Pastoralism, the use of extensive grazing on rangelands for livestock production, is one of the key production systems in the world’s drylands. Nonetheless, throughout much of its long history its reputation has been poor and its practitioners marginalized by sedentary cultivators and urban dwellers. Pastoral societies have risen and fallen, fragmented into isolated families or constructed empires that span the world; their demise has been announced regularly, often in the face of entirely contrary evidence for their persistence.
In spite of this, anthropologists and social theorists have continued to pay much attention to pastoralism, at times seeing it as an inevitable stage in the growth of civilization or, alternatively, caricaturing it as an anarchic institution that is likely to pull down that same civilization. Planners have denigrated the mobility characteristic of pastoral societies and novelists have romanticized the wanderings of these same nomads. Development experts, noticing the enormous passing herds, first saw pastoral systems as rich in potential, but later castigated pastoralists as vulnerable and unable to invest in development. To all this, pastoralists have remained largely indifferent, since a certain scepticism towards the schemes and caprices of the external world is an almost inevitable product of the independent image they have of themselves.
The late twentieth century saw a new upswelling of writing on pastoralism, both sentimental and aggrieved, regretting its inevitable demise and blaming pastoralists for their failure to respond to the vagaries of climate and the international economic system. Investment in pastoral development, which reached a high point in the 1970s, crumbles progressively every year. At the same time, however, pastoralists themselves have become far more articulate and able to communicate their concerns and desires to the outside world. The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up the great steppes of Central Asia for the first time in 70 years, making accessible a whole world of pastoralism that had been essentially closed to researchers since 1919. The effect of this has been to expand pastoralism, as refugees from now collapsed industrial enterprises, which only functioned with significant subsidies, have sought to revive the only method of subsistence that is practical throughout much of this region.
This would therefore seem to be the right time to look at pastoralism in the world as a whole, combining recent insights from archaeology and anthropology with twentieth-century experiences of development. Despite a plethora of case studies, monographs and collected papers on African and Asian pastoral systems, integrated worldwide overviews of pastoralism are surprisingly few. One of the most recent essays on this subject was written by Khazanov (1984) who approaches pastoralism from a historical point of view, focusing on nomads’ relations with external societies and the origin of the State. The rich and complex literature on pastoral development is effectively ignored, perhaps unsurprisingly within the context of Soviet ethnography. More important, however, is the failure to integrate the biological and to recognize that pastoral society is, above all, driven by the nature and requirements of different species. This monograph is intended to provide a synopsis of the present and draw out implications for the future.
Pastoral strategies can be categorized in a number of ways. The most important of these are:
In addition to these categories, a broad distinction is made between the developed and the developing countries. In both Australia and North America, extensive livestock production is practised under conditions that are very different from those found elsewhere in the world, using fenced ranges and unambiguous tenure. This creates a level of investment in land and animals that is very dissimilar from that of “traditional” systems.
Pastoralism evolved as a response to two factors: medium human population densities and the presence of extensive rangelands, usually in semi-arid regions (although the reindeer pastoralism found across the circumpolar regions of Eurasia is an exception to this). Where human population densities are very low, i.e. where hunting-gathering is relatively easy, there is little or no impetus to herd animals. Hence pastoralism was absent from the rangelands of the New World and Australia prior to the arrival of the first Europeans. It is debated whether the absence of appropriate species also has an impact on the evolution of pastoralism; for example, camelids, alpaca and llamas were domesticated as pastoral species in the Andes in the pre-Columbian era but no pastoralism developed on the New World plains, perhaps for lack of an appropriate species.
Pastoralism has had a vertiginous history in the realm of development agencies. The world’s rangelands and the large numbers of livestock using them were, for a long time, seen as a major and underused resource and this stimulated a vast body of research and development projects, both technical and social. The perceived failure of many of these projects and the linking of livestock to a spectrum of environmental damage caused a major retreat from support of pastoralism in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s it was realized that pastoralism had remained in place and, moreover, that the opening up of Central Asia – the largest pastoral region in the world – was stimulating a renewed interest in, if not necessarily a wise application of, lessons learned over the previous decades. The new millennium therefore seems an appropriate time to review the status of pastoral production worldwide and, with a particular focus on the insights gained by comparing Asian and African pastoralism, to review policy in the light of recent concerns about poverty and vulnerability.
Pastoralism is strongly associated with the presence of grasslands, but there are numerous grasslands without pastoralists. This is partly a reflection of history; pastoralists tend to exist in complex relationships with hunter-gatherers and, in most of the New World and Australia, pastoralism never developed because the population pressure on land remained limited. Table 1 lists the regions of the world where pastoralism is found and gives a summary of its status.
It is no accident that the high-capital land management approaches common in Australia and the New World are in areas where populations of hunter-gatherers lived prior to colonial intrusions. Historically, forager cultures have proved the most vulnerable to aggression from agricultural and technology-based cultures; “guns, germs and steel” against dispersed low-technology populations (Diamond, 1997). Pastoralism developed in North and Central America after the Spanish era as indigenous peoples gained access to European ruminants, or migrants from the Old World settled and began to farm (Melville, 1994). These systems have been adopted in very diverse fashions, with such peoples as the Navaho developing what may be termed “true” pastoralism while others, such as the Apache, evolved highly focused meat production through collective herds (Kunstadter, 1965).
African pastoralists are very unevenly distributed; occupationally specialized pastoralists – principally dependent on camels, cattle and sheep – are virtually confined to areas north of the equator in semi-arid regions (Blench, 1998a). Agropastoral communities, which own cattle, sheep and goats, also occur in the northern region, but predominate south of the equator.
