars as weapons against nomads, see Glubb, John Bagot, The Story of the Arab Legion (London, 1948), 62–64, 75Google Scholar; idem, War in the Desert (London, 1960), 69–70, 83–87, 143–44, 146–47, 202–3, 234–35, 240–42Google Scholar; Sluglett, Peter, Britain in Iraq: 1914–1932 (London, 1976), 262–70Google Scholar. For the impact of centralized government in Iran on the tribes, see Beck, Lois G., “Herd Owners and Hired Shepherds: The Qashqa'i of Iran,” Ethnology, 19:3 (1980), 335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 For part of the material in the next few paragraphs, I would like to thank Jeffrey Bale, whose probing questions and comments in a tutorial sharpened my thought about kinship structures.

5 The classic description of the conical clan is by Kirchhoff, Paul, “The Principles of Clanship in Human Society,” Davidson Journal of Anthropology, 1:1 (1955), 5–10Google Scholar (originally written in the 1930s); also see Sahlins, Marshall D., Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968), 24–25, 49–50.Google Scholar

6 Barth, , Nomads, 84, quotes the Basseri description of the selection process: “The horse feels the rider's thigh.”Google Scholar

7 The segmentary lineage system is blessed with a vast and interesting literature. The classic exposition is by Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), 142–50Google Scholar. Also, Middleton, John and Tait, David, cds., Tribes without Rulers (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Smith, M. G., “Segmentary Lineage Systems,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 86:2 (1956), 39–80Google Scholar; Sahlins, Marshall D., “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist, 63:2 (1961), 322–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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10 Salzman, , “Complementary Opposition,” 67.Google Scholar

11 Salzman, , “Ideology and Change,” 629–30Google Scholar. The notion of an ideology “in reserve” is important to Salzman, who uses it to develop an interesting theory of the sedentarization of nomads. See his introduction to When Nomads Settle, Salzman, Philip Carl, ed. (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

12 Tribal place-names have occupied the attention of Professor Faruk Siimer for many years. See his most recent research, Safevi Devletinin Kuruluşu ve Gelişmesinde Anadolu Türklerinin Rolū (Ankara, 1976).Google Scholar

13 For example, cadasters of central Anatolian nomads dating from the first quarter of the sixteenth century reveal divergent political and economic loyalties among groups sharing the same name. I describe this evidence in a forthcoming study of nomadism in medieval Anatolia.

14 Smith, John Masson Jr., “Mongol Manpower and Persian Population,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 18:3 (1975), 271–99. As for Salzman's own analysis of the role of segmentary lineages among territorially unstable groups (the basis for his defense of the theory), in my view, his groups are actually rather stable. While it is true that these tribesmen may alter their routes and pastures more freely than can Peters's Bedouin, their total range and selection of resources are limited by state power. They are therefore not comparable to the tribes of medieval Eurasia.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 The best treatise on genealogies “as present politics” is Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar; also see Lancaster, William, The Rwala Bedouin Today (Cambridge, 1981), 34–35Google Scholar; Barth, , Nomads, 55–56Google Scholar; Irons, William, The Yomul Turkmen (Ann Arbor, 1975), 44Google Scholar; Pehrson, Robert N., The Social Organization of the Marri Baluch (Chicago, 1966), 34Google Scholar; Humphrey, Caroline, “The uses of Genealogy: A Historical Study of the Nomadic and Sedentarised Buryat,” in Pastoral Production and Society (Cambridge, 1979), 235–60Google Scholar; Digard, Jean-Pierre, “Histoire et anthropologic des sociétés nomades: la cas d'une tribu d'Iran,” Annates, 28:6 (1973), 1427Google Scholar; Marx, Emanuel, “The Tribe as a Unit of Subsistence,” American Anthropologist, 79:2 (1977), 353CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meeker, , Literature and Violence, 189.Google Scholar

16 For the manipulation of genealogies, see Lonsdale, J., “When Did the Gusii (or Any Other Group) Become a Tribe?” Kenya Historical Review, 5:1 (1977), 123–33Google Scholar; Humphrey, , “Uses of Genealogy,” is an excellent study of the differing conditions underlying the “remembering of ancestors” as well as “structural amnesia.”Google Scholar

