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Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include , pastoral nomads (owning livestock), and Merchant nomads. In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased, reaching an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world .
Nomadic hunting and gathering—following seasonally available wild plants and game—is by far the oldest human subsistence method known. Pastoralists raise herds of domesticated livestock, driving or accompanying them in patterns that normally avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover. Nomadism is also a lifestyle adapted to infertile regions such as steppe, tundra, or desert, where mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. For example, many groups living in the tundra are reindeer herders and are semi-nomadic, following forage for their animals.
Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are various itinerant populations who move among densely populated areas to offer specialized services ( or ) to their residents—external , for example. These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads".
Nomads keep moving for different reasons. Nomadic foragers move in search of game, edible plants, and water. Aboriginal Australians, of Southeast Asia, and San people of Africa, for example, traditionally move from camp to camp to hunt and gather wild plants. Some tribes of the Americas followed this way of life. Pastoral nomads, on the other hand, make their living raising livestock such as camels, cattle, goats, horses, sheep, or yaks; these nomads usually travel in search of pastures for their flocks. The Fula people and their cattle travel through the grasslands of Niger in western Africa. Some nomadic peoples, especially herders, may also move to raid settled communities or to avoid enemies. Nomadic craftworkers and merchants travel to find and serve customers. They include the Gadia Lohar blacksmiths of India, the Roma traders, Scottish travellers and Irish travellers.
Many nomadic and pastorally nomadic peoples are associated with semi-arid and ; examples include the Mongolic peoples and Turkic peoples peoples of Central Asia, the Plains Indians of the Great Plains, and the Berbers and other peoples of the Sahara. Pastoral nomads who are residents of arid climates include the Fula people of the Sahel, the Khoekhoe of South Africa and Namibia, groups of Northeast Africa such as Somali people and Oromo people, and the Bedouin of the Middle East.
Most nomads travel in groups of families, bands, or tribes. These groups are based on kinship and marriage ties or on formal agreements of cooperation. A council of adult males makes most of the decisions, though some tribes have chiefs.
In the case of Mongolian nomads, a family moves twice a year. These two movements generally occur during the summer and winter. The winter destination is usually located near the mountains in a valley and most families already have fixed winter locations. Their winter locations have shelter for animals and are not used by other families while they are out. In the summer they move to a more open area in which the animals can graze. Most nomads usually move within the same region and do not travel very far. Since they usually circle around a large area, communities form and families generally know where the other ones are. Often, families do not have the resources to move from one province to another unless they are moving out of the area permanently. A family can move on its own or with others; if it moves alone, they are usually no more than a couple of kilometres from each other. The geographical closeness of families is usually for mutual support. Pastoral nomad societies usually do not have large populations.
One nomadic society, the Mongols, gave rise to the largest land empire in history. The Mongols originally consisted of loosely organized nomadic tribes in Mongolia, Manchuria, and Siberia. In the late 12th century, Genghis Khan united them and other nomadic tribes to found the Mongol Empire, which eventually stretched the length of Asia.
The nomadic way of life has become increasingly rare. Many countries have converted pastures into cropland and forced nomadic peoples into permanent settlements.
Modern forms of nomadic peoples are variously referred to as "shiftless", "Romani people", "rootless cosmopolitans", hunter-gatherers, refugees and urban Homelessness or Street people, depending on their individual circumstances. These terms may be used in a derogatory sense.
According to Gérard Chaliand, terrorism originated in nomad-warrior cultures. He points to Machiavelli's classification of war into two types, which Chaliand interprets as describing a difference between warfare in sedentary and nomadic societies:
There are two different kinds of war. The one springs from the ambition of princes or republics that seek to extend their empire; such were the wars of Alexander the Great, and those of the Romans, and those which two hostile powers carry on against each other. These wars are dangerous but never go so far as to drive all its inhabitants out of a province, because the conqueror is satisfied with the submission of the people... The other kind of war is when an entire people, constrained by famine or war, leave their country with their families for the purpose of seeking a new home in a new country, not for the purpose of subjecting it to their dominion as in the first case, but with the intention of taking absolute possession of it themselves and driving out or killing its original inhabitants.
