Download or read book Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change written by Reuven Amitai and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.

Download or read book Nomads The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World written by Anthony Sattin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sattin is a terrific storyteller.” —David Farley, New York Times The remarkable story of how nomads have fostered and refreshed civilization throughout our history. Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilization. From the Neolithic revolution to the twenty-first century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the empires created by the power of human cities. Exploring the evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, Anthony Sattin’s sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible to its decline in the present day. Connecting us to mythology and the records of antiquity, Nomads explains why we leave home, and why we like to return again. This is the history of civilization as told through its outsiders.

Download or read book The Importance of the Nomads written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Go inside the steppe environment to learn about the role militarized pastoral nomads played in world history. As you see how these societies responded to climate pressures and influenced neighboring civilizations, you will also chart the rise of the horse, which played an important role in nomadic society.

Download or read book Stalin s Nomads written by Robert Kindler and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Kindler's seminal work is a comprehensive and unsettling account of the Soviet campaign to forcefully sedentarize and collectivize the Kazakh clans. Viewing the nomadic life as unproductive, and their lands unused and untilled, Stalin and his inner circle pursued a campaign of violence and subjugation, rather than attempting any dialog or cultural assimilation. The results were catastrophic, as the conflict and an ensuing famine (1931-1933) caused the death of nearly one-third of the Kazakh population. Hundreds of thousands of nomads became refugees and a nomadic culture and social order were essentially destroyed in less than five years. Kindler provides an in-depth analysis of Soviet rule, economic and political motivations, and the role of remote and local Soviet officials and Kazakhs during the crisis. This is the first English-language translation of an important and harrowing history, largely unknown to Western audiences prior to Kindler’s study. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

Download or read book Nomad s Land written by Andrea E. Duffy and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth century, the development and codification of forest science in France were closely linked to Provence's time-honored tradition of mobile pastoralism, which formed a major part of the economy. At the beginning of the century, pastoralism also featured prominently in the economies and social traditions of North Africa and southwestern Anatolia until French forest agents implemented ideas and practices for forest management in these areas aimed largely at regulating and marginalizing Mediterranean mobile pastoral traditions. These practices changed not only landscapes but also the social order of these three Mediterranean societies and the nature of French colonial administration. In Nomad's Land Andrea E. Duffy investigates the relationship between Mediterranean mobile pastoralism and nineteenth-century French forestry through case studies in Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. By restricting the use of shared spaces, foresters helped bring the populations of Provence and Algeria under the control of the state, and French scientific forestry became a medium for state initiatives to sedentarize mobile pastoral groups in Anatolia. Locals responded through petitions, arson, violence, compromise, and adaptation. Duffy shows that French efforts to promote scientific forestry both internally and abroad were intimately tied to empire building and paralleled the solidification of Western narratives condemning the pastoral tradition, leading to sometimes tragic outcomes for both the environment and pastoralists.

Download or read book Empires of Ancient Eurasia written by Craig Benjamin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces a crucial period of world history when the vast exchange network of the Silk Roads connected most of Eurasia.

Download or read book Nomads in the Sedentary World written by Anatoly M. Khazanov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the role played by nomads in the political, linguistic, socio-economic and cultural development of the sedentary world around them. Spans regions from Hungary to Africa, India and China, and periods from the first millennium BC to early modern times.

Download or read book Nomads of the Nomads written by Donald Powell Cole and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Last Nomad written by Shugri Said Salh and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable and inspiring true story that "stuns with raw beauty" about one woman's resilience, her courageous journey to America, and her family's lost way of life. Winner of the 2022 Gold Nautilus Award, Multicultural & Indigenous Category Born in Somalia, a spare daughter in a large family, Shugri Said Salh was sent at age six to live with her nomadic grandmother in the desert. The last of her family to learn this once-common way of life, Salh found herself chasing warthogs, climbing termite hills, herding goats, and moving constantly in search of water and grazing lands with her nomadic family. For Salh, though the desert was a harsh place threatened by drought, predators, and enemy clans, it also held beauty, innovation, centuries of tradition, and a way for a young Sufi girl to learn courage and independence from a fearless group of relatives. Salh grew to love the freedom of roaming with her animals and the powerful feeling of community found in nomadic rituals and the oral storytelling of her ancestors. As she came of age, though, both she and her beloved Somalia were forced to confront change, violence, and instability. Salh writes with engaging frankness and a fierce feminism of trying to break free of the patriarchal beliefs of her culture, of her forced female genital mutilation, of the loss of her mother, and of her growing need for independence. Taken from the desert by her strict father and then displaced along with millions of others by the Somali Civil War, Salh fled first to a refugee camp on the Kenyan border and ultimately to North America to learn yet another way of life. Readers will fall in love with Salh on the page as she tells her inspiring story about leaving Africa, learning English, finding love, and embracing a new horizon for herself and her family. Honest and tender, The Last Nomad is a riveting coming-of-age story of resilience, survival, and the shifting definitions of home.

