What Am I Doing Here? (27 page)

A nomad's territory is the path linking his seasonal pastures. The tent-dweller invests this path with the emotional attachment a settler reserves for his houses and fields. Iranian nomads call the path
II-Rah,
The Way. The ‘way' of one tribe intersects with the ‘ways' of others, and ill-timed movements lead to conflicts of interest. Herdsmen claim to own their ‘ways' as their inalienable property; but in practice all they ask is the right of passage through a given stretch of territory at a fixed time of the year. The land holds no interest for them once they have moved on. Thus for a nomad, political frontiers are a form of insanity, based as they are on the aggregation of farmlands.

Today's nomads, whether they be Quashgais in Iran or Masai in Kenya, are facing their ultimate crisis at the hands of settled administrations. Their way of life is considered an anachronism in a modern state. Nomads are resentful of, and resistant to, change. The ‘problem of the tribes' is as much an issue to many a modern government as it was to the rulers of an ancient near-eastern city-state. For life in the black tents has not significantly changed since Abraham, the Bedouin sheikh, moved his flock on his ‘journeys from the south even unto Bethel, where his tent had been at the beginning' (Genesis 13:3).

The automatic discipline of pastoralism encourages a high standard of loyalty among close kin. In most nomad cultures the definition of a human being is ‘he who goes on migrations'. The word
arab
means a ‘dweller in the tents' as opposed to
hazar,
a ‘house dweller'. Again, the latter is less than human.

Yet nomads are notoriously irreligious. They show little interest in ceremonial or protestations of faith. For the migration is of itself a ritual performance, a ‘religious' catharsis, revolutionary in the strictest sense in that each pitching and breaking of camp represents a new beginning.
²
This will account for the violence of a nomad's reaction when his migration is blocked. Furthermore, if we assume that religion is a response to anxiety, then nomadism must satisfy some basic human aspiration, which settlement does not. It is paradoxical, but not surprising, that the great religions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian and Buddhist – were preached among settled peoples who
had been
nomads. Their ceremonial is saturated with pastoral metaphor, their processions and pilgrimages perform the activities of a pastoral migration in mime. The
Hadj
, or holy journey to Mecca, is but an artificial migration for settlers to detach them from their profane homes. What then has given the nomad his bad reputation?

The least helpful view suggests that the ‘spirit of emigration and conquest' is a genetically inherited behavioural trait, which, through the pressures of natural selection, is highly developed in the nomad. In his
Evolution of Man and Society
Professor C.D. Darlington maintained that the instincts of a gipsy, like the palaeolithic hunter, were adjusted to a life of wandering, and seriously suggested that the royal families of Europe, as well as the Mongols, had a genetic adaptation to the horse. This had enabled their ancestors to win wars, but on mechanised battlefields had brought them ‘headlong to disaster'. But so far the genetic approach to history has been either misleading or malign. The innate superiority of the wandering Nordic
Volk
was a fantasy. And it is not possible to explain Mongol militancy in genetic terms. The Mongols were a people of hunters who broke out onto the steppe, learned the arts of equitation and pastoralism, and left behind their closely related cousins, the Tungus and Samoyed, who were – and are – among the least violent people in the world; ‘deformed and diminutive savages', as Gibbon called them, ‘who tremble at the sound of arms'.

Others have suggested that the piles of skulls that marked the passage of a Genghiz Khan or the fearsome slave-markets of Bokhara were proof of a primary instinct in man to attack, dominate and kill his own kind, an instinct often suppressed by the institutions of civilised life, but encouraged under the more ‘natural' conditions of nomadic barbarism. Again this view is unhelpful. Instead, we should perhaps allow human nature an appetitive drive for movement in the widest sense. The act of journeying contributes towards a sense of physical and mental well-being, while the monotony of prolonged settlement or regular work weaves patterns in the brain that engender fatigue and a sense of personal inadequacy. Much of what the ethologists have designated ‘aggression' is simply an angered response to the frustrations of confinement.