Estimated numbers of pastoral households worldwide are very speculative. There is a striking difference between Central Asia and Africa in this respect; pastoral societies in Asia tend to have very high populations and substantial non-pastoral sectors. The Kazakhs, for example, number some 10 million people across ten countries, but only a small fraction of them are herders (Benson and Svanberg, 1998). The other aspect of the Central Asian situation is that the creation of new countries with ethnic bases and freer movement across borders is allowing expatriate members of specific ethnic groups to return to their homes, thus Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks are all now moving back to the states that bear their names. At the same time, the collapse of industries that had previously been supported by Soviet subsidies has forced unemployed urban workers to practise herding with their rural relatives. The situation is therefore dynamic and can be expected to change further in coming years.
De Haan, Steinfeld and Blackburn (1997) quote a worldwide estimate of 20 million pastoral households. In sub-Saharan Africa, pastoral and agropastoral communities account for 20 million and 240 million individuals, respectively (Swallow, 1994 in Holden, Ashley and Bazeley, 1997). Broadly speaking, the economic importance of livestock within total household income rises as rainfall declines, and in desert regions dependence is near total.
TABLE 1
Regional zonation of pastoral systems
Zone |
Main species |
Status |
Sub-Saharan Africa |
Cattle, camels, sheep, goats |
Reducing because of advancing agriculture |
Europe |
Small ruminants |
Declining everywhere because of enclosure and advancing agriculture |
North Africa |
Small ruminants |
Reducing because of advancing agriculture |
Near East and South- Central Asia |
Small ruminants |
Declining locally because of enclosure and advancing agriculture |
India |
Camels, cattle, buffaloes, sheep, goats, ducks |
Declining because of advancing agriculture, but peri-urban livestock production is expanding |
Central Asia |
Yak, camels, horses, sheep, goats |
Expanding following decollectivization |
Circumpolar zone |
Reindeer |
Expanding following decollectivization in Siberia, but under pressure in Scandinavia |
North America |
Sheep, cattle |
Declining because of increased enclosure of land and alternative economic opportunities |
Central America |
Sheep, cattle |
Declining because of increased enclosure of land and alternative economic opportunities |
Andes |
Llamas, alpaca, sheep |
Contracting llama production because of expansion of road systems and European-model livestock production, but increased alpaca wool production |
South American |
Cattle, sheep |
Expanding where forests are converted to savannah, lowlands but probably static elsewhere |
Table 2 is a schematic tabulation of pastoral species worldwide, showing their approximate geographical distribution and the main management strategies used to keep them. “Enclosed” refers to fenced or demarcated rangelands operating within a Western economy.
The inclusion of buffalo in pastoral herds is rare and those found in the Islamic Republic of Iran are believed to derive from the migrations of Zott gypsies in the eighth century (see note in Digard, 1981: 30). In India, the Gujjar and other peoples practise vertical transhumance with buffaloes between the foothills of the Himalayas and the alpine meadows.
TABLE 2
Main pastoral species and management systems worldwide
Species |
Scientific name |
Main regions |
Nomadic |
Transhumant |
Agropastoral |
Enclosed |
Alpaca |
Lama pacos |
Andes |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
Bactrian camel |
Camelus bactrianus |
East-Central Asia |
+ |
+ |
+ |
- |
Buffalo |
Bubalus bubalis |
Islamic Republic of Iran, India |
+ |
+ |
+ |
? |
Cattle (taurine) |
Bos taurus |
Europe, West Asia, West Africa |
- |
+ |
+ |
+ |
Cattle (zebu) |
Bos indicus |
Africa, Central Asia |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
Donkey |
Equus asinus |
Africa, Asia |
+ |
+ |
+ |
- |
Dromedary |
Camelus dromedarius |
Africa, West Asia |
+ |
+ |
+ |
- |
Goat |
Capra hircus |
Africa, Europe, Asia |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
Horse |
Equus caballus |
Central Asia |
+ |
+ |
+ |
- |
Llama |
Lama lama |
Andes |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
Reindeer |
Rangifer tarandus |
Circumpolar Eurasia |
+ |
+ |
- |
? |
Sheep |
Ovis aries |
Africa, Europe, Asia |
+ |
+ |
+ |
+ |
Yak |
Poephagus grunniens |
Highland Central Asia |
- |
+ |
- |
- |
This discussion excludes birds, notably ducks and geese. Particularly in India, ducks and geese are herded by specialized pastoralists who move them from place to place to exploit changing feed resources. The parameters of such pastoralism are very different from those of mainstream systems, so bird pastoralism is not treated in the main text but discussed briefly in Annex 2. Historically, in Europe and the Near East, pig-based pastoralism clearly existed, but there seem to be no clear modern cases of it, in part because the main areas where it was important have switched to either Islam or enclosed production systems.1
Another division of pastoralism that is less easy to model is the contrast between systems that are essentially based around a single species and those based around the integrated production of several species. For example, although horses, donkeys, camels, goats, cattle and dogs are kept by the nomads of Southwest Asia, sheep predominate, and other animals are used for portage, riding, ploughing or herd management (see, e.g. Barfield, 1981 for a description of the Arabs of northeast Afghanistan). By contrast, in Mongolia and the northern Sudan, herders seem to manage between two and four species of roughly equal importance simultaneously. Göbel (1997) shows that, in the arid puna of northwest Argentina, herders keep a mixture of llamas, sheep and goats in roughly equal proportions.