Download or read book Nomadism in Iran written by D. T. Potts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic images of Iranian nomads in circulation today and in years past suggest that Western awareness of nomadism is a phenomenon of considerable antiquity. Though nomadism has certainly been a key feature of Iranian history, it has not been in the way most modern archaeologists have envisaged it. Nomadism in Iran recasts our understanding of this "timeless" tradition. Far from constituting a natural adaptation on the Iranian Plateau, nomadism is a comparatively late introduction, which can only be understood within the context of certain political circumstances. Since the early Holocene, most, if not all, agricultural communities in Iran had kept herds of sheep and goat, but the communities themselves were sedentary: only a few of their members were required to move with the herds seasonally. Though the arrival of Iranian speaking groups, attested in written sources beginning in the time of Herodutus, began to change the demography of the plateau, it wasn't until later in the eleventh century that an influx of Turkic speaking Oghuz nomadic groups-"true" nomads of the steppe-began the modification of the demography of the Iranian Plateau that accelerated with the Mongol conquest. The massive, unprecedented violence of this invasion effected the widespread distribution of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic groups across Iran. Thus, what has been interpreted in the past as an enduring pattern of nomadic land use is, by archaeological standards, very recent. Iran's demographic profile since the eleventh century AD, and more particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth century, has been used by some scholars as a proxy for ancient social organization. Nomadism in Iran argues that this modernist perspective distorts the historical reality of the land. Assembling a wealth of material in several languages and disciplines, Nomadism in Iran will be invaluable to archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Download or read book Mobility and Displacement written by Orhon Myadar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores and contests both outsiders’ projections of Mongolia and the self-objectifying tropes Mongolians routinely deploy to represent their own country as a land of nomads. It speaks to the experiences of many societies and cultures that are routinely treated as exotic, romantic, primitive or otherwise different and Other in Euro-American imaginaries, and how these imaginaries are also internally produced by those societies themselves. The assumption that Mongolia is a nomadic nation is largely predicated upon Mongolia’s environmental and climatic conditions, which are understood to make Mongolia suitable for little else than pastoral nomadism. But to the contrary, the majority of Mongolians have been settled in and around cities and small population centers. Even Mongolians who are herders have long been unable to move freely in a smooth space, as dictated by the needs of their herds, and as they would as free-roaming "nomads." Instead, they have been subjected to various constraints across time that have significantly limited their movement. The book weaves threads from disparate branches of Mongolian studies to expose various visible and invisible constraints on population mobility in Mongolia from the Qing period to the post-socialist era. With its in-depth analysis of the complexities of the relationship between land rights, mobility, displacement, and the state, the book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of cultural geography, political geography, heritage and culture studies, as well as Eurasian and Inner-Asian Studies. Winner of the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award (AAG, 2022)