A primary need for movement is borne out by recent studies of human evolution. Professor John Napier
³
has shown that the long-striding walk is an adaptation, unique among the primates, for covering distances over open savannahs. The bipedal walk made possible the development of the manufactory hand, and this led to the enlarged brain of our species. Any human baby also demonstrates its instinctive appetite for movement. Babies often scream for the simple reason they cannot bear to lie still. A crying child is a very rare sight on a nomad caravan, and the tenacity with which nomads cling to their way of life, as well as their quick-witted alertness, reflects the satisfaction to be found in perpetual movement. As settlers, we walk off our frustrations. The medieval Church instituted pilgrimage
on foot
as a cure for homicidal spleen.

The mainsprings of nomadic insurgency must be found within the precarious character of nomadism itself. Arnold Toynbee, following the lead of the fourteenth-century Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun, could never be accused of underestimating the importance of nomad invasions on the course of history. But in
A Study of History
he favoured the mechanical agency of climatic change to account for the periodic eruptions of nomads from their customary pastures. Travellers in Central Asia, like Sven Hedin or Sir Aurel Stein, had observed that the cities of the Tarim Basin were flourishing in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but two hundred years later lay abandoned after a shift of climate had desiccated the land. This onset of aridity had coincided with the Mongol outburst, and it inspired the American geographer Ellsworth Huntington to plot a sequence of climatic oscillations that would account for every nomad eruption. The idea that the nomads had responded to a climatic challenge admirably commended itself to Toynbee's scheme and was further reinforced by the story of Jacob and his sons coming down to Egypt ‘when the famine was sore in the land'. But Jacob came as a suppliant, not a conqueror. Whether or not the insurgents would swamp the civilisation depended on its political state at the time. For Toynbee the nomads were either ‘pushed off the steppe or desert or ‘pulled out' of it as if by suction when internal chaos invited them to raid.

But Toynbee's scheme is too simple. Shortage of grazing and population pressures certainly contributed towards the great exoduses. Livy tells of a Celtic king who resorted to predatory expansion, ‘anxious to relieve his realm from the burden of overpopulation'. Furthermore, once pastureland is overgrazed, the grass becomes sour and less nourishing. Overgrazing also bares the topsoil which is then carried away in the wind. Dustbowl conditions ensue and the rains do not come any more. But such shifts in climate as there were do not coincide with the invasions. No climatic change took place in Arabia to account for the outpouring of Bedouin warriors in the service of Islam.

Moreover, it does not require a major shift in climate to ruin a stock-breeder. Few climates lack a lean season, a time of mental and physical anguish, which the religions ritualised as Lent or Ramadan. In the desert this coincides with the hot dry phase (Ramadan comes from the Arabic
ramz
‘to burn'), in the north with the last months of winter. At this time the people are weak, the animals weaker. And if the lean season lasts too long, a rich man may face total ruin. (Sheep farmers in New South Wales used to calculate that a thirty per cent drop in rainfall would carry off eighty per cent of the livestock.) But the lean season is also, in Bedouin terminology, ‘the time of the beasts'. The story of David and the Lion reminds us of the danger shepherds faced from carnivorous animals, and wolves will increase their numbers in direct ratio to the availability of edible sheep.

The instability of his profession encourages the nomad to increase and guard his flocks with fanatical obsession. He prefers to eat meat at others' expense and to rustle his neighbour's animals whenever he can. Then he looks about for other alternatives – raids, long-distance trade, and protection rackets as an insurance against disaster. ‘The soul of them', Doughty wrote of the Arabian Bedouin, ‘is greedy first of the proper subsistence, then of their proper increase. Though Israel is scattered among the most polite nations, who has not noticed this humour in them?' Owen Lattimore, whose knowledge of steppe pastoralism is unrivalled, once said, ‘The pure nomad is the poor nomad,' in that he is unburdened by the luxuries of settlement. But in a society where livestock
is
wealth, the pure nomad is the relatively rich nomad. His obsession with increase is dictated by the fact that, once his flocks decline below a certain level, nomadism loses its viability. He and his family are compelled to find employment as agricultural serfs. As Ellsworth Huntington wrote in
The Pulse of Asia
, ‘all the nomads I have ever met seemed to be comfortable. When their flocks diminish, they are obliged to seek new homes and to betake themselves to agriculture, leaving only the rich to continue the nomadic life.' Live beasts are the standard medium of exchange, and a man rich in animals has purchasing power to ‘buy' wives for himself or his sons, to buy grazing concessions, and to buy his way out of a blood-feud.

