Richard Tapper

SOAS, University of London | SOAS · Department of Anthropology and Sociology

In this chapter I argue that it is better to understand Afghan nomads as they saw themselves: as ‘pastoralists’ (mâldâr; lit. stock-owner), whose interest in nomadism was economic and ecological rather than cultural, ideological or psychological. They recognised farmland as a more secure resource—a ‘golden tent-peg’—and could be tempted by cultivat...

Book details Frank Hole and Sekandar Amanolahi-Baharvand Tribal Pastoralists in Transition. The Baharvand of Luristan, Iran Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers, Number 100; 2021. xx, 381 pages, ISBN: 978-0-915703-99-9 (print), 978-1-951538-74-3 (ebook)

In the early 1970s we made more than 100 hours of tape recordings, as part of our ethnographic fieldwork among the Piruzai, Pashtun farmers and semi-nomadic pastoralists in northern Afghanistan. These village voices create a remarkable community self-portrait of a social world now lost and irretrievable. Maryam's story is the perfect exemplar of an...

Lois Beck Nomads in Postrevolutionary Iran: The Qashqa’i in an Era of Change Abingdon: Routledge, 2015 xxv, 404 pages Hardcover: ISBN: 978-1-138-01561-6; ISBN: 978-1-315-79422-8

Book details 342 pages, 8 maps, 19 tables, 66 figures, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-85745-335-8 Hb, $95.00/£60.00, eISBN 978-0-85745-336-5

Esquisse d'une sociologie tribale de l'Iran; La structure sociale et économique des tribus Shah-Sevan (Afshar — Baghdadi — Inanlu — Mughan). By YoussefizadehMohammad Ali. (Thèse présentée et soutenue pour le Doctorat en Anthropologie.) pp. 452, xxi. Académie de Paris, Université René Descartes (Sorbonne), [c.1974]. - Volume 108 Issue 1 - Richard Ta...

The author reviews his analysis of 'tribe and state in Iran and Afghanistan' resulting from a conference he convened in 1979. He considers the continuing relevance of the themes discussed at the conference, given the shattering political and social changes over the intervening three decades, following revolutions in both countries. There has been a...

‘Kuchi’, an Afghan Persian word meaning ‘those who go on migrations’, is the common generic term, used by both Afghans and foreigners, for the nomads of Afghanistan, as it has been for many decades. Most if not all the nomads, and indeed many long‐settled former nomads, now acknowledge this name, yet in the 1960s and 1970s few of those so labelled...

Yet more on the Islamic revival

The Government They Deserve: the role of the elite in Sudan's political evolution. by Mansour Khalid, London: Keegan Paul International. 1990. 480pp. £25.00hb

HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF SAUDI ARABIA. By J. E. Peterson. (Asian Historical Dictionaries, no. 14). Metuchen, NJ and London, Scarecrow Press, 1993. xxii, 244 pp. £29.25.THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE MODERN ISLAMIC WORLD (4 volumes). Editor in Chief John L Esposito. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.MUSLIM WOMEN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD: A BIBLIOGRA...

A Multi-Volume, Multi-Author Encyclopaedia Such as this is a Desktop library; but, more than any library, it represents a set of conscious editorial decisions. The basis of these decisions (if, as is common, the editors do not make it explicit to the reader) may be inferred not just from the choice of topics, but from the balance between them, and...

The Islamic Middle East: an Historical Anthropology. By LindholmCharles. pp. xxviii, 324, 23 illus., 6 figs., 5 maps. Oxford, Blackwell, 1996. £55.00 (Cloth), £14.99 (Paperback). - Volume 8 Issue 1 - Richard Tapper

Richard Tapper's 1997 book, which is based on three decades of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive documentary research, traces the political and social history of the Shahsevan, one of the major nomadic peoples of Iran. The story is a dramatic one, recounting the mythical origins of the tribes, their unification as a confederacy, and their declin...

This article reviews various proposals for an "Islamic anthropology" and their relation to the "anthropology of Islam." Islamic anthropology approaches social and cultural phenomena on the basis of Islamic values/principles and with analytical techniques derived from Islamic texts and traditions. This approach has been disparaged on various grounds...