Download or read book Nomadic Empires written by Gerard Chaliand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nomadic Empires sheds new light on 2,000 years of military history and geopolitics. The Mongol Empire of Genghis-Khan and his heirs, as is well known, was the greatest empire in world history. For 2,000 from the fifth century b.c. to the fifteenth century a.d., the steppe areas of Asia, from the borders of Manchuria to the Black Sea, were a ""zone of turbulence,"" threatening settled peoples from China to Russia and Hungary, including Iran, India, the Byzantine empire, and even Syria. It was a true world stage that was affected by these destructive nomads.This cogent, well-written volume examines these nomadic people, variously called Indo-Europeans, Turkic peoples, or Mongols. They did not belong to a sole nation or language, but shared a strategic culture born in the steppes: a highly mobile cavalry which did not require sophisticated logistics, and an indirect mode of combat based on surprise, mobility, and harassment. They used bows and arrows and, when they were united under the authority of a strong leader, were able to become a deadly threat to their sedentary neighbors.Chaliand addresses the subject from four perspectives. First, he examines the early nomadic populations of Eurasia, and the impact of these nomads and their complex relationships with settled peoples. Then he describes military fronts of the Altaic Nomads, detailing events from the fourth century b.c. through the twelfth century a.d., from the early Chinese front to the Indo-Iranian front, the Byzantine front, and the Russian front. Next he covers the undertakings of the great nomad conquerors that brought about the Ottoman Empire. And finally, he describes what he calls ""the revenge of the sedentary peoples, exploring Russia and China in the aftermath of the Mongols. The volume includes a chronology and an annotated bibliography. Now in paperback, this cogent, well-written volume examines these nomadic people, variously called Indo-Europeans, Turkic peoples, or "

Download or read book Nomads of Western Tibet written by and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: this copiously illustrated book is a fascinating account of these remarkable people, of their traditional way of survival. In a world where indigenous peoples and their environments are vanishing at alarming rates, the survival of this way of life represents an unexpected and heartening victory for humanity.

Download or read book Nomads in Archaeology written by Roger Cribb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the problem of how to study mobile peoples using archaeological techniques. It deals not only with the prehistory of nomads but also with current issues in theory and methodology.

Download or read book A Moveable Empire written by Resat Kasaba and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier studies that take an evolutionary view of tribe-state relations -- casting the development of a state as a story in which nomadic tribes give way to settled populations -- this book argues that mobile groups played an important role in shaping Ottoman institutions and, ultimately, the early republican structures of modern Turkey. Over much of the empire's long history, local interests influenced the development of the Ottoman state as authorities sought to enlist and accommodate the various nomadic groups in the region. In the early years of the empire, maintaining a nomadic presence, especially in frontier regions, was an important source of strength. Cooperation between the imperial center and tribal leaders provided the center with an effective way of reaching distant parts of the empire, while allowing tribal leaders to perpetuate their own authority and guarantee the tribes' survival as bearers of distinct cultures and identities. This relationship changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as indigenous communities discovered new possibilities for expanding their own economic and political power by pursuing local, regional, and even global opportunities, independent of the Ottoman center. The loose, flexible relationship between the Ottoman center and migrant communities became a liability under these changing conditions, and the Ottoman state took its first steps toward settling tribes and controlling migrations. Finally, in the early twentieth century, mobility took another form entirely as ethnicity-based notions of nationality led to forced migrations.

Download or read book Nomads of the Sahel written by Patrick Marnham and published by Minority Rights Group. This book was released on 1979-01-01 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1973 an international disaster was declared in the Sahelian countries of West Africa (Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad). The picture presented to the world at the time was of a natural disaster of the first order, affecting six very poor nations. A prolonged drought had led to the disappearance of almost all their livestock, destroyed their way of life and resulted in mass famine. This had been caused by a change in climate which might continue. The traditionally self-sufficient nomadic peoples of West Africa were permanently weakened. The situation described amounted to no less than a sudden and complete collapse of living conditions in a vast area of the world. But was this an accurate description of events in the Sahel at that time? Please note that the terminology in the fields of minority rights and indigenous peoples’ rights has changed over time. MRG strives to reflect these changes as well as respect the right to self-identification on the part of minorities and indigenous peoples. At the same time, after over 50 years’ work, we know that our archive is of considerable interest to activists and researchers. Therefore, we make available as much of our back catalogue as possible, while being aware that the language used may not reflect current thinking on these issues.

Download or read book Nomad State Relationships in International Relations written by Jamie Levin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores non-state actors that are or have been migratory, crossing borders as a matter of practice and identity. Where non-state actors have received considerable attention amongst political scientists in recent years, those that predate the state—nomads—have not. States, however, tend to take nomads quite seriously both as a material and ideational threat. Through this volume, the authors rectify this by introducing nomads as a distinct topic of study. It examines why states treat nomads as a threat and it looks particularly at how nomads push back against state intrusions. Ultimately, this exciting volume introduces a new topic of study to IR theory and politics, presenting a detailed study of nomads as non-state actors.