Pastoralism and patriliny
Nomads and their animals
p. 115-128
Texte intégral
Some preliminaries: ‘totemic’ thinking
1This paper develops a suggestion I first raised in a contribution to Tim Ingold’s What is an Animal? (Tapper (1988).1 In that essay, I addressed the human use of animals as metaphors, as models or as ‘significant Others’. While Western philosophers, psychologists, ethologists and others have sought to establish what ‘really’ unites or differentiates humans and other animals, as an anthropologist I was more concerned with how people in diverse cultural contexts construct these differences and similarities. Here I examine how pastoralist peoples socially construct animality and humanity, and I suggest that pastoral social institutions such as patrilineal descent may reflect their construction of the sociality of their herd animals.
2In considering cultural constructions of relations between people and animals, and the use of animals as metaphors for human society, we are of course in the anthropological realm of ‘totemic thought’. Lévi-Strauss (1964, 1966) argued that animals figure so commonly in totemic discourse not, as Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Fortes proposed, because they are good to eat, but because they are good to think with. He also maintained that systems of classification of animals are not, as Durkheim and Mauss (1963) suggested, derived from social categories, but rather that categories drawn from a system of classification of nature are employed to express the nature of relations between human groups and individuals.
3It has of course long been established that notions of both nature and humanity are variable and changing cultural constructions, and that in many societies they are not constructed as such a pair at all (Thomas 1983; Descola 2005; Digard 2006). But if the argument that animals are good for thinking is valid, and I think it is, then we need to enquire further, thinking to what purpose? That purpose, I suggest, is not just classification and the creation of order, but also teaching and learning morality, or “to forge a system of moral conduct and to resolve the problem of man in nature” (Tambiah 1969, p. 457; Fernandez 1971).
4Animals, or rather cultural constructions of them, are used as metaphors for this moralizing and socializing purpose in two rather different, even contradictory, ways. Animal stories and myths may idealize certain animals as models of order and virtue (Sperber 1975), treating them as agents and social beings, with motives, values and morals, and implicitly denying differences between them and people. By contrast, they may also represent certain animals as the Beast, the Brute, the model of disorder, and their actions as the way things should not be done.
5Animals are ideal for both these purposes because they can be seen to perform the same basic functions as people (eating, excreting, moving, copulating, giving birth, being born, dying…), but they do so in ways that are forbidden by human cultural and moral rules. It is ‘culture’ in this sense that separates people from other animals. The enigma of animals that are ‘both us and not-us’ is posed most acutely by pets on the one hand, and nonhuman primates on the other.
6Sapir (1977) suggests a caveat to what he calls Lévi-Strauss’s ‘shibboleth’ that animals are good to think with: fine, he says, but only when there are animals about. I would question this: there are always animals about, even if they exist only in the imagination. My caveat, or rather elaboration of the ‘shibboleth’, would be that animals are good for people to think and to teach with, but the way they do so varies with both the degree of their familiarity with animals and the availability of other possible human models: other ethnic groups, classes and social categories, either for emulation as positive ideals or for derogation as negative others.
7In my original paper I suggested that familiarity with animals is a function of aspects of the economic system, or at least of the nature of human-animal relations of production within different production systems: hunter-gatherers, settled farmers, pastoralists, ranchers, urban industrial society (Tapper 1988: 52f).2 I shall not repeat the argument here, where I am concerned specifically with pastoralists.
Pastoralists: human agency and animal metaphor
8One distinctive feature of pastoral production systems is that two communities, one human and one animal, co-exist in what is usually described as a relation of symbiosis. Livestock, as stores of wealth, are easily accessible and ideal for exchange, especially in marriage. They are also more vulnerable to both loss and theft than other forms of wealth (land, valuables), and consequently require manpower for care and defence. Further, many pastoralists live in a homogeneous social environment almost as empty of other humans as that of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Settled, agricultural or urban society is glimpsed from afar, if at all. Animals, on the other hand, are more immediately available as models than in any other production system.
