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"Pastoral Societies"
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Multiregional Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and Nonuniform Institutional Complexity across Eurasia
In this article I present a new archaeological synthesis concerning the earliest formation of mobile pastoralist economies across central Eurasia. I argue that Eurasian steppe pastoralism developed along distinct local trajectories in the western, central, and (south)eastern steppe, sparking the development of regional networks of interaction in the late fourth and third millennia BC. The “Inner Asian Mountain Corridor” exemplifies the relationship between such incipient regional networks and the process of economic change in the eastern steppe territory. The diverse regional innovations, technologies, and ideologies evident across Eurasia in the mid-third millennium BC are cast as the building blocks of a unique political economy shaped by “nonuniform” institutional alignments among steppe populations throughout the second millennium BC. This theoretical model illustrates how regional channels of interaction between distinct societies positioned Eurasian mobile pastoralists as key players in wide-scale institutional developments among traditionally conceived “core” civilizations while also enabling them to remain strategically independent and small-scale in terms of their own sociopolitical organization. The development of nonuniform institutional complexity among Eurasian pastoralists demonstrates a unique political and economic structure applicable to societies whose variable political and territorial scales are inconsistent with commonly understood evolutionary or corporate sociopolitical typologies such as chiefdoms, states, or empires.
Journal Article
Transitions: Pastoralists Living with Change
This review covers two major causes of change in pastoral systems. First is fragmentation, the dissection of a natural system into spatially isolated parts, which is caused by a number of socioeconomic factors such as changes in land tenure, agriculture, sedentarization, and institutions. Second is climate change and climate variability, which are expected to alter dry and semiarid grasslands now and into the future. Details of these changes are described using examples from Africa and Mongolia. An adaptation framework is used to place global change in context. Although pastoral systems are clearly under numerous constraints and risks have intensified, pastoralists are adapting and trying to remain flexible. It is too early to ask if the responses are enough, given the magnitude and number of changes faced by pastoralists today.
Journal Article
Open Access, Open Systems: Pastoral Management of Common-Pool Resources in the Chad Basin
The discussion about the impact of pastoralists on ecosystems has been profoundly shaped by Hardin's tragedy of the commons that held pastoralists responsible for overgrazing the range. Research has shown that grazing ecosystems are much more complex and dynamic than was previously assumed and that they can be managed adaptively as commons. However, proponents and critics of Hardin's thesis continue to argue that open access to common-pool resources inevitably leads to a tragedy of the commons. A longitudinal study that we conducted of pastoral mobility and primary production in the Logone floodplain in the Far North Region of Cameroon suggest that open access does not have to lead to a tragedy of the commons. We argue that this pastoral system is best conceptualized as an open system, in which a combination of individual decision-making and coordination of movements leads to an ideal-free type of distribution of mobile pastoralists. We explain how this self-organizing system of open access works and its implications for theories of management of common-pool resources and our understanding of pastoral systems.
Journal Article
The Emergence and Persistence of Inequality in Premodern Societies
In this special section we propose an interpretation of the emergence and persistence of wealth inequality in premodern populations along with ethnographic and quantitative evidence exploring this hypothesis. The long‐term trajectory of inequality in premodern societies, we suggest, is based on the differing importance of three classes of wealth—material, embodied, and relational—together with differences in the transmission of these types of wealth across generations. Subsequent essays in this forum use data on individual and household wealth from 21 populations to evaluate this and related propositions concerning the interaction of wealth class, transmission rates, production systems (foraging, horticultural, pastoral, and agricultural), and inequality. Here we motivate our interpretation by applying our ideas to the Holocene transition from more egalitarian to more stratified societies, introduce key concepts that are developed in the subsequent essays, and comment on some of the limitations of our study.
Journal Article
Adopting Cultivation to Remain Pastoralists: The Diversification of Maasai Livelihoods in Northern Tanzania
Over the past four decades, Maasai pastoralists in Tanzania have adopted agriculture, integrating it with their traditional pastoralism. This livelihood diversification has complex origins and profound implications for Maasai social organization, culture, and demography, and ultimately for their health and well being and for the local and regional environment. In this paper, we examine the process by which this engagement with, and increasing dependence upon, agriculture came about in Ngorongoro District, northern Tanzania. The process there was more complex and influenced by a wider variety of factors than has been reported by previous descriptions of Maasai livelihood diversification. It generally involved two stages: planting a garden first, and later expanding the garden to a farm. We found that some households adopted cultivation out of necessity, but far more did so by choice. Among the latter, some adopted cultivation to reduce risk, while for others it was a reflection of changing cultural and social norms. Motivations for adopting cultivation differed among people of different wealth categories. Diversification was part of wider cultural changes, and was also influenced by power differentials among Maasai age sets and by government policies.