The most common categorization of pastoralism is by the degree of movement, from highly nomadic through transhumant to agropastoral. Cultivators also keep livestock for work or as a source of marketable products, but this is not usually regarded as pastoralism. Any classification of this type must be treated as a simplification; pastoralists are by their nature flexible and opportunistic, and can rapidly switch management systems as well as operating multiple systems in one overall productive enterprise. For example, West African cattle herders can practise a system of regular transhumance for a long period, building up patronage relationships with farmers on their routes. However, in the case of extreme drought or disease stress, they switch to highly nomadic patterns, moving to new areas and breaking these relationships. When the crisis has passed they may revert to their former routes or move into an entirely new management mode.
Exclusive pastoralists are livestock producers who grow no crops and simply depend on the sale or exchange of animals and their products to obtain foodstuffs. Such producers are most likely to be nomads, i.e. their movements are opportunistic and follow pasture resources in a pattern that varies from year to year. This type of nomadism reflects, almost directly, the availability of forage resources; the more patchy these are, the more likely an individual herder is to move in an irregular pattern.
In popular imagination, nomads wander from place to place without any logic – Ammianus Marcellinus described the Huns thus:
No one ever ploughs a field in their country, or touches a plough handle. They are ignorant of time, law or settled existence and they keep roaming from places in their wagons. If you ask one of their children where he comes from, he was conceived in one place, born far away and brought up still further off.
Ammianus Marcellinus. The Histories.
In reality, pastoralists’ landscape is flecked with an invisible constellation of resources. They have to balance their knowledge of pasture, rainfall, disease, political insecurity and national boundaries with access to markets and infrastructure. They prefer established migration routes and often develop longstanding exchange arrangements with farmers to make use of crop residues or to bring trade goods. Pastoralists usually only diverge from their existing patterns in the face of drought, pasture failure or the spread of an epizootic. This flexibility is often the key to their survival. In the droughts of the early 1980s, highly mobile camel people such as the Rashaida retained a much greater proportion of their herds than the neighbouring Beja because of the latter’s attachment to set routes and pastures (RIM, 1989).
In some regions of the world, nomadism is an ancient and relatively static subsistence strategy, for example among the “nomads of the nomads” in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia (Cole, 1975). However, along the ecozone between rangeland and arable land, movement among different strategies can be quite fluid. The tone of much of the literature suggests that the process of sedentarization among nomads is irreversible but, as Glatzer (1977, 1982) shows, the very limited opportunities for agriculturists in northwest Afghanistan have impelled some to turn to pastoral nomadism.
Transhumance
Transhumance is the regular movement of herds among fixed points in order to exploit the seasonal availability of pastures. In montane regions such as Switzerland, Bosnia, North Africa, the Himalayas, Kyrgyzstan and the Andes this is a vertical movement, usually between established points, and the routes are very ancient. There is strong association with higher-rainfall zones; if the precipitation is such that the presence of forage is not a problem, herders can afford to develop permanent relations with particular sites, for example by building houses. Horizontal transhumance is more opportunistic, with movement between fixed sites developing over a few years but often disrupted by climatic, economic or political change.
Transhumant pastoralists often have a permanent homestead and base at which the older members of the community remain throughout the year. Transhumance is often associated with the production of some crops, although primarily for herders’ own use rather than for the market. In many temperate regions, where snow is likely to block animals’ access to pasture, haymaking is an important component of the system. “Make hay while the sun shines” is very significant advice in such systems; if the grass is not cut, dried and bundled during the summer, it may rot while being stored. Hay production in tropical systems is less common because the movement of the herds is between higher- and lower-rainfall zones, in the expectation that there will be forage in both. In West Africa, for example, there is a broad pattern of southwards movement in the dry season, when grass is available and insect problems are minimized, and a return movement northwards in the wet season, when humidity-related diseases increase and there is pasture in the regions further north.
A characteristic feature of transhumance is herd splitting; the herders take most of the animals to search for grazing, but leave the resident community with a nucleus of lactating females. There are many variations on this procedure, and the development of modern transport has meant that in recent times households are not split so radically; members can travel easily between the two bases. Whether milking females, weak animals or work animals are left behind depends substantially on the system being followed, and may even vary within an individual system on a year-by-year basis.
Transhumance has been transformed by the introduction of modern transport in many regions of Eurasia. For example, in the United Kingdom, the transhumance of sheep between the lowlands and highland areas for rough grazing is now conducted entirely by trucks that carry the animals from one grazing point to another. Many pastoralists in North Africa send their animals on transhumance by truck or train (Trautmann, 1985). Wealthier countries in the Persian Gulf, such as Oman and Saudi Arabia, make vehicles available at subsidized rates to assist pastoralists with animal transport. It seems likely that this pattern will become more and more frequent, especially as the problem of controlling animals in increasingly densely settled environments worsens.
Agropastoralists can be described as settled pastoralists who cultivate sufficient areas to feed their families from their own crop production. Agropastoralists hold land rights and use their own or hired labour to cultivate land and grow staples. While livestock is still valued property, agropastoralists’ herds are usually smaller than those found in other pastoral systems, possibly because they no longer rely solely on livestock and depend on a finite grazing area which can be reached from their villages within a day. Agropastoralists invest more in housing and other local infrastructure and, if their herds become large, they often send them away with more nomadic pastoralists.
