Changing Nomads in a Changing World

This book contains a chapter entitled Great Scholar, Great Man, Great Friend (Remembering Ernest Gellner), brings together leading anthropologists who discuss how pastralists are coping and changing as the societies they inhabit change at an unprecedented pace. The different issues pertaining to the different geographic areas covered are united by a general theme: socioeconomic and cultural changes in contemporary pastoralist societies and groups. These changes are far from being spontaneous. They result from the painful adaptation of the mobile and extensive pastoralists to the modern (some scholars would argue already postmodern) world, in which pastoralists occupy only a marginal and inferior economic and sicial position. This is true even with regard to Middle eastern countries, although in some of them a social prestige connected with pastoralism. Discussion focuses on the worldwide deterioration of the sicio-political and economic standing of the pastoralist, the historical factors of colonization/de-colonization, and how modernizing sedetary society (with its technological inventions, modern infrastructure, and national requirements of taxation and education) impacts on change in nomadic societies.