Journal Article
Mobile Pastoralists in the Logone Floodplain Distribute Themselves in an Ideal Free Distribution
We examined whether mobile pastoralists in the Logone floodplain of Cameroon distribute themselves according to the ideal free distribution (IFD), which predicts that the number of individuals in each area is proportional to the quality and quantity of resources in each area and that all individuals have access to the same amount of resources. We used the concept to assess the distribution of grazing pressure over available common-pool resources as evidence of a complex adaptive system in which the spatial distribution grazing pressure is adjusted to the distribution of resources through individual decision making and passive coordination of movements among individual pastoralists. We used a combination of spatial and ethnographic approaches to study the distribution of resources and mobile pastoralists in the Logone floodplain in 5 successive years and found evidence for an IFD in 3 years (2008–2009 and 2012) and an approximation of an IFD in years in which pastoralists were terrorized by armed bandits (2010) and the government reestablished security (2011). The findings support our hypothesis that there is a self-organizing management system in which pastoralists distribute themselves effectively over the available resources.
Journal Article
Pastoralism and Wealth Inequality
Pastoralist societies are often portrayed as economically egalitarian, reflecting the volatile nature of livestock herds and the existence of multiple institutions that allow for the redistribution of wealth as a form of insurance. Motivated by an interest in the role of intergenerational transmission in structuring persistent inequality, we examine the extent of intergenerational transmission of material wealth (four measures) and embodied wealth (one measure) for four pastoral populations from different parts of the world (East Africa, West Africa, and southwest Asia). We find substantial levels of intergenerational transmission and marked economic inequality. We argue that the high correspondence between the material wealth of parents and offspring reflects the importance of the family in the transmission of wealth through bequests, positive assortment by wealth in the domains of marriage and herd management, and positive returns to scale as might occur when raising or defending large herds. We conclude that the analysis of intergenerational transmission provides new insights into the much‐debated extent of egalitarianism among pastoralists.
Journal Article
Pyrenean Pastoralists’ Ecological Knowledge: Documentation and Application to Natural Resource Management and Adaptation
Pastoral production systems in the Spanish Pyrenees have changed dramatically in recent decades, leading to the loss of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We documented TEK of pastoralists from two valleys in the western Central Pyrenees of Aragón and explored its potential applications to resource management and adaptation. Pyrenean pastoralists possess extensive knowledge of relationships between terrain, climate, vegetation and animal nutrition and behavior. TEK could contribute to sustainable stewardship and facilitate adaptation by informing pasture monitoring; providing traditional practices to manage mountain vegetation; and preserving knowledge of extensive livestock production strategies, such as transhumance. Institutional barriers to applying TEK include weak economic cooperation among stockmen, their dependence on EU subsidies, and lack of voice in regional government decisions about local resources. A more collaborative, place-based stewardship of the Central Pyrenees might begin with direct involvement of pastoralists in designing monitoring of pasture conditions and vegetation type changes.
Journal Article
Production Systems, Inheritance, and Inequality in Premodern Societies
Premodern human societies differ greatly in socioeconomic inequality. Despite much useful theorizing on the causes of these differences, individual‐level quantitative data on wealth inequality is lacking. The papers in this special section provide the first comparable estimates of intergenerational wealth transmission and inequality in premodern societies, with data on more than 40 measures of embodied, material, and relational wealth from 21 premodern societies representing four production systems (hunter‐gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and agriculturalists). Key findings include (1) the importance of material, embodied, and relational wealth differs significantly across production systems, with material wealth more important in pastoral and agricultural systems; (2) the degree of wealth transmission from parent to offspring is markedly higher for material wealth than embodied and relational wealth; (3) aggregate wealth is transmitted to a higher degree among pastoralists and agriculturalists; (4) the degree of inequality is greater for material wealth; and (5) the degree of intergenerational transmission of wealth is correlated with wealth inequality. Surprisingly, horticulturalists exhibit no greater wealth inequality or intergenerational wealth transmission than do hunter‐gatherers, while pastoralists are very similar to agriculturalists. We discuss how these trends may have favored the emergence of institutionalized inequality, as intensified forms of production made material wealth transmission increasingly important.
Journal Article