Agropastoralism is often also the key to interaction between the sedentary and the mobile communities. Sharing the same ethnolinguistic identity with the pastoralists, agropastoralists often act as brokers in establishing cattle tracks, negotiating the “camping” of herds on farms (when crop residues can be exchanged for valuable manure) and arranging for the rearing of work animals, all of which add value to overall agricultural production.
As well as the traditional pastoral systems described in the previous paragraphs, there is a fourth system of extensive livestock production, which can be described as enclosed systems or ranching, i.e. the land is individually owned and usually fenced. The United States is an example of the gradual transition from common ownership systems, which were prevalent in the nineteenth century, to today’s fully enclosed system. Ranching is the dominant system in North America, Australia and parts of South America, notably Argentina (Strickon, 1965). Rivičre (1972) describes transitional systems in northern Brazil, where communal tenure is giving way to ranching. Some European systems could be described as ranching, although enclosures are often small and animals frequently given supplements in the field. As Ingold (1990) points out, there has been remarkably little description of ranching from anything other than the technical point of view, and socio-economic descriptions tend to be uniformly hostile because the individual ownership of large tracts of land is seen as antisocial. Ranching, however, is an inevitable development in certain types of economy, where the urban demand for protein makes the lax supply systems of conventional pastoralism unacceptable and input supply can support the higher throughputs that justify ranches.
Enclosed systems represent a powerful ideology, and the history of colonial and post-colonial development and command economies is littered with failed attempts to introduce them throughout both the dry tropics and the temperate grasslands of Eurasia. In Nigeria, such systems have had a long and unsuccessful history dating back to the early colonial era (e.g. Dunbar, 1970); elsewhere in Africa, the late 1960s saw the renewal of hopeful introductions and equally convincing failures (e.g. Galaty, 1994: 190). Livestock ranches have an interesting history in Southern Africa; in the colonial era they were established in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. Although a substantial proportion of these remain, in many places they have been perceived as an unacceptable concentration of land in the hands of a single owner and there is a gradual reversion to more traditional tenure systems. In Zimbabwe, for example, smallholder settlers are invading large livestock enterprises with the tacit approval of government.
The situation in North-Central Asia is one of decollectivization. Among Sakha and Even reindeer herders in Siberia, a system of managing wild reindeer seems to have operated in the pre-Soviet era (Vitebsky, 1991, 1992; Van Veen, 1995). After the imposition of Bolshevik rule, the land was divided into fenced enclaves and the herds collectivized and managed on very large ranches with centralized services. A suboptimal system of managing fodder resources improved the health of the animals, and the ready market for their products acted as compensation in market terms. With decollectivization after 1991, the fencing is gradually collapsing and veterinary services are in decline. The townships established to provide centralized social services are not functioning as well, and the product-buying systems have faltered. Herders are compelled to re-establish older management systems while trying to develop new markets for their products in a situation where inputs are no longer subsidized.
The flexibility that is characteristic of pastoral nomadism, combined with its ability to transport goods and people, has meant that pastoralism has long been associated with two other major livelihood strategies: trade and warfare. Prior to the evolution of modern transport, animals were the only method of moving large quantities of goods across land. Consequently, pastoralists often became involved in trade caravans, guiding, managing and supplying the appropriate livestock, and sometimes themselves becoming traders. In the Sahara and the countries of the Persian Gulf, this evolved into a fairly sophisticated form of blackmail, whereby the nomads guided the caravans and extracted monetary payments to prevent them from raiding those same caravans (Sweet, 1965). Long-distance trade in the Andes was a key function of llama breeders, and elaborate multiple-point trade systems have been recorded, based on exchange relationships that lasted many generations (Orlove, 1982: 104). Similar, camel-based, systems traverse the deserts between eastern Turkey and northwestern India, while the movement of yaks and long-legged sheep is essential to the distribution of trade goods in the Himalayan region (Downs and Ekvall, 1965; Jina, 1999). A caravan trade still exists in the more inaccessible regions of the pastoral zone, but its economic importance has been much reduced by modern transport.
Frederiksen (1995) describes the transformation of the Hazarbuz, who are pastoral nomads of eastern Afghanistan and form a section of the Pashtun. Until the 1920s, the Hazarbuz lived principally as herders, concentrating on sheep (despite their name, which means “a thousand goats”). Because their migration routes coincided with a major arm of the silk route, they became more involved in transporting and then trading, typically bringing tea from Bukhara into Afghanistan. As they became more and more successful, an increasing number of households gave up nomadism and settled in Kabul or elsewhere until, by the mid-1970s, less than 10 percent of the Hazarbuz were actually involved in pastoralism. The Soviet invasion scattered the population still further, and many Hazarbuz now operate from Pakistan, while those remaining in Afghanistan are unable to migrate because of the security situation.
It is no coincidence that pastoralism has also been associated with another type of trade: smuggling. The consolidation of national borders and the evolution of contradictory tariffs in neighbouring countries makes nomads the ideal group for smuggling contraband between such countries. This is particularly highly developed in the Near East and Central Asia, where extremely different economies border one another and long featureless frontiers are almost impossible to police. Bourgeois and Bourgeois (1972) describe the pastoral nomad smuggling systems of Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion, and Abu-Rabia (1994) the important role that the Negev Bedouin played in Israel in the 1950s, when they smuggled in both meat and scarce consumer goods with the tacit approval of the authorities. More recently, the Bedu in Jordan have played a key role in smuggling primary products out of Iraq, tax-free consumer goods from Saudi Arabia to all other countries and small products, such as cigarettes, into the Syrian Arab Republic. Similarly, the Rashaida in the Sudan are key intermediaries in trade, moving fat-tailed sheep across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia and receiving consumer goods in return.