9In the past, anthropologists and others devoted considerable attention to the topic of ‘animals as metaphor’ among nomadic hunter-gatherers and settled farmers; while for ranchers and modern urban society there is also a sizeable literature on, for example, rodeos, bullfights, zoos, pets and the like. For pastoralists, until recent decades the relevant literature was thin, and largely confined to East African peoples, following Evans-Pritchard’s classic studies of the Nuer (esp. 1940, 1956). Since the 1980s, however, there have been numerous monographs and collections on human-animal relations among pastoralists, this time with a major focus on Mongolia and northern Asian reindeer herders (Fijn 2011; Beach & Stammler 2006; Stammler & Takakura 2010). Meanwhile, there have been challenges to the ‘myth of the patriarchal pastoralist’ and the ‘androcentric lens’ in pastoralism studies, starting with Gough (1971) and culminating in Hodgson’s collection from Africa (2001).
10These more recent studies of pastoralists’ relations with their animals have, for the most part, focused on their mutual dependence, on the animals’ agency, and on humans’ economic, ceremonial, cognitive and metaphoric uses of animals. However, pastoralists’ ideas of humanity and animality have been neglected since Evans-Pritchard first addressed the question in 1940.
11Intellectually, the pastoralist symbiosis has two edges. Whether the pastoralists consider their animals to be part of human society, or humans to be part of animal society, the livestock provide an ideal model for humanity. We can divide pastoralists into three broad, sometimes overlapping, categories, distinguished by the character of their livestock and hence of human productive relations with them. First, keepers of large stock, such as cattle herders of sub-Saharan Africa, camel herders of Africa and Arabia, reindeer-herders of northern Asia and America: secondly, Mediterranean herders of sheep and goats; and thirdly, Southwest Asian and Central Asian mixed pastoralists who herd sheep and/or goats but keep larger animals for transport.3
12Herders of large stock tend to distinguish their animals clearly as individuals on the basis of markings and character, features that add to their metaphoric and metonymic potential. Willis (1974) discussed Evans-Pritchard’s material on the Nuer in this respect at some length. The Nuer combine a form of totemic classification of wild animals, which imputes to them lineage and community structure both different from and similar to human society (a transformed mirror image), with a heavy symbolic loading of the cattle, particularly the ox. Nuer social idiom is, famously, a ‘bovine idiom’; cattle are the channels along which social relations run; where the women are, the cattle are not. Cattle lineages, unlike those of wild animals, parallel human lineages. The oxen are held up as examples of grandeur, beauty, supreme value. In Nuer aesthetics, cattle and people cannot be distinguished (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 1956). These observations have been echoed and deepened by many later studies, both of East and West African cattle pastoralists and of other herders of large stock – camels, horses, reindeer in Asia and elsewhere.
13Mediterranean sheep and goat herders, however, do not invest such emotional and aesthetic energy in their livestock. Although they know their animals individually, they rarely pick them out for ‘noble’ features of character. Nonetheless, certain categories of animal do offer good metaphoric potential. For example, Christians owe to the pastoral imagery of the Bible the metaphors of sheep and shepherd, the Lamb, the scapegoat, the wolf in sheep’s clothing.4
14On another tack, Blok asks why, in the Mediterranean area, the horns of the goat are so generally metaphors of a cuckold, a dishonoured man. He refers to the Sarakatsani of northern Greece, who (in Campbell’s rich ethnography) contrast sheep with goats, associating the former with men and God, the latter with women and the Devil. Having examined other historical and contemporary materials on Mediterranean pastoralism, Blok establishes a rather wider system of classifications, in which the sheep/goat opposition has much deeper resonances. The answer to his question, why horns on a cuckold, lies in the different sexual behaviour that Mediterranean pastoralists observe in rams and billy-goats. Sheep, and particularly rams, represent virile men: the ram does not tolerate a sexual rival but is fierce and potent; rams are kept in regulated numbers to prevent them from fighting, and most male lambs are castrated to become wethers to lead the herd. The billy-goat, by contrast, is a ‘woman’: it permits other males to mate with the nannies, and is inclined to laziness and hence can be kept in numbers (Blok 1981; Campbell 1964).5 One could add that the identification of rams and men remains metaphoric, if only because of the clear (if implicit) distinction that rams are essentially polygamous, an anathema for humans according to the monogamous ideal in these Christian societies.
15Interestingly, in another, geographically distant region where small stock are herded – Nuristan and Chitral in the Western Himalayan mountains – the sheep/goat opposition is again central, but inversely in relation to humanity: goats are pre-eminent, associated with men, purity and gods, and their horns are a central symbol of maleness; sheep are weak and despised, associated with women and demons. Parkes explains that the altitude and terrain are ideal for goats, while sheep have to be kept in the despised valleys below (Parkes 1987).