17 See the detailed discussion of a Kalat example in Swidler, Nina, “The Political Context of Brahui Sedentarization,” Ethnology, 12:3 (1973), 304–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an Iranian example, Bradburd, Daniel, “Never Give a Shepherd an Even Break: Class and Labor among the Komachi,” American Ethnologist, 7:4 (1980), 604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Wittek, Paul, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1938), 7–13.Google Scholar

19 The very title of an Ottoman in Turkish, Osmanh, consisted of the name of the first chief plus a tribal suffix. Tribal names compounded in this manner are common in the cadasters of Anatolian nomads.

20 Barth, , Nomads, 132Google Scholar; Pehrson, , Social Organization, 20.Google Scholar

21 Pehrson, , Social Organization, 19.Google Scholar

22 For the most recent summary of the evidence that there were few, if any, barriers to outsiders joining a tribe, see Rada, and Dyson-Hudson, Neville, “Nomadic Pastoralism,” Annual Review of Anthropology: 1980, 48Google Scholar. For a detailed example, see Barth, , “Pathan Identity and Its Maintenance,” in Ethnic Groups, Barth, , ed., 124–25.Google Scholar

23 Ehmann, Dieter, Bahtiyaren, Persische Bergnomaden im Wandel der Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1975), 58.Google Scholar

24 Bates, Daniel G., Nomads and Farmers (Ann Arbor, 1973).Google Scholar

25 Pehrson, , Social Organization, 3.Google Scholar

25 For what follows I am indebted to the insights of Irons, William, “Variation in Political Stratification among the Yomut Turkmen,” Anthropological Quarterly, 44:3 (1971), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Political Stratification among Pastoral Nomads,” in Pastoral Production, 361–74Google Scholar; see also the parallel position of Burnham, Philip, “Spatial Mobility and Political Centralization in Pastoral Societies,” in Pastoral Production, 349–60Google Scholar, as well as Fried, , Notion of Tribe. There are points of difference, some of them major, separating the views of these authors from each other and from my own, but our approaches seem to me similar.Google Scholar

27 Since the tribe comes into being as a result of such external prodding, which presumably forces people to choose sides, Fried, (Notion of Tribe, 99–106), considers tribes as “secondary phenomena.” In my view, Fried's discussion can be extended further back in time than the age of European expansion; were Fried to do so, I suspect he might reconsider his doubts (pp. 60–65) concerning the tribe as a political group.Google Scholar

28 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford, 1949), ivGoogle Scholar. In general, see Sahlins, , Tribesmen, 17, 38, 55Google Scholar; Meeker, , Literature and Violence, 190Google Scholar; Marx, , “Tribe as a Unit of Subsistence,” 349.Google Scholar

29 The Chinese/Mongol variant on this story is best told in the many stimulating studies of Owen Lattimore, especially his Mongol Journeys (New York, 1941)Google Scholar, and the classic Inner Asian Frontiers of China, 2d ed. (New York, 1951).Google Scholar

30 Burnham, , “Spatial Mobility,” 350.Google Scholar

31 Marx, Emanuel, “The Ecology and Politics of Pastoral Nomadism in the Middle East,” in The Nomadic Alternative, Weissleder, Wolfgang, ed. (Chicago, 1977), 60.Google Scholar

32 Irons, , “Political Stratification,” 362Google Scholar; see also Lattimore's, OwenStudies in Frontier History (London, 1962), 476.Google Scholar