Nomads are unstable within their tribal lands as a direct result of their ‘growth ideology'. And it can be seen that the maximum amount of activity on the steppe will coincide with a climate favouring the growth of herds. With more animals to defend, there will be more herdsmen needed, and in turn more disputes over grazing rights and more raids. The cattlemen of Abraham quarrelled with the cattlemen of Lot. Knowing neither could control the wayward temper of their cowboys, Abraham suggested a parting of the ways. ‘Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself I pray thee, before me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left' (Genesis 13:9). But once a split-away group trespasses on the pastures of others because of overstocking, old boundaries and agreements are destroyed.

‘Sons are the source of wealth' goes a Turkoman proverb. And as we know from the Gospel of St John, a good shepherd owns his own sheep, unlike the hireling who runs away at the first sight of a wolf. The increase of healthy animals demands the increase of healthy sons to look after them. Hence the nomad's exhibitionistic attitude to male potency and his preoccupation with the genealogy of the male line. All stockraisers have this obsession for ‘fine blood', and human studbooks litter the Old Testament. As economic principle, nomads make no effort to limit births, and a plentiful supply of milk from domesticated animals enables a nomad mother to conceive again immediately after birth. Her first child is weaned early and to some extent this rupture weakens the bond of attachment between her and her infant. The latter deflects its attachment onto animal ‘substitutes' and is encouraged to fondle baby animals, remaining ‘animal-fixed' for life. Boys are taught to ride as soon as they can walk, if not before. Pere Huc describes this in
Travels in China, Tartary and Thibet.
‘When a mere infant the Mongol is weaned and as soon as he is strong enough he is stuck upon a horse's back behind a man, the animal is put to a gallop, and the juvenile rider, in order not to fall off, has to cling with both hands to his leader's jacket. The Tartars thus become accustomed, from a very early age, to the movements of the horse and by degrees and the force of habit, to identify themselves, as it were, with the animal.'

Warfare – or, at least, violent competition – is endemic to nomadism. The tribe is a military machine, and from the age of four boys are trained in the art of war and defence. They are deputed to tend a few animals on pain of punishment for letting them stray. As a result, they are brainwashed into believing that the care of livestock constitutes one of the main purposes in life. This devotion to animals is invariably accompanied by a weakened regard for the value of human life. The Grand Historian of China, Ssu-Ma Ch‘ien, describes the process in his account of the Hsiung-Nu or Eastern Huns. ‘The little boys start out by learning to ride sheep and shoot birds and rats with a bow and arrow, and when they get older they shoot foxes and hares which are used for food. Thus all the young men are able to use a bow and act as armed cavalry in times of war.' Furthermore, equitation engenders a sort of Olympian grandeur. As the Russian explorer Colonel Przwalsky quaintly remarked of the Kalmuck nomad, ‘His contempt for pedestrianism is so great that he considers it beneath his dignity to walk even as far as the next
yurta.'
The Huns, we are told, bought, sold, slept, ate, drank, gave judgment, even defecated without dismounting.

The territorial instability of the nomad may be contrasted unfavourably with the greater security enjoyed by the ‘primitive' hunter and gatherer. The former sees territory in terms of good or bad grazing, the latter exploits his territory gratefully for his basic needs, and refuses on principle to store food for more than a few days. This he can afford to do, since hunters take active steps to keep their numbers constant. Without milk from domesticated animals and without beasts of burden, the mothers must suckle
and
carry their children on long journeys till the age of three or more. Meanwhile, they cannot bear any more children. The hunters have been accused of 'merry squandering' and certainly enjoy a far lower standard of living. But by budgeting for the minimum they lack all incentive to overstretch their frontiers unless forced out by others. ‘There has never been the least attempt', wrote Spencer and Gillen of the Central Australia Aborigines, ‘made by one tribe to encroach on the territory of another. Now and again they may have inter-tribal quarrels or fights, but there is no such thing as the acquisition of fresh territory.' The hunter's sole motive for travel outside his hunting ground is to ‘marry far' in accordance with the incest taboo. For this reason, isolated groups of hunters are interlinked in a network of reciprocal trading agreements and marriage alliances with their neighbours. Fights flare up when – and only when – the parity of these exchanges is broken. Thus ‘primitive' war and nomadic insurgency cannot meaningfully be compared to one another.