16Studies of mixed pastoralists in the mountain and plateau regions of southwest Asia, such as those of Iran and Afghanistan, were plentiful in the 1960s and 1970s, but they have almost ceased since political conditions in those countries made ethnographic research there difficult if not impossible for both foreign and local fieldworkers.6 Most recent comparative and collective literature on pastoralism, moreover, ignores these studies, or refers briefly to the one monograph that has become a classic, Barth’s study of the Basseri of southern Iran – who are, however, by no means typical of pastoralists of the region (Barth 1961; Tapper 1997: 18-24).
17I did field research among two such pastoral peoples: the Shahsevan of northwestern Iran in the mid-1960s and the Durrani of northern Afghanistan in the early 1970s. In the absence of directly comparable information from studies of other pastoralists in both countries, my discussion in what follows is confined to a comparison of Shahsevan and Durrani.
18There were basic similarities in their economic, social and cultural situations: they raised mainly sheep in response to market demand, they had greater or lesser involvement in local agricultural activities, and they were (broadly) tribally organized. But there were many cultural differences between them in core areas of life: for example, in their ideas about the morality of sex and reproduction, about gender roles, production and food. These differences were related to significant differences in their economic and political circumstances, and emerged in their discourses about human nature and morality and about the structure of both human and animal groups.
Shahsevan: deeds and words
19When I visited them, the Shahsevan had for long raised one-and two-year-old male lambs for sale; there was strong market demand, particularly for the much-valued meat of Shahsevan sheep, but also for their milk and wool.7
20The core of Shahsevan flocks were the fertile ewes, but the majority were lambs, castrated yearlings and a few rams. Goats made up about ten percent of each flock. Also important to the economy were camels, horses and donkeys as transport animals. Like many pastoralists, Shahsevan had little direct experience of ‘other cultures’; the settled villagers and townspeople of their environment (whom they knew as ‘Tat’) shared their language (Azarbayjani Turkish), religion (Shi‘ a Islam) and much of their culture. To an extent, cultural differences with the Tat were artificially constructed mutual misconceptions due to ignorance; objective differences amounted to little more than pastoral nomadism/settled farming, tent/house dwelling, and tribal/peasant. More remotely, the pastoralists were aware of the existence of the dominant Persian culture of the Iranian state, and of the Soviets across the frontier.
21In such a situation, not surprisingly, the Shahsevan made considerable use of animal metaphor to express their moral ideas and standards. They distinguished individuals according to ascribed categories of sex, age, and relationship, and by the standards of responsible, rational, honourable behaviour appropriate to such categories. Patrilineal descent, important locally for community membership, counted for little at the wider level: few of the forty-odd Shahsevan ‘tribes’ (ranging from fifty to several hundred households strong) were ‘descent groups’. A claim of Shahsevan identity was not a statement of substance, but was historically an ideological commitment to tribalism (defined by the political system of tribes led by a hierarchy of chiefs), though in recent decades, with the state-enforced breakdown of the tribal system, the commitment was increasingly to nomadism (defined by pastures and pastoralism, tents and migratory movements).
22It was possible to identify three separate animal classification schemes in Shahsevan discourse. In one, the most important animals were associated with human gender: camels with women, horses with men, goats with women, sheep with men. Horses and camels were the most admired – and expensive – animals, ceremonially exchanged as well as given as prestigious gifts between wealthy men. These associations were explicit in both practical economic and ceremonial activities.
23In a second scheme, Shahsevan, rather like settled farmers (Leach 1964, Tambiah 1969), differentiated animals according to a scale of distance, just as they did with human groups, from safe centre to dangerous, wild periphery. An individual lived in a social context of exogamous households, cooperating in small herding camps; these combined into larger camps and into patrilineage-based communities of twenty to thirty households, within which about forty percent of men found their wives; communities in turn combined into chief-led tribes, which were virtually endogamous; inter-tribal relations were traditionally either alliance or feud. People classed animals as household (edible fowls; inedible cats, dogs); livestock (edible sheep and goats); transport (not normally eaten camels; inedible equines); and wild animals (edible game; inedible predators). The flocks were vulnerable to attack by wolves, but defended by dogs; warriors defended the camps – and the honour of the women. Enemies (wolves, thieves) threatened to attack the centre, but lived outside, at the periphery.