This has interesting consequences for both livestock production and intervention in the livestock sector. In many places where smuggling and trade are key sources of income, pastoralist economic dependence on livestock is slight, although trade depends on the pastoral way of life. As a consequence, animals are often few and little investment is made in either reproduction or health, since returns on these are low compared with, for example, bribing officials or buying four-wheel-drive vehicles. So, when proposed development projects assume that pastoralism is the basis of the local economy (since speaking openly about smuggling is politically unacceptable), they usually run into sand, literally and metaphorically, as herders do not make the investments required by the project because their attention is directed elsewhere.
Pastoralism and raiding have been associated since ancient times; Herodotos reported on the Scythian horsemen 2 500 years ago. Since then, waves of raiders from Central Asia threatened Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. Barfield (1989) gives a history of the dynamic relationship between the Chinese empire and its nomadic raiders from the steppes over a period of 3 000 years. Chatwin (1989) describes in some detail the ebb and flow of the association between pastoralism and military cultures across Asia. There is little doubt that the domestication of the horse contributed significantly to the evolution of both raiding cultures and large States. Horses made possible the rapid movement of large armies and the transport of goods, personnel and messages in a way that was impractical with any other livestock species. The cyclical nature of the conflict between nomads and the State was first described by the mediaeval North African historian, Ibn Khaldun, in his study of history, The Muqadimah (Rosenthal, 1967). This cyclism also helps explain why so much of the discourse of pastoral nomadism is framed in terms of “crisis” and “problem” (see The discourse of pastoralism, on p. 11); the explosive nature of relations with the State and the natural environment suggests that a catastrophic cusp has been breached.
This type of centre-periphery warfare has largely ceased, probably mainly as a result of the introduction of the aeroplane. Once the State can move around freely in rugged and remote areas, moving troops and weapons to inaccessible zones, the previous advantage held by the nomads disappears. Only when the State is too impoverished to outmanoeuvre the pastoralists in this way can nomads persist with dissent. Nonetheless, the ability of nomads to move in hostile terrain continues to be perceived as a threat by national governments, as witnessed by the continuing hostilities between the Saharan nomads – the Tuareg and the Teda – and the countries in whose territory they live.
Brotherston (1989: 244) notes that the llama was essential to Inca military operations, providing both transport and food on the hoof and playing a role that was analogous to that of the horse. In some regions where the horse was an introduced exotic, such as West Africa, large States failed to develop. Although large North African horses were brought across the desert in the mediaeval period, the high costs of keeping them alive in a tsetse zone meant that they could never support an empire as large as those of Central Asia (Law, 1980; Blench, 1993). Nonetheless, as horses became accustomed to West Africa, they played an increasing role in warfare and, had colonialism not intervened, would perhaps have begun to underpin large State structures. The Fulše in West Africa launched a jihad in the early nineteenth century which transformed the political map of the Sahelian region.
One aspect of the colonial and postcolonial era that is relevant to this type of conflict is changing social structure and the breakdown of acceptance of former hierarchical relations. Just as in the West, special interest groups increasingly challenge the process whereby the governments of nation States make decisions for them, so sections of society at the bottom of the social pyramid in Africa have begun to assert their rights. Across the semi-arid zone, pastoralist societies such as the Moors, the Tamachek and some Fulše groups depended heavily on slave labour in the precolonial period. After the colonial conquest, slaves were given their freedom legally, although realizing that freedom was often a lengthy process. As groups such as the Haratin (Moors), Bella or Iklan (Tamachek) and Rimayše (Fulše) moved away from their former masters they retained both their language and their lifestyle. Gradually, however, resentment at their former status has surfaced and they have responded either by denying their slave origins or with antagonistic behaviour towards their former owners, some of whom have been reduced to poverty by the major droughts of the 1970s and 1980s.
In more subtle ways, authority systems that depended on farmers being subservient to pastoralists gradually collapsed in the postcolonial era. For example, in Nigeria during the colonial period, many non-Muslim populations were placed under a local juridical system controlled by the Hausa/Fulani. Court cases between herders and farmers tended almost invariably to be decided in favour of herders. However, after independence, farmers gradually began to take control of local authorities, and thus judicial systems, and their own appointees made decisions in courts. The result has often been a reversal of the previous bias.
In the case of seasonal pastoral migrations, committees were established throughout English-speaking West Africa to ensure that established cattle routes were respected by both farmers and pastoralists. These committees functioned into the early years of independence, but have now been largely disbanded. Many years of the seasonal migration of cattle herds have created fertile north-south swathes. Declining soil fertility in many regions has made these attractive places to farm, outweighing the dangers of possible conflict. Farmers have also been emboldened by taking control of the local or regional administration in many areas.
In many environments, pastoralism and agriculture have effectively eliminated all but small animals and commensals. However, especially in some parts of Africa and Central Asia, herders still interact with significant wildlife populations. This has two opposing consequences: the persistence of predators and the availability of hunted meat. Pastoralists have no sympathy with predators, and usually end up in conflict with conservation lobbies, especially in Mongolia (see section on Predation, p. 34). Curiously, few pastoralists are hunters. In contrast to farmers, who often regard hunting as a prestigious activity, pastoralists view hunting as a minor activity, often focused on particular species. In Mongolia, the main focus of hunting activity is the marmot, which is not high-status game compared with large mammals. Similarly, pastoralists over much of Africa do not hunt. It has been noted that areas of the Serengeti where pastoralists are resident suffer less from the depredations of poachers than do areas that are bordered by farming villages.
