Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity, and inherent dynamics of pastoralism in Africa based on research during a twelve-year period on the southwest and northeast regions. Unraveling the complex prehistory, history, and contemporary political ecology of African pastoralism, results in insight into the ingenuity and flexibility of historical and contemporary herders.

Social and cultural anthropology case study, Maasai nomadic ethnic group, social change, Tanzania - social structure, community relations, traditional culture, value system, religious practice, livestock herding, family structure, theoretical implications of nomadism. Bibliography, photographs.

The book is written by anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists specializing in nomadic studies. All the chapters presented here discuss various aspects of one significant problem: how could small nomadic peoples at the outskirts of agricultural civilizations subjugate vast territories between the Mediterranean and the Pacific? What was the impetus that set in motion the overwhelming forces of the nomads which made tremble the royal courts of Europe and Asia? Was it an outcome of any predictable historical process or a result of a chain of random events? A wide sample of nomadic peoples is discussed, mainly on the basis of new data

Pastoralism is a diffused and ancient form of human subsistence and probably one of the most studied by anthropologists at the crossroads between continuities and transformations. The present critical discourse on sustainable and responsible development implies a change of practices, a huge socio-economic transformation, and the return of new shepherds and herders in different European regions. Transhumance and extensive breeding are revitalized as a potential resource for inner and rural areas of Europe against depopulation and as an efficient form of farming deeply influencing landscape and functioning as a perfect eco-system service. This book is an occasion to reconsider grazing communities’ frictions in the new global heritage scenario.

A scholarly volume devoted to an understanding of contemporary nomadic and pastoral societies in the Middle East and North Africa. This volume recognizes the variable mobile quality of the ways of life of these societies which persist in accommodating the ‘nation-state’ of the 20th and 21st century but remain firmly transnational and highly adaptive. Composed of four sections around the theme of contestation it includes examinations of contested authority and power, space and social transformation, development and economic transformation, and cultures and engendered spaces.

Following basic themes in each chapter, this text makes an ethnographic and historical examination of nomadic pastoral societies in Africa, the Near East, Iranian Plateau, and Central Eurasia. It studies the cattlekeepers, the camel nomads, the good shepherds of southwest Asia, the horseriders, the yakbreeders, and the enduring nomad. For anthropologists and all those interested in nomadic cultures.

The essays in this volume were first published in 1979 and were written by specialists in different aspects of the study of pastoralism, covering all major groups of nomadic pastoralists. They show how the study of nomadic pastoralism can contribute to the understanding of the forms of human existence. The essays examine the relationships between the economic and social organization of pastoral societies and the ecological constraints to which they are subjected, discuss the factors which contribute to the emergence of social and economic inequalities within nomadic societies and analyse whether the evolution of pastoral society is a function of the contact which nomadic groups have with settled agricultural and urban societies or of the contradictions internal to pastoral societies themselves.