24The third classification system was the most complex and least explicit. In this, people talked of the habits and social organization of the main herding animal, the sheep, in ways that made clear that they were a society essentially parallel to human society, as with the Nuer: but individual sheep did not receive the same devotion as Nuer cattle. Thus, they spoke of the ewe flock as the main producers and reproducers – as ‘the source of food’. They kept ewe-lambs for replenishing the flock; promising male lambs might be reared as rams, but rams were sometimes bought or exchanged, or borrowed from another flock. The few rams were normally segregated from the ewes and herded with the lambs. Rams, people pointed out, were highly polygynous, and moreover they tupped publicly, but at strictly controlled seasons. All other male lambs were castrated in their first year; these wethers were then fattened for sale to wealthier nomads, merchants or shopkeepers; a few were kept for ritual slaughter.
25This construction of animal behaviour and society was a matter of common discussion. People described their herding practices as ‘our way’ and would consider other possible choices in other circumstances. Human morality, however, was less discussed except in response to breach cases: implicitly, no other way was conceivable. The representation of human society that emerged was a mirror image of sheep society. Agnatically-related men were the core of the camp; boys stayed in camp, were circumcised and carried on the line; these were the producers and reproducers; there was a strong notion that male ‘blood’ determined heredity, though pure descent was not fetishized. Polygyny was rare, and a source of scandalized amusement; sexual activity was an intensely private affair, regulated by wives’ pregnancies and periods and by certain religious festivals. Wives and small children were segregated – as far as possible in a nomad camp – from contact with strangers. Many wives were cousins from the same or neighbouring camps, but most were brought in from outside. Daughters were mostly married to other Shahsevan, occasionally to villagers or chiefly families.
26The parallels are not perfect. Male lambs were castrated so as not to reproduce but to be good meat, but neither daughters nor sons are unambiguously their human counterparts: daughters were not circumcised, nor was their defloration on marriage ritualized, while the circumcision of sons was much celebrated and essential if they were to marry and reproduce.
27The nomads pointed to other contrasts. They explained the different sexual behaviour of men and rams by the faculty of reason (‘aql), the distinctive attribute of men; they (men and women) considered young women to be deficient in ‘aql, like rams, while ewes (‘as anyone can see’) were admirable and rational mothers. Further, while sheep grazed in long lines and “en masse”, people always ate in circles, gathered in pairs around shared bowls. One could add (though I did not hear this contrast remarked on) colour differences in the food: sheep ate raw green food, but human food was cooked and ideally a combination of white and black – bread, milk products, white rice, with black tea and well-done meat; people never ate raw meat or vegetables; wild plants were not much favoured and only rarely did women slip them into a broth or stew. Finally, people divided wild animals into those (the game) that ate green food like the livestock, and carnivores and predators that ate red food – raw meat.
28These various classifications of animals and people appear to concern, first, a moral system of human gender and age roles, and appropriate sexual behaviour and table manners; and secondly, a message of the essential difference between human and animal, and the nature of humanity. The dominant theme here, and indeed in much of Shahsevan discourse, was that in human affairs it is not who you are (descent, gender, age status) that matters so much as how you act and what you do in relation to your status. It was a system in which women, even if the cards seemed stacked against them by an ideology that owed much to the Great Tradition of Islam, could and did by their actions and achievements attain positions of respect and influence not only among other women but among men of the community as well. I should add, finally, that the folktales that I heard concerned romantic and legendary human heroes and supernatural creatures – but never, that I can recall, animal characters.
Durrani: descent and essence
29The Durrani Pashtuns of northern Afghanistan provided some marked contrasts.8 Members of the Durrani tribal confederacy from southwestern Afghanistan, several million strong, they migrated around 1900 to the ethnically mixed north, where their status and access to power depended on a strong sense of cultural identity and superiority, based on claims to common descent and tribal ties with state rulers (1747 to 1978). Membership of Durrani tribes and subtribes was fluid and ambiguous, and the only marriage rule was to find a Durrani spouse.
30Durrani were distinct in these features from fellow-Pashtuns such as the Yusufzai of Swat or the Ghiljai of Eastern Afghanistan, who declare that it is not speaking Pashto but doing Pashto that matters, with a strong emphasis on honourable behaviour (Barth 1969p. 119; Anderson 1979). For Durrani, what mattered was who you are, especially as defined by descent. The expectation of responsible and honourable behaviour went together with purity of descent; no one should be judged by deeds or words alone, or by superficial attributes such as clothes – proverbially, ‘a true [Durrani clothed] in rags, a fake [or half-breed] in robes’.9 People were expected to observe an elaborate code of honourable conduct, but many did not. Minor offences by a recognized Durrani were overlooked as uncharacteristic; serious or persistent offenders were dealt with drastically and their sanity – or their descent claims – questioned. People judged and interpreted action as flowing less from intention than from essence.