However, in some pastoral subarctic systems, such as that of the Saami of the Kola peninsula, hunting plays an important role in overall subsistence. The Saami have relatively small reindeer herds which they exploit principally for household meat. Their herding system allows them to leave the reindeer to run wild for much of the year, and during this period the fishing, hunting and trapping of mammals predominate, occasionally for meat and also for the pelts of high-value species sold for cash. The Kazakhs combine all these sources of income, hunting with hawks on a recreational basis, hunting meat species and trapping fur animals and selling the pelts.
Pastoralists can be clearly divided in terms of their attitude to aquatic resources. In some regions, fishing and the gathering of shellfish are essential to subsistence, while elsewhere pastoralists regard such foods as taboo. For example, along the coast of the Horn of Africa, from southern Egypt to northern Kenya – an extremely dry region dominated by pastoral peoples – a prohibition on marine resources means that these go virtually unexploited, despite the sometimes desperate straits to which populations are reduced in times of drought or warfare. Inland, however, in the swamps of the southern Sudan, Nilotic pastoral peoples such as the Dinka and the Nuer regard fish as an integral part of their subsistence. Subgroups of the Turkana have always exploited the fish in Lake Turkana. Mongolian lakes remain largely unfished, but throughout much of the subarctic region, for example among the Chukchi and Saami, the hunting of marine mammals and fishing are regarded as essential.
The sources of these rather marked cultural differences are not easy to determine, although it is evident that they are of great antiquity. In some cases, this is because fishing people and pastoralists have systems of interlocking land use, for example, in the Inland Delta in Mali (Gallais, 1975a, 1984). Making more effective use of aquatic resources in pastoral areas might be important for increasing food security, although experience suggests that changing entrenched dietary preferences is difficult. However, there could be considerable potential for increasing cooperation between pastoral and fishing peoples in order to make effective use of a rich but fragile environment.
Some fishers are nomadic and, in some circumstances, the State treats these people in the same way as it treats nomadic livestock producers. In Nigeria, for example, as well as pastoralists, there are also numerous nomadic fishing communities that move from site to site in the sea delta of the River Niger to follow estuarine aquatic resources. Both of these types of community face similar problems in terms of poor health and education and have successfully lobbied the government for access to funds intended for nomads.
As well as livestock, most pastoralists keep non-pastoral species, notably chickens and dogs. The Tuareg of the Hoggar keep dogs, cats, hedgehogs, chickens, guinea-fowl and pigeons (Nicolaisen and Nicolaisen, 1997, II: 173). Usually these enterprises are rather casual and vary considerably from one fraction to another. However, in West Africa, the chickens carried by Fulše nomads grow very fat on the worms associated with animal dung, and thus constitute a significant source of cash to the household.
Dogs are of considerable importance in the protection of livestock across a wide swathe of Eurasia, especially where wolves are a problem. In Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe, wolves have interbred with feral dogs. In the United Kingdom and some other parts of Western Europe, dogs are also used to herd sheep, making a considerable saving on labour. This practice is not well documented but it seems that, despite the importance of sheep in the Near East and Central Asia, the use of dogs for herding is not known in these regions; pastoral peoples such as the Bedouin and the Kazakhs use hawks for hunting.
Although this monographs is principally an account of the present situation of pastoralists, it makes reference to the historical literature. The naivety of much development literature concerning even the recent past is a source of frequent errors about the present. One common mistake is to suppose that a crisis in the present signals the final demise of pastoralism. However, history shows that pastoralists and settled cultures establish dynamic relationships and that, while pastoralism has a certain ethnic component, it is above all a way of life appropriate to particular economic and ecological circumstances. In other words, it may disappear briefly, but will always return because the settled need the mobile to trade, to breed animals and to open up areas that are too remote for agriculture. Planning for pastoral societies must have this long-term perspective, and needs to assume that herds will always recover eventually, as they have in the past, and that the colonization of inaccessible zones will always be the preserve of pastoralists.
The origin of pastoralism has been much discussed, especially in an older type of literature that is influenced, unconsciously perhaps, by Marxist historical schemas. Pastoralism was seen as an evolutionary stage in human history, a phase following hunting-gathering and leading to sedentarization and agriculture. This may have seemed reasonable, both because of a lack of archaeological evidence and because it unconsciously reflected the contempt in which settled people historically held nomads. It may also be influenced by the myth of Cain and Abel, which places the burden of original sin unambiguously on the livestock producer. However, the increase of archaeological data and a more careful reading of the historical sources, especially from Asia, have demonstrated a more complex story (see Cribb, 1991 for a review of modern theoretical developments). In most parts of the world, Africa excepted, agriculture seems to have started earlier than pastoralism. Pastoralism develops from surplus, as individuals simply accumulate too many animals to graze around a settlement throughout the year. In addition, as herders learned more about the relations between particular types of ecology and the spread of debilitating diseases they gradually developed the practice of seasonally removing their animals from danger zones.
