Almost a century of systematic anthropological research on pastoral nomads has produced significant data and theory for understanding these mobile societies. Substantially less attention has been devoted to complex sociopolitical organization among pastoral nomadic groups and, in particular, to the large-scale polities referred to as nomadic confederations, states, or sometimes empires. This article reviews established ideas for how and why complex organization emerged among nomadic groups and then considers these ideas in the context of recent archaeological theory on statehood and new material evidence for pastoral nomadic prehistory. Revised conceptions of both the state and the nomad suggest that pastoral nomadic polities represent alternative forms of complex organization that were different from classic Old World states but still quite complex in unexpected ways. These organizational differences resulted from the mobile and flexible politics practiced among herding peoples and gave rise to regional polities based on spatial networking, distributed authority, and innovations in transport and exchange.

background

The Development of the Kalat Khanate

Alternative Complexities: The Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadic States

Myths and Paradoxes of Nomadism

ANTHROPOLOGY (New Persian mardomšenāsī), social and cultural, in Iran and Afghanistan (see also Afghanistan iv). Anthropology as an Iranological discipline evolved from a Western interest in non-Western and especially non-literate societies; over the past fifty years it has developed a holistic and relativistic approach to the ethnographic description of life in small, largely face-to-face communities, and to the analysis and explanation of variation in human experience generally. Iranians who have turned to anthropology more recently, primarily as a framework for the study of life in their own country, have tended to treat it as a branch of sociology and apply it only to the study of tribes and of rural material culture. The terms “social” and “cultural” derive from the historical distinction between focuses on interaction (behavior) and ways of thinking (culture), though they are not always easily distinguishable in recent work. The term “ethnology,” used mainly in Europe, is identified with a tradition that has paid particular attention to material culture. For convenience, in this article the simple and comprehensive term “anthropology” is used for work from all three traditions. (Physical anthropology is not included here.) Disciplines Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences Comments To view this entry online, visit http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/anthropology-social-and-cultural-iniran-and-afghanistan. This other is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/130

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Anthropology: Social and Cultural, in Iran and Afghanistan

Current explanations for the rise of the Xiongnu state are confronted with a major disconnect between anthropological theories on statehood and pastoral nomadism. State theory reifies the sedentary, agricultural, and bureaucratic organization with centralized hierarchy as the primary example of “the state.” Theory on pastoral nomads argues that mobile lifeways and herding economies are therefore not at all conducive to statehood. This chapter examines how such long-standing anthropological notions have constrained understandings of Inner Asian nomadic states. In response, I suggest a definition for the “the state” that makes room for alternative kinds of political complexity and I define pastoral nomadism in a way that forefronts mobile political process. These definitions set a foundation for the “spatial politics” approach to Eurasian steppe political organization. Based on the spatial politics concept and interaction theory from the previous chapter, I propose a new explanation for Xiongnu political emergence and statehood.

The Development of the Kalat Khanate

Citations

Alternative Complexities: The Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadic States

Myths and Paradoxes of Nomadism

Anthropology: Social and Cultural, in Iran and Afghanistan

Solving Contradictions: Nomads and Political Complexity

References

Principles of social organization in southern Kurdistan

Kazak social structure

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