Changing Nomads in a Changing World

This volume, which contains a chapter entitled "Great Scholar, Great Man, Great Friend (Remembering Ernest Gellner)", brings together leading anthropologists who discuss how pastoralists 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: socio-economic 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 post-modern) world, in which pastoralists occupy only a marginal and inferior economic and social position. This is true even with regard to Middle Eastern countries, although in some of them a social prestige connected with pastoralism is still quite high. Discussion focuses on the world-wide deterioration of the socio-political and economic standing of the pastoralist, the historical factors of colonisation/de-colonisation, and how modernising sedentary society (with its technological inventions, modern infrastructure, and national requirements of taxation and education) impacts on change in nomadic societies.