Pastoralists: Equality, Hierarchy, And The State

Drawing upon the author's extensive field research among pastoral peoples in the Middle East, India, and the Mediterranean, and on more than 30 years of comparative study of pastoralists around the world,Pastoralistsis an authoritative synthesis of the varieties of pastoral life. At an ethnographic level, the concise volume provides detailed analyses of divergent types of pastoral societies, including segmentary tribes, tribal chiefdoms, and peasant pastoralists. At the same time, it addresses a set of substantive theoretical issues: ecological and cultural variation, equality and inequality, hierarchy and the basis of power, and state power and resistance. The book validates "pastoralists" as a conceptual category even as it reveals the diversity of societies, subsistence strategies, and power arrangements subsumed by that term.

Philip Carl Salzman is professor of Anthropology at McGill University. He has carried out ethnographic research among nomadic and pastoral peoples in Baluchistan, Rajastan, and Sardinia. He is founder and past editor of the journal Nomadic Peoples and was awarded the 2001 Primio Pitrè-Salomone Marino from the International Center of Ethnohistory of Palermo for his book Black Tents of Baluchistan.