The earliest literary references to a people who appear to be pastoralists are to the Amorites, who herded cattle, sheep, goats and donkeys in the Near East in the first half of the second millennium BC (Cribb, 1991: 10). Chronicles of the Hsia dynasty in China (2205-1766 BC) note the Ch’iang nomads – who were probably the ancestors of modern Tibetans – as weavers of fine wool (Miller and Craig, 1997: 58 ff.). Herodotus mentions a number of peoples, assumed to be pastoral, across Central Asia; Russian archaeology has made remarkable and still little-known contributions to knowledge of the Scythians, the Sauromations, the Saka, the Siberian Schythisna and the Mongols (see Davis-Kimball, Bashilov and Yablonsky, 1995). It is generally believed that the llama and the alpaca were first domesticated 6 000 years ago, although it is difficult to differentiate the bones of early domesticated animals from those of their wild ancestors.
Descriptions of a recognizably pastoral culture in sub-Saharan Africa date back to Pliny (who described blood- and milk-drinking in the Horn of Africa). However, pastoralism is likely to be far earlier than these records. Its exact origins can only be gauged from archaeology and, in particular, from careful osteometric work that demonstrates the gradual divergence between wild forms of livestock and their domesticated relatives. Claims have been made for the presence of domestic cattle in northeast Africa as early as 9 000 years ago, but not all scholars accept these dates and more solid ones are available for 6 000 years ago onwards (MacDonald and MacDonald, 2000). However, the interpretation of osteometric evidence already depends on the assumption that early herders controlled breeding, although it seems likely that the earliest stages of pastoralism involved the management of wild animals, as reindeer pastoralism still does today in some parts of the subarctic.
Pastoral culture spread from the Nile Valley and North Africa, probably through the agency of the ancestors of present-day Berber populations (Blench, in press). Pastoral production appears clearly in the archaeological record in both East and West Africa from between 4 500 and 4 000 years ago (Marshall, 2000). The exact routes and dates whereby pastoralism reached Southern Africa are disputed (Bousman, 1998), but there seems to have been pre-Iron Age transmission nearly 2 000 years ago, probably initially with sheep followed shortly after by cattle. The elaborate cattle culture described by early travellers to the Cape (Boonzaier et al., 1996) was probably established only some 500 years before the first navigators encountered the Khoikhoi.
Worldwide, the literature on pastoralism is extremely uneven and determined by politics and security issues as much as by the need for empirical data. Pastoralism studies have historically been dominated by anthropologists, and the initial focus was probably East African pastoralists.
At any rate, the accessibility of East African pastoralists, combined with the colonial authorities’ perception of the importance of their herds, led to a flowering of monographs (Asad, 1970). The Sudan is well known, as is Kenya (Bollig, 1990); but, for example, the non-colonial status of Ethiopia meant that its many pastoral peoples remained unstudied, and even today are little known (Abbink, 1993). In West Africa, the dominance of the Fulše stimulated a series of monographs in French covering the different subgroups (Dupire, 1970; Benoit, 1979; Bourgeot, 1981; Awogbade, 1983; Blench, 1984, 1985, 1991a, 1994). By contrast, the Kanuri-speaking groups of Nigeria and the Niger are barely described (but see Conte, 1991).
Pastoralism was widespread in Southern Africa at the period of first European contact, but the extermination of the Khoikhoi and the Herero has led to a near-elimination of true pastoralism systems from the region (see Boonzaier, 1987; Vivelo, 1977). Only in the extreme north of Namibia, among the Himba, does a recognizable pastoral system still exist (Bollig, 1997).
Berber pastoralism in North Africa and the Sahara is relatively well described (Chapelle, 1957; Bernus, 1981; Baroin, 1985; Nicolaisen and Nicolaisen, 1997; Spittler, 1998), but in West Asia and Northeast Africa the emphasis has historically been on the Bedu, and romanticized descriptions of their herding date back to the mid-nineteenth century (Oppenheim and von Freiherr, 1939-1952; Lancaster, 1981; Blench, 1998c). Such an emphasis is in keeping with the United Kingdom social anthropological tradition, and the relative wealth of many of these countries has rather discouraged pastoral projects of the type that has been dominant in Africa.
Between eastern Turkey and northwest India lies a region that is very imperfectly known. The south of the Islamic Republic of Iran is rich in pastoral groups, usually specializing in sheep, and these are described in a number of monographs from the epoch of the Shah (e.g. Barth, 1961; Bates, 1973; Irons, 1975; Digard, 1981; Barfield, 1981; Black-Michaud, 1986). Since the Iranian revolution, all scholarly field study appears to have ceased. Similarly, in Afghanistan and Pakistan political insecurity in the pastoral regions has all but halted research. Indian pastoralism in the Rajasthan desert has been extensively covered (e.g. Agrawal, 1992; Casimir, 1996; Kavoori, 1991, 1996; Sansthan and League for Pastoral Peoples, 1999), but not the Tibet-style transhumance that is typical of the Himalayan region (e.g. Downs and Ekvall, 1965; Ekvall, 1968; Goldstein and Beall, 1990).
In Central Asia, the Soviet period produced a large literature seen through a rather specific ideological filter; little of this literature has been translated and much is inaccessible (but see Khazanov, 1984). Since the break-up of the Soviet Union there has been a major expansion of materials on pastoralists in both the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries and Mongolia, although the potential for outside scholars to study has been limited by political insecurity (e.g. Temple, Swift and Payne, 1993; Mearns, 1991, 1993; Van Veen, 1995). At the same time, development agencies’ desire to mount projects has led to a burgeoning of development literature and consultancy reports, although much of this material is very weak.