31Durrani differed from Shahsevan too in terms of their economic and political environment. Both the terrain they occupied and the market they supplied favoured the breeding of Karakul sheep for their Persian lambskins. This, to be successful, involved highly selective breeding, and the pastoralists insisted that the quality of the ram determined the quality of the skin. In particular, they were careful to avoid interbreeding with other sheep strains, including the arabi, which they raised themselves for meat.
32Further, Durrani inhabited a complex ethnic environment, with many different ethno-linguistic groups, and both Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims.10 Durrani were familiar with many of these as neighbours, friends, visitors, servants, employees and employers. So, on the one hand, they had plenty of human ‘others’, and indeed unfavourable stereotypes of the sexual morality and eating habits of these others abounded (and were reciprocated). On the other hand, Durrani claims to political and cultural superiority over them all depended on their observing the rules of descent and endogamy. They considered the greatest threat to Durrani identity to be people they called Parsiwan (‘Persian-speakers’), who appeared in all aspects of culture and behaviour (Pashto language, Sunni Islam, pastoralism, tent-dwelling, dress, moral standards) to be identical with them, yet could not claim membership of a recognized Durrani tribe; they were, moreover, suspected of being closet Shi‘ites and of speaking Persian at home. For Durrani, in other words, the ‘enemy’ was within or near their own society, not out on the periphery as with the Shahsevan.
33With all these human others, Durrani use of animal metaphor was relatively limited, but quite clear in its moral implications. Like the Shahsevan, Durrani associated camels and goats, practically and ritually, with women, and horses and sheep with men; and as with the Shahsevan and others, a Durrani flock had a self-reproducing core of ewes. But they selected Karakul rams not for performance but for their ‘blood’, as determinant of skin quality. They slaughtered all other karakul ram lambs soon after birth for their skins, which they sold, to bring in their main cash income. They never sold the meat of these lambs, but gave it away, often to non-pastoralist outsiders. Durrani human groups were based on a core of males; wives were almost always Durrani, but ranged from close cousins to complete strangers. Occasionally men married women from other ethnic groups, but apart from causing domestic and social problems this was seen as an unwise move, bringing in bad blood, and people watched the offspring carefully for signs of character deficiency. Bride-prices, reckoned primarily in numbers of sheep, ranged from nothing for close relatives or others married by sister exchange to 100 sheep or more for others. Daughters must never be married to non-Durrani. This is a paradox familiar in patrilineal descent systems, but makes sense as a point of contrast with karakul breeding. Women, Durrani would say, ‘are the source of descent’. Not surprisingly, men treated women, not as agents, but as objects and means of wealth, though admittedly superior to other kinds. ‘A real man’, they also said, ‘leaves women behind him, a dog [= miser] leaves property.’11Of course, such a male-centred view of gender relations allows considerable scope for subversion by dissident women (Tapper 1991: esp. chapter 10).
34Finally, animals were very common in Durrani stories: but almost always they were familiar wild animals (fox, wolf, jackal), or home-based livestock (ox, donkey, hen), who are given human characters, though with their own species personalities (no names). Sheep, goats, horses and camels do not figure at all, except – as in real life – as victims of slaughter or theft.
Conclusion
35Shahsevan and Durrani contrast both in their conceptions of morality as based on action or on essence respectively, and in the ways in which they express these concepts metaphorically through discourse about animals. I argue that the contrasts reflect the differences between these societies in their economic and political environments, in the demands of the market and the ethnic complexity of the surrounding populations.