33 Irons, , “Variation in Stratification,” 152–54Google Scholar; Irons, , “Political Stratification,” 366Google Scholar; Spooner, Brian, The Cultural Ecology of Pastoral Nomads (Reading, Massachusetts, 1973), 35Google Scholar. Also see Salzman, Philip Carl, “Tribal Chiefs as Middlemen: The Politics of Encapsulation in the Middle East,” Anthropological Quarterly, 47:2 (1974), 203–10, although I do not believe that the historical evidence supports all of Salzman's contentions. The Ottomans, for example, preferred administering the affairs of a tribe through mid-level leaders rather than through the chief in order to undercut his authority, and thus to weaken and divide the tribe's political structure. The tribes of medieval Anatolia, however, were a greater military threat than are the tribes of today, and Salzman is of course describing the ethnographic present.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 This is not a thinly veiled “great man” theory of history. Such theories ring hollow because they affect to explain events in an environment of sizeable bureaucracies, the sluggish and countervailing forces of a host of social and economic institutions, and a population with multiple and varied interests. The tribe and its chief represent an adaptation to life in environments where a few, well-defined needs are shared. Once a tribe came to have competing or complex interests, the position of the chief became something different, as we shall see: although the founder of the Ottomans was a tribal chief, his grandson was no longer first among equals but a sultan far above his subjects.

35 No literary source discusses pastoralism among the Huns in Europe: Maenchen-Halfen, Otto, The World of the Huns (Berkeley, 1973), 171Google Scholar. I have tried to demonstrate, in a companion essay entitled “Nomadism, Horses, and Huns,” Past and Present, no. 92 (1981), 3–19, that crossing the Carpathians resulted in a severe decline in the amount of pasture, and thus the number of horses, available to the Huns—and also, incidentally, to the Avars, Magyars, and Mongols.Google Scholar

36 Thompson, E. A., A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948), 57.Google Scholar

37 Sozomen, VII. 26. 7–8.Google Scholar

38 Thompson, , History of Attila, 128.Google Scholar

39 For the following calculations I am indebted to my mentor, John Masson Smith, Jr., who first pointed out their possibility to me.

40 Jones, A. H. M., The Roman Economy (Oxford, 1974), 207.Google Scholar

41 Jones, , Roman Economy, 37.Google Scholar

42 Clark, C. and Haswell, M., The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture (London, 1966), 49.Google Scholar

43 For similar stipends paid to the Avars, see Wiita, John E., “The Ethnika in Byzantine Military Treatises” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1977), 131–32.Google Scholar

44 Maenchen-Helfen, , World of the Huns, 364–67.Google Scholar

45 Apollinaris, Sidonius, Carmina VII. 319–25Google Scholar; see the comments of Thompson, , History of Atilla, 136.Google Scholar

46 Anon. Valesianus 8.38: “Orestes Pannonius qui eo tempore quando Atlila adltaliam venit se illi iunxit et eius notarius factus fuerat.” In the context of Attila's organization, the words se illi iunxit can only mean that Orestes joined the tribe.

47 Priscus, frag. 8, Historici Graeci Minores, I, 305 (hereafter cited as HGM). Whether the detail in the dialogue between Priscus and this (Greek) Hun about Roman justice is fabricated or not does not affect my argument here.Google Scholar

48 Maenchen-Helfen, , World of the Huns, 117.Google Scholar

49 Thompson, , History of Attila, 85.Google Scholar

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51 I discuss this encounter in “Nomadism, Horses, and Huns.”

52 Priscus, frag. 1, HGM, I, 277.Google Scholar

53 Priscus, frag. 5, HGM, I, 284.Google Scholar

54 Priscus, frag. 8, HGM, I, 296–97, 314.Google Scholar

55 On the Akatziri, see Maenchen-Helfen, , World of the Huns, 433Google Scholar; for their attempted defection from the tribe, see Priscus, frag. 8, HGM, I, 298–99Google Scholar. Defection itself, if not its political implications for tribal leadership, caught the attention of the Byzantine strategists. Wiita, , ”Ethnika,” 158–59.Google Scholar

56 These processes are discussed in greater detail by Joseph Fletcher in a series of forthcoming essays on “bloody tanistry.” I am indebted to him for kindly showing me drafts of these papers.

57 Maenchen-Helfen, , World of the Huns, 151.Google Scholar

58 A more detailed exposition of the material in the following paragraphs is contained in my forthcoming study of medieval Anatolian nomadism.