AndrewsPeter Alford (ed. and comp.) and BenninghausRüdiger: Ethnic groups in the Republic of Turkey. (Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients. Reihe B: Geisteswissenschaften, Nr. 60.) 656 pp. + 2 pp. corrigenda, 2 maps. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichart Verlag, 1989. DM 220. - Volume 58 Issue 2 - Richard Tapper

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ISLAMIC LIBRARY COLLECTIONS IN WESTERN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA. By STEPHAN ROMAN (Libraries and Librarianship in the Muslim World.) London, Mansell, 1990. xii, 259 pp. £40.OPIS NA DOKUMENTITE NA ARABSKI EZIK, ZAPAZENI V ORIENTALSKIYA OTDEL NA NARODNATA BIBLIOTEKA ‘KIRIL I METODII’ V SOFIYA, XIII‐XX V. = INVENTORY OF THE DOCUMENT...

Until recently, a dominant approach in the history and anthropology of the Middle East has rested on the assumption that an “ethnic” or “tribal” group is, or approximates, a biologically self-perpetuating population, sharing elements of a common culture and identifying itself and being identified with others as a separate category. This fundamental...

The anthropology of Islam has for too long been dominated by dichotomies such as 'orthodox'/ 'popular', and by a presumption that Muslim women are subordinate in religious as in other matters. The religious activities of men cannot be explained solely in terms of their degree of 'orthodoxy', and those of women should not be dismissed a priori as pe...

Our title comes from a cartoon in Cumhuriyet, the Turkish national newspaper of the centre-left. It shows the President of the Republic bowing Muslim-fashion and saying ‘Thank God we’re secular’; here, the old joke is poking mild fun at the secular state’s relation to Islam, a relation which has been a touchy subject since the foundation of the Tur...

The Shāhsevan tribes of Azarbayjan were involved in various important events during the Constitutional period. In spring 1908, border incidents in Shāhsevan territory, between tribesmen and Russian frontier guards, provided the Russians with a pretext for military intervention in Azarbayjan on a scale which hastened the fall of the Constitutionalis...

Food, eating, and commensality among the Durrani Pashtuns are discussed in terms of four domains of discourse: the Koranic, the Tribal, the Humoral, and the Magical. Each domain is related to a distinct section of the Afghan-Islamic Great Tradition. The domains offer alternative frames of reference between which actors switch according to context,...

KhazanovA. M.: Nomads and the outside world. Translated by Julia Crookenden. (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, 44.) xxviii, 366 pp. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University press, 1984. £37.50, $65. - Volume 49 Issue 1 - Richard Tapper

IbrahimHayder: The Shaiqiya: the cultural and social change of a Northern Sundanese riverain People. (Studien zur Kulturkunde, 49.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979. DM 32. - Volume 46 Issue 2 - Richard Tapper

LancasterWilliam: The Rwala Bedouin tody. (Changing Cultures.) x, 179 pp. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1981. £17. 50 (Paper £5. 95). - Volume 46 Issue 1 - Richard Tapper

EhlersEckart (ed.): Beiträge zur kulturgeopraphie des islamischen Orients. (Marburger geographische Schriften, 78.) [viii], 140 pp. Marburg, Lahn: Geographisches Institut derUniversität Marburg, 1979. - Volume 45 Issue 1 - Richard Tapper

This exploratory article questions certain generalisations which have been made about nomadic pastoral societies, particularly those in the Islamic world. It reviews models of social organisation common to these societies. Two types of communities defined according to size and structure and illustrated by comparing the Shahsevan Turks of Iranian Az...

Treats a problem of pastoral nomadism which, although in one form or another it concerns all nomadic societies, seems to have been surprisingly neglected in the literature. This is nature of grazing rights, the size and composition of social groupings to which they are allocated, and how they are managed as an estate by such a social unit. Discusse...

OberlingPierre: The Qashqā'i nomads of Fārs. (Near and Middle East Monographs, vi.) 277 pp. The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1974. Guilders 90. - Volume 40 Issue 1 - Richard Tapper

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GoldbergHarvey E.: Cave dwellers and citrus growers: a Jewish community in Libya and Israel. xv, 208 pp., 4 plates. Cambridge: University Press, 1972. £4. - Volume 38 Issue 1 - Richard Tapper

Centlivres-DemontMicheline: Une communauté de potiers en Iran; le centre de Meybod (Yazd.) (Beiträge zur Iranistik.) 131 pp. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag in Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz, 1971. DM 58. - Volume 38 Issue 1 - Richard Tapper

The Shāhsevan tribes of Persia are a heterogeneous collection of groups brought together in a confederation of that name some time between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The question of how and when this confederation was formed is something of a riddle, which arises from the following considerations.

FisherW. B. (ed.): The land of Iran. (The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 1.) xix, 784 pp., 16 plates. Cambridge: University Press, 1968. 75s. - Volume 33 Issue 2 - Richard Tapper