36Their constructions of human and livestock societies, however, are quite similar, and indeed resemble those of many other pastoral peoples. Let us return briefly to the cattle-herding Nuer. Men explicitly affirm equivalence with their livestock, using them as models for humanity; on another level they implicitly admit their difference. This comes out clearly in Evans-Pritchard’s account. The cattle are replicas of human society, yet they are matrilineal in descent and uxorilocal in residence (the cows are the stable core of the herd); while their human counterparts are ideally organized according to patrilineal, virilocal principles (the men are the stable core of the community). Moreover, the favourite animal is not the virile bull but the castrated ox (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 37; 1956: 258-60; Willis 1974: 52, 117; Beidelman 1966).12
37Pastoralist constructions of animals and animal society as both like and unlike humans and human society appear to reflect a common intellectual tension; as Willis puts it, “the distinctive peculiarity of animals is that, being at once close to man and strange to him, both akin to him and unalterably not-man, they are able to alternate, as objects of human thought, between the contiguity of the metonymic mode and the distanced, analogical mode of the metaphor” (1974: 128). In his history of human-animal relations in early modern England, Thomas at several points notes the same tension. “The brute creation provided the most readily-available point of reference for the continuous process of human self-definition. Neither the same as humans, nor wholly dissimilar, the animals offered an almost inexhaustible fund of symbolic meaning” (1983: 40). Pet dogs and horses were named – but “their names were only semi-human and emphasized their social distance” (1983: 113).
38Engels argued long ago, following Morgan, that the domestication of animals and the emergence of pastoralism, with the development of wealth in animals, led to the replacement of matriliny and matriarchy by patriliny and patriarchy, which he called “the world historical defeat of the female sex” (Engels 1972: 129; Morgan 1877: 345). Holden and Mace have recently (2003) demonstrated that the association of pastoralism and patriliny in Africa (and of horticulture with matriliny), was indeed causally linked to the acquisition of wealth, raiding, bridewealth and polygyny.
39It seems to me equally plausible to argue an intellectualist explanation for the prevalence of patriliny among pastoralists: living in the closest intimacy with their animals, pastoralists must distinguish themselves from them; noting that the social organization of the herds is matrilineal and uxorilocal, they define their humanity by organizing themselves patrilineally and virilocally.
40I must conclude, however, by admitting that this idea occurred to me only after it became impossible for me to test it with further appropriate field research among either the Shahsevan or the Durrani. The supporting evidence I have given here comes from combing through decades-old field materials, while trying to recall unrecorded fragments of conversations – it remains an ethnographic loose end.
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 Thanks to Tim Ingold for his extensive editorial comments. I presented an early draft of the present paper in 1989 at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford; I owe seminar participants thanks for helpful suggestions on that occasion. Comments by Jean-Pierre Digard and Ziba Mir-Hosseini on a later draft are gratefully acknowledged.
2 Digard rejects my suggestion as too abbreviated and formal (1990, p. 221-2); Palsson finds it useful in the context of recent studies in biosocial relations of production (2009: 305).
3 I ignore here, for reasons of space and purpose, the numerous far more comprehensive and sophisticated classifications of the world’s pastoralist societies.
4 Another often-quoted exemplification is the European vocabulary of finance, which has its roots in the pastoralism (cattle as well as sheep) of the classical age. Marx, it may be added, was fond of the notion of early man as ‘herd animal’.
5 See also Herzfeld (1984) and related correspondence in American Ethnologist.
6 Mixed pastoralists in post-Soviet Central Asia have, by contrast, recently been the subject of numerous interesting and exciting ethnographic studies.
7 The main fieldwork period was 1963-6 (see R Tapper 1979); I revisited them briefly in 1973, 1993 and 1995. In some ways, the Shahsevan operated a ‘ranching’ rather than a pastoral economy; but their self-identity remained distinctively pastoralist.
8 Fieldwork was carried out jointly with Nancy Tapper in 1968 and 1971-72. It is unlikely, given the tragic political events that have occurred in Afghanistan since 1978, that the cultural and social system that we observed in 1972 has survived intact, although, as we have suggested elsewhere, there are elements in it that may have enabled Durrani society to survive previous, perhaps not so traumatic, disasters (N Tapper 1991; R Tapper 2013).
9 Asl pa gdelo ke, kamasl pa gazbaro ke.
10 As well as ‘godless’ Soviet experts who were exploring and exploiting the gas and oil resources in the steppes occupied by the Durrani nomads, and who were stationed in the nearby towns of Saripul, Shiberghan and Mazar-i Sharif.
11 Da mera sheza patezhi, da spi dunya.
12 The complexities of Nuer social and political organization and the subtleties of Nuer men’s relations with their cattle have been much discussed by both Evans-Pritchard and a whole industry of subsequent commentators and fieldworkers.
Auteur
Professeur émérite en anthropologie, Université de Cambridge
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