Black tents of Baluchistan
By: Philip Carl Salzman.
Series: Smithsonian series in ethnographic inquiry
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Washington, DC
Language: eng
Number of pages: 390
Subjects: Baluchi (Southwest Asian people) -- Social conditions; Baluchi (Southwest Asian people) -- Economic conditions; Baluchi (Southwest Asian people) -- Domestic animals; Herders -- Iran -- Sarhad Plateau; Sarhad Plateau (Iran) -- Social life and customs
Description: "Drawing upon twenty-seven months spent among the men, women, and children of the Yarahmadzai tribe of Iranian Baluchistan, Philip Carl Salzman shows that such labels as "pastoral," "nomad," "chiefdom," "Muslim," and "subsistence" are misleading, because they reduce a complex and mutating multiplicity to an imagined essence.

Relating the details of the group's life - from tent living and the division of daily labor to kinship ties, lineage organization, and religion - Salzman discusses how Baluch shift between decentralized, egalitarian, segmentary lineage politics and centralized, hierarchical, chief-based politics. He also compares and contrasts the people of the Sarhad with other livestock-rearing, mobile peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

Maintaining that scholarly conceptions of society have too often overemphasized unitary structural integration, Salzman argues that alternative stances or tendencies can remain embedded in a culture's repertoire, ready to be called forth in response to changing conditions."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 375-383) and index.