MOBILITY

Mobility stands in contrast to immobility or settlement. It implies a movement through space rather than a place in space. Mobility is an adaptation to the terrain, climate, species of livestock, quality of natural resources, other mobile people, local settlements, and external forces, including economy, politics, and hostilities. Mobility is an adaptation to different configurations of these variables, which helps to ensure the livelihood of people and flocks.

There are two aspects of mobility that deserve emphasis: environment and distance. Mobile people occupy terrain that is generally not suited to fixed-place agriculture, usually due to lack of precipitation or seasonal extremes of temperature. Mobile people thus occupy an environmental niche that cannot support subsistence-level agrarian settled life. Of course there is some mingling of niches, and boundaries between the desert and the sown have shifted, but the generalization holds: mobile people occupy land that is not suited to agriculture. On the other hand, they occupy land that can support herds of animals and supply various wild products that may be needed or desired by both settled and mobile people. In many cases, as I shall discuss later, it is possible for settled and mobile people to sustain lives without necessary economic interaction.

The second aspect of mobility is distance, or the size of the sustaining area. Bedouin Arab camel-riding tribes might cover hundreds of miles in their annual movements, whereas vertical transhumant pastoralists might move a few days’ walk to reach seasonally suitable pastures. The environment determines which of these patterns can obtain, given appropriate species of livestock and means of human transport.

A brief description of Luri pastoralists in the central Zagros Mountains of Iran illustrates the role of terrain and distance (Hole 1978, 1979). The Zagros Mountains of Luristan, Kurdistan, and Bakhtiyari are rugged, often without surface water, blanketed with snow in the winter, and difficult to access because of the terrain (fig. 14.1). At the base is the Susiana plain and eastern Mesopotamia, low-lying land, blazing hot in the summer, but relatively mild in winter. The contrast with the mountain zone could not be more stark, yet it is but a short walk from plain to peak, for those nimble enough to negotiate the landscape. A similar movement from the Jezirah of north Mesopotamia into the Taurus and northern Zagros Mountains was long practiced by Kurdi tribes. Interestingly, even when I first worked in Iran, there were still herds of gazelle, wild sheep and goats, pigs, bears, and wild cats available to hunters. Moreover, the elevated slopes of the Zagros also supported wild barley and wheat, along with almonds, pistachios, figs, jujubes, and abundant oaks that produced large and succulent acorns. In short, even in the mid-twentieth century, the central Zagros had rich, edible wild resources that could supplement both herding and agriculture.

When I traveled with the Baharvand tribe I watched the people glean food along the way. streams and pools supplied greens, while unripe almonds, as well as acorns, could be eaten without processing. According to older men, in the past they had hunted, harvested wild cereals, and collected acorns as a staple food. The women confirmed this and they showed me acorn roasting ovens and grinding mills (fig. 14.2) and gave me recipes for cooking acorn meal. They said they now planted small fields in both their winter and summer pastures because it is now safe; moreover, a planted field produces well in a confined area, whereas wild stands may be thin and scattered, and acorn meal is considered less palatable than bread. Nevertheless, we know from ethnography that acorns could be a staple food, as for non-agricultural california Indians (Driver 1953; Gifford 1936; Mason 1995). The need for security was echoed by others. in Luristan in the 1930s, Erich schmidt’s team observed that crops were harvested green and piled on roofs to secure them (schmidt, van Loon, and Curvers 1989). I was told a similar story — that men would go out and hand strip the heads of grain and hurry home with them for fear that a hostile tribe might burn the crop. The point is that while nomads might survive without cultivated grain, they prefer its ease of preparation, taste, and convenience, so long as there is security. In other words, farming is not inherently antithetical to mobile pastoralism.