Primary historical sources for nomadic steppe-style warfare are found in many languages: Chinese, Persian, Polish, Russian, Classical Greek, Armenian, Latin and Arabic. These sources concern both the true steppe nomads (Mongols, Huns, Magyars and Scythians) and also the semi-settled people like Turkish people, Crimean Tatars and Russians, who retained or, in some cases, adopted the nomadic form of warfare.
Pastoral nomads are nomads moving from pastures to pastures. Nomadic pastoralism is thought to have developed in three stages that accompanied population growth and an increase in the complexity of social organization. Karim Sadr has proposed the following stages:
The pastoralists are sedentary to a certain area, as they move between the permanent spring, summer, autumn and winter (or dry and wet season) pastures for their livestock. The nomads moved depending on the availability of resources. Nomads of the Middle East , David Zeidan, OM-IRC, 1995
The first nomadic pastoral society developed in the period from 8,500 to 6,500 BCE in the area of the southern Levant. There, during a period of increasing aridity, Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) cultures in the Sinai Peninsula were replaced by a nomadic, pastoral pottery-using culture, which seems to have been a cultural fusion between them and a newly-arrived Mesolithic people from Egypt (the Harifian culture), adopting their nomadic hunting lifestyle to the raising of stock.
This lifestyle quickly developed into what Jaris Yurins has called the circum-Arabs nomadic pastoral techno-complex and is possibly associated with the appearance of Semitic languages in the region of the Ancient Near East. The rapid spread of such nomadic pastoralism was typical of such later developments as of the Yamnaya culture of the Eurasian nomads ( 3300–2600 BCE), and of the Mongol spread in the later Middle Ages.
Yamnaya steppe pastoralists from the Pontic–Caspian steppe, who were among the first to master Equestrianism, played a key role in Indo-European migrations and in the spread of Indo-European languages across Eurasia.
in southern Africa adopted nomadism from the 17th century.
Since the 1990s, as the cash economy shrank, unemployed relatives were reabsorbed into family farms, and the importance of this form of nomadism has increased. The symbols of nomadism, specifically the crown of the grey felt tent known as the yurt, appears on the national flag, emphasizing the central importance of nomadism in the genesis of the modern nation of Kyrgyzstan.
In Kazakhstan where the major agricultural activity was nomadic herding, forced collectivization under Joseph Stalin's rule met with massive resistance and major losses and confiscation of livestock. Livestock in Kazakhstan fell from 7 million cattle to 1.6 million and from 22 million sheep to 1.7 million. The resulting famine of 1931–1934 caused some 1.5 million deaths: this represents more than 40% of the total Kazakhs population at that time. In the 1950s as well as the 1960s, large numbers of Bedouin throughout the Middle East started to leave the traditional, nomadic life to settle in the cities of the Middle East, especially as home ranges have shrunk and population levels have grown. Government policies in Egypt and Israel, oil production in Libya and the Persian Gulf, as well as a desire for improved standards of living, effectively led most Bedouin to become settled citizens of various nations, rather than stateless nomadic herders. A century ago, nomadic Bedouin still made up some 10% of the total Arab population. Today, they account for some 1% of the total. The Middle East People Groups and Their Distribution , Zeidan, David, OM-IRC, 1995
At independence in 1960, Mauritania was essentially a nomadic society. The great of the early 1970s caused massive problems in a country where 85% of its inhabitants were nomadic herders. Today only 15% remain nomads. Mauritania – Political Power in the Mid-1980s , U.S. Library of Congress Country Studies
As many as 2 million nomadic Kuchis wandered over Afghanistan in the years before the Soviet invasion, and most experts agreed that by 2000 the number had fallen dramatically, perhaps by half. A severe drought had destroyed 80% of the livestock in some areas. "Severe Drought Driving Nomads From Desert", Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2000
Niger experienced a serious food crisis in 2005 following erratic rainfall and desert locust invasions. Nomads such as the Tuareg people and Fulani, who make up about 20% of Niger's 12.9 million population, had been so badly hit by the Niger food crisis that their already fragile way of life is at risk. Niger way of life 'under threat' , BBC News, August 16, 2005 Nomads in Mali were also affected. Mali's nomads face famine BBC News, August 9, 2005 The Fulani of West Africa are the world's largest nomadic group.