Chinese-dominated regions of Central Asia were off-limits for a long period, but have now begun to open up. Although Tibet remains problematic, Mongol and Kazakh herders in northwest China are gradually being placed on the pastoral map. Longworth and Williamson (1993) are a major source for these regions, concentrating principally on sheep and wool production.
Pastoralism in North America is of recent origin, and in many cases the documentation is somewhat out of date and the systems described may well have changed. For example, domestic reindeer were introduced into Alaska in the 1890s and were principally herded by the native Inupiat people (Beach, 1985). At their height in the 1930s, reindeer numbered some 640 000 head. However, by the 1970s this number had fallen to just 24 000, and the practice of herding reindeer may well have disappeared altogether. Similarly, accounts of Apache and Navajo herding are more than 30 years old (Kunstadter, 1965) and the situation is likely to have changed dramatically since then.
In the Andes, indigenous pastoralism was virtually ignored until the 1960s, and the herding of llama and alpaca (auchenids) was considered to be a borrowing from European traditions, similar to Navaho sheep herding. Andean pastoralism is now known to be extremely ancient (Rick, 1980). It is confined to the semi-arid regions of the Andes in a habitat known as puna, which lies between 3 700 and 5 000 m above sea level. This type of herding is found in south-central Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile. In comparison with other types of pastoralism, publications on Andean pastoralism are few and scattered (see review in Orlove, 1982 and also Flores Ochoa, 1968; Browman, 1974, 1982; Orlove, 1977; Novoa, 1989; Göbel, 1997).
The emphasis placed here on the sporadic and interrupted nature of pastoralist studies in many regions is important because of the highly flexible and opportunistic nature of pastoral society. Descriptive monographs tend to fix a region or a people in time, but very often further study shows that major changes in species, breeding strategies and movement patterns have occurred. In the pastoral sector, basing development interventions on old data is a particularly inappropriate strategy.
If information is to flow effectively, substantially more effort must go into translating and synthesizing publications on pastoralism in languages other than English and French. Even monographs in German are often ignored by the Anglo-American establishment, and this is even truer of Chinese and Russian. Similarly, approaches from different disciplines tend to write in ignorance of one another; animal scientists do not read anthropology, while development literature often seems to be written in blissful ignorance of any other discipline whatsoever.
The literature on pastoralism is not simply an ordered body of empirical descriptive literature; to read through this material is to become aware of authors writing within a particular context. Although nomadism is viewed negatively within many of the countries in which it is practised, it is as often viewed positively by outsiders. Writers are frequently impressed by the independence of nomads, their ability to survive in extremely harsh landscapes and their cosmopolitan outlook compared with that of neighbouring farmers. The other side of this, however, is the discourse of the “crisis” or “problem”. Even from the early period, the literature is rich in articles and books analysing the crisis of nomadism or the problems nomads experience or are said to cause. Gloomy predictions as to the catastrophic decline of pastoralism are commonplace, although nomads – surprisingly – seem to outlast these forebodings. For example, one of the earliest texts on the Maasai (Hinde and Hinde, 1910) was entitled The last of the Masai. Many of the books and articles listed in the bibliography have titles that include words such as “last”, “final” and “end”, even where this is manifestly not the case. Benson and Svanberg (1998) refer to the Kazakh as China’s last nomads, despite the fact that China has many other nomadic peoples, some of whom seem to have been given a new lease of life by recent liberalization.
In part this reflects an inevitable aspect of the nomadic system of production, frequent catastrophic collapses and recoveries. Climatic extremes and disease can cause apparently terminal livestock losses, while prosperity and stability in nation States lead to agricultural encroachment on pastoral land. The presence of researchers while such processes are under way almost inevitably leads to dire prognostications; however, history should make it clear that the flexibility and opportunism insisted on in monographs allow pastoralism to be constantly resuscitated.
The other aspect of this is that national governments often see pastoralists as a problem, and it is hard not to be influenced by this discourse, especially when writing reports. If it is national policy to sedentarize pastoralists, the failure of projects or initiatives to settle them transmutes into a problem. If it is accepted that pastoralism is simply one of the national ways of life, the problem disappears. This publication describes the attempts that have been made to provide solutions to these problems, but it is essential to remember that the existence and nature of such problems consist almost entirely of issues defined by outsiders. Pastoralists themselves often derive considerable satisfaction from their lifestyle, sometimes to the extent of intentionally offending farmers with outrageous dress or customs.
More recently, the literature on pastoralism has taken a more reflexive academic turn, with authors less concerned about ethnographic reality and more with the vast literature and archive material that have now accumulated. Anderson and Broch-Due’s (1999) The poor are not us is a good example of this; its theme reflects the fashionable concerns of the aid agencies that fund much of the work now being undertaken, while its contributors rely heavily on archives and early published material to draw out past narratives of rangeland degradation, pastoral fecklessness, etc.
Given the vast body of publications and grey literature on pastoralism, it may seem invidious to suggest that yet more research is required, but recent literature describing current economics, ecology and production systems is remarkably sparse for many regions. Chad, which is probably one of the most significant pastoral countries in Africa, must make do with descriptions that are more than 50 years old. The locations, size and status of many of its pastoral groups are at present unknown. If even a small part of the energy that has been directed towards the Turkana were turned to Chad, the picture of pastoralism in Africa would be more balanced. This situation is similar to that of the “new” pastoral societies of Central Asia. They are not new, and the rapid changes following decollectivization make much of the existing literature of historical interest.
1 The dehesa systems of central Spain, based around cork-oak forests, may well be the last survivors of what was a major European swine-herding tradition.
