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 decline under the Pahlavi Shahs. The book is intended as a contribution to three different debates. The first concerns the riddle of Shahsevan origins, while another considers how far changes in tribal social and political formations are a function of relations with states. The third discusses how different constructions of the identity of a particular people determine their view of the past. In this way, the book promises not only to make a major contribution to the history and anthropology of the Middle East and Central Asia, but also to theoretical debates in both disciplines.

The classic images of Iranian nomads in circulation today and in years past suggest that Western awareness of nomadism is a phenomenon of considerable antiquity. Though nomadism has certainly been a key feature of Iranian history, it has not been in the way most modern archaeologists have envisaged it. Nomadism in Iran recasts our understanding of this "timeless" tradition. Far from constituting a natural adaptation on the Iranian Plateau, nomadism is a comparatively late introduction, which can only be understood within the context of certain political circumstances. Since the early Holocene, most, if not all, agricultural communities in Iran had kept herds of sheep and goat, but the communities themselves were sedentary: only a few of their members were required to move with the herds seasonally. Though the arrival of Iranian speaking groups, attested in written sources beginning in the time of Herodutus, began to change the demography of the plateau, it wasn't until later in the eleventh century that an influx of Turkic speaking Oghuz nomadic groups-"true" nomads of the steppe-began the modification of the demography of the Iranian Plateau that accelerated with the Mongol conquest. The massive, unprecedented violence of this invasion effected the widespread distribution of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic groups across Iran. Thus, what has been interpreted in the past as an enduring pattern of nomadic land use is, by archaeological standards, very recent. Iran's demographic profile since the eleventh century AD, and more particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth century, has been used by some scholars as a proxy for ancient social organization. Nomadism in Iran argues that this modernist perspective distorts the historical reality of the land. Assembling a wealth of material in several languages and disciplines, Nomadism in Iran will be invaluable to archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran traces the history of the Bakhtiyari tribal confederacy of the Zagros Mountains through momentous times that saw the opening of their territory to the outside world. As the Qajar dynasty sought to integrate the peoples on its margins into the state, the British Empire made commercial inroads into the once inaccessible mountains on the frontier between Iran and Iraq. The distance between the state and the tribes was narrowed through imperial projects that included the building of a road through the mountains, the gathering of geographical and ethnographic information, and the exploration for oil, which culminated during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. These modern projects assimilated autonomous pastoral nomadic tribes on the peripheries of Qajar Iran into a wider imperial territory and the world economy. Tribal subjects did not remain passive amidst these changes in environment and society, however, and projects of empire in the hinterlands of Iran were always mediated through encounters, accommodation, and engagement with the tribes. In contrast to the range of literature on the urban classes and political center in Qajar Iran, Arash Khazeni adopts a view from the Bakhtiyari tents on the periphery. Drawing upon Persian chronicles, tribal histories, and archival sources from London, Tehran, and Isfahan, this book opens new ground by approaching nineteenth-century Iran from its edge and placing the tribal periphery at the heart of a tale about empire and assimilation in the modern Middle East.

Examining the rapid transition in Iran from a modernizing, westernizing, secularizing monarchy (1941-79) to a hard-line, conservative, clergy-run Islamic republic (1979-), this book focuses on the ways this process has impacted the Qashqa’i—a rural, nomadic, tribally organized, Turkish-speaking, ethnic minority of a million and a half people who are dispersed across the southern Zagros Mountains. Analysing the relationship between the tribal polity and each of the two regimes, the book goes on to explain the resilience of the people’s tribal organizations, kinship networks, and politicized ethnolinguistic identities to demonstrate how these structures and ideologies offered the Qashqa’i a way to confront the pressures emanating from the two central governments. Existing scholarly works on politics in Iran rarely consider Iranian society outside the capital of Tehran and beyond the reach of the details of national politics. Local-level studies on Iran—accounts of the ways people actually lived—are now rare, especially after the revolution. Based on long-term anthropological research, Nomads in Postrevolutionary Iran provides a unique insight into how national-level issues relate to the local level and will be of interest to scholars and researchers in Anthropolgy, Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.

Although nomadic peoples are scattered worldwide and have highly heterogeneous lifestyles, they face similar threats to their mobile livelihood and survival. Commonly, nomadic peoples are facing pressure from the predominant sedentary world over mobility, land rights, water resources, access to natural resources, and migration routes. Adding to these traditional problems, rapid growth in the extractive industry and the need for the exploitation of the natural resources are putting new strains on nomadic lifestyles. This book provides an innovative rights-based approach to the issue of nomadism looking at issues including discrimination, persecution, freedom of movement, land rights, cultural and political rights, and effective management of natural resources. Jeremie Gilbert analyses the extent to which human rights law is able to provide protection for nomadic peoples to perpetuate their own way of life and culture. The book questions whether the current human rights regime is able to protect nomadic peoples, and highlights the lacuna that currently exists in international human rights law in relation to nomadic peoples. It goes on to propose avenues for the development of specific rights for nomadic peoples, offering a new reading on freedom of movement, land rights and development in the context of nomadism.

A country marked by controversy, Iran’s social, cultural and political dynamics are too often reduced to a few misleading clichés. Islamism is widely considered to shape all social relations in Iranian society and, while Iranian society is indeed Islamic, this term’s multiple meanings in everyday life and practices go far beyond the naïve and monolithic idea we are used to. The Thousand and One Borders of Iran analyses travel as a social practice, exploring how diasporas, margins and so-called peripheries are central in the construction of a national identity and thus revealing the complexities of Iranian history and society. Written by a leading anthropologist, it draws upon fieldwork carried out in Iran and Iranian migrant communities across Dubai, Tokyo and Los Angeles from 1998 to 2015. While casting new perspectives on the place of transnational relations in an increasingly globalized world, this work also sheds new light on the evolution of Iranian society, countering the explanation furnished by nationalist ideology that has been reproduced by the Islamic Republic itself. Its unique approach to the analysis of Iranian society through the theme of travel and borders considers the links and even the quarrels between the centre of Iranian society and the periphery, and the foreign elements that have contributed to society’s development. Travel is key to these interactions and, following the travels of merchants and workers, students or the faithful, elected officials and experts, or exiles and refugees, this book offers an anthropological study of travel that re-thinks Iranian history and national identity. This book would be of interest to students and scholars of Iranian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology.

This book examines the historiography of the Middle East and the consequent silences or omissions. It provides a collection of important histories from the modern era, particularly relating to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, to give a fuller account of the society, culture and politics of the period.

The first full-length study to examine the significance of the critical but neglected Iranian organization and ministry, Reconstruction Jihad.

During recent years, attempts have been made to move beyond the Eurocentric perspective that characterized the social sciences, especially anthropology, for over 150 years. A debate on the “anthropology of anthropology” was needed, one that would consider other forms of knowledge, modalities of writing, and political and intellectual practices. This volume undertakes that challenge: it is the result of discussions held at the first organized encounter between Iranian, American, and European anthropologists since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is considered an important first step in overcoming the dichotomy between “peripheral anthropologies” versus “central anthropologies.” The contributors examine, from a critical perspective, the historical, cultural, and political field in which anthropological research emerged in Iran at the beginning of the twentieth century and in which it continues to develop today.

A major new account of the Eurasian borderlands as 'shatter zones' which have generated some of the world's most significant conflicts.