59 In fact, the career of the general Alexius Philanthropenus in Asia Minor is very much that of a successful tribal chief—and perhaps that is how his Turkish supporters treated him. On this fascinating episode, see Laiou, Angeliki E., Constantinople and the Latins: The Foreign Policy of Andronicus II, 1282–1326 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972), 80–82Google Scholar; Arnakis, George G., Hoi Protoi Othomanoi (Athens, 1947), 42–43Google Scholar; Laiou, Angeliki E., “Some Observations on Alexios Philanthropenos and Maximos Planoudes,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 4 (1978), 89–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schreiner, Peter, “Zur Geschichte Philadelpheias im 14. Jahrhundert (1293–1390),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 35:2 (1969), 378–83.Google Scholar

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61 An inflated version of the story of the election of Osman is in the Seljuk history of Yazicioğlu Ali. For the text, see Levend, Agah Sim, Türk Dilinde Gelişme ve Sadeleşme Evreleri (Ankara, 1972), 18Google Scholar; a more accurate version is one which Negri derived from Bursan tradition describing the competition for chieftaincy between Osman and his uncle Dündar: Die altomanische Chronik des Mevlana MehemmedNeschri, Taeschner, Franz, ed. (Leipzig, 1951), I, 25Google Scholar. For Diindar's death, see pp. 28–29. In Neşri's work, Osman's election is clearly a result of “the horse feeling the rider's thigh.” For the election of Osman's son Orkhan, see Die altomanische Chronik des Ašikpašazade (hereafter cited as APT), Giese, Friedrich, ed. (Wiesbaden, 1929), 34; for the election of Murad I, see the chronicle of Ruhi, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS Or. qu. 821, f. 28v.Google Scholar

62 APZ, 14–15, 19, 22Google Scholar; for heterodoxy among the early Ottomans, see Vyronis, S., “The Byzantine Legacy and Ottoman Forms,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 23–24 (1969–1970), 260.Google Scholar

63 APZ, 10–14Google Scholar; for an example of Palaeologan fiscal policies in Bithynia, see Laurent, V., Les regestes des actes du patriarcat de Constantinople (Paris, 1971), vol. I, fasc. 4, no. 1492.Google Scholar

64 Swidler, , “Political Context,” 307–8Google Scholar, provides a parallel to Osman's protection of Christian glassvendors against Muslims from a neighboring emirate, Germiyan; APZ, 14–15Google Scholar; Battuta, Ibn, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Vol. II, Gibb, H. A. R., trans., publications of the Hakluyt Society (Cambridge, 1962), n.s. 117, pp. 451–53.Google Scholar

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67 Al-'Umari, as translated by Quatremère, E., in Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la bibliotheque du roi, 13 (1838), 364–65, 339–40.Google Scholar

68 Irons puts this point particularly well in his “Political Stratification,” 370–72.Google Scholar

69 Uzunçarşih, I. H., “Gazi Orhan Bey vakfiyesi,” Belleten, 5:3 (1941), 277–88.Google Scholar

70 Mantran, Robert, “Les incriptions arabes de Brousse,” Bulletin d'etudes orientates, 14 (1952–1954), 89Google Scholar; for the influx of ulema, see Taeschner, Franz in Der Islam, 20:2 (1932), 114–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Irène, “La règne de Selim Ier: tournant dans la vie politique et réligieuse de l'empire ottoman,” Turcica, 6 (1975), 36–37Google Scholar. I cannot agree with the interpretation of Wittek, , Rise, 14–15Google Scholar; see my “Stimulus and Justification in Early Ottoman History,” in Byzantium and Islam, Vaporis, N. M., ed. (Boston, 1982).Google Scholar

71 Quoted from his Inner Asian Frontiers, 522Google Scholar. The phrase is usually reproduced in the form, “The only pure nomad is a poor nomad.” Lattimore's earliest formulation bore slightly different connotations; see his Studies in Frontier History, 257–58. Scholars' use of the dictum deserves closer study.Google Scholar

72 Lattimore, , Studies in Frontier History, 484.Google Scholar