Nomadic diets in Kazakhstan have not changed much over centuries. The Kazakh nomad cuisine is simple and includes meat, salads, marinated vegetables and fried and baked . Tea is served in bowls, possibly with sugar or milk. Milk and other dairy products, like cheese and yogurt, are especially important. Kumys is a drink of fermentation milk. Wrestling is a popular sport, but the nomadic people do not have much time for leisure. Horse riding is a valued skill in their culture.
Allan Hill and Sara Randall observe that western authors have looked for "romance and mystery, as well as the repository of laudable characteristics believed lost in the West, such as independence, stoicism in the face of physical adversity, and a strong sense of loyalty to family and to tribe" in nomadic pastoralist societies. Hill and Randall observe that nomadic pastoralists are stereotypically seen by the settled populace in Africa and Middle East as "aimless wanderers, immoral, promiscuous and disease-ridden" peoples. According to Hill and Randall, both of these perceptions "misrepresent the reality".
Each existing community is primarily endogamous, and subsists traditionally on a variety of commercial or service activities. Formerly, all or a majority of their members were itinerant, and this largely holds true today. Migration generally takes place within the political boundaries of a single state these days.
Each of the peripatetic communities is multilingual, it speaks one or more of the languages spoken by the local sedentary populations, and, additionally, within each group, a separate dialect or language is spoken. They are speaking languages of Indic origin and many are structured somewhat like an argot or secret language, with vocabularies drawn from various languages. There are indications that in northern Iran at least one community speaks Romani language, and some groups in Turkey also speak Romani.
In Iran, the Asheq of Azerbaijan, the Challi of Baluchistan, the Luti of Kurdistan, Kermānshāh, Īlām, and Lorestān, the Mehtar in the Mamasani district, the Sazandeh of Band-i Amir and Marv-dasht, and the Toshmal among the Bakhtyari pastoral groups worked as professional musicians. The men among the Kowli worked as tinkers, smiths, musicians, and monkey and bear handlers; they also made baskets, sieves, and brooms and dealt in donkeys. Their women made a living from peddling, begging, and fortune-telling.
The Ghorbat among the Basseri were smiths and tinkers, traded in pack animals, and made sieves, reed mats, and small wooden implements. In the Fārs region, the Qarbalband, the Kuli, and Luli were reported to work as smiths and to make baskets and sieves; they also dealt in pack animals, and their women peddled various goods among pastoral nomads. In the same region, the Changi and Luti were musicians and balladeers, and their children learned these professions from the age of 7 or 8 years.
The nomadic groups in Turkey make and sell cradles, deal in animals, and play music. The men of the sedentary groups work in towns as scavengers and hangmen; elsewhere they are fishermen, smiths, basket makers, and singers; their women dance at feasts and tell fortunes. Abdal men played music and made sieves, brooms, and wooden spoons for a living. The Tahtacı traditionally worked as lumberers; with increased sedentarization, however, they have taken to agriculture and horticulture.
Little is known for certain about the past of these communities; the history of each is almost entirely contained in their oral traditions. Although some groups—such as the Vangawala—are of Indian origin, some—like the Noristani—are most probably of local origin; still others probably migrated from adjoining areas. The Ghorbat and the Shadibaz claim to have originally come from Iran and Multan, respectively, and Tahtacı traditional accounts mention either Baghdad or Greater Khorasan as their original home. The Baluch say they were attached as a service community to the Jamshedi, after they fled Baluchistan because of feuds.
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