Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 132

Nomadic pastoralism forms a basis for colourful and distinctive societies found in widely separated niches around the world: the Evenki reindeer herders of Siberia, the Sámi of Finland, Basque herders of northern Spain, the Kurds of northern Iraq, the Phala of Tibet, Turkana and other groups in East Africa and the Herero of Botswana and Namibia are examples discussed in this book. Such populations tend to be relatively well bounded and small, ideal laboratories for seeing the diversity of patterns of demography, disease, and genetic distinctiveness.

The difficulty, of course, is that each society is enormously complex and it is difficult to isolate the topics of a single paper. Michael Little’s paper ‘Human biology, health and ecology of nomadic Turkana pastoralists’ is a striking example. The paper covers climate, ecology, food production, diet and nutrition, growth, health, activity, and morbidity and causes of death – all in thirty pages. Clearly the material requires a monograph for full presentation.

Similarly William Irons’ paper, on Yomut family organization and demography, integrates ethnography, economic studies and a brief but clear review of the history of the Turkoman, focusing his understanding of all these aspects of the society on the status of women and the details of their lives as they contribute to mortality rates. The article by E. Kobyliansky and I. Hershkovitz on ‘History, demography, marital patterns and immigration rate in south Sinai bedouins’ is an interesting account of the intersection of social structure and demography within an isolated set of small intermarrying populations. Goldstein and Beall’s article on Tibetan nomadic pastoralism also makes good use of ethnographic materials. In general, the links between demography and social structure are well illustrated in this collection of essays. history review

Some of the other essays are on a totally different level of abstraction: Crawford et al. shift from lists of genetic alleles in very small groups to worldwide genetic distance analyses. Calderon uses current genetic analysis as an entry to inferential population history of the Basques. In both cases those particular local facts are used to produce very high level generalizations while many other known aspects of the populations are ignored.

Other articles focus more narrowly on health issues and are hard to integrate into a pattern. It is interesting to see that Sámi herders are approaching the health standards of the general Finnish population without giving up their distinctive way of life. Leonard and colleagues report very detailed data on food consumption of Evenki herders of Siberia, but do not expand the discussion into their overall health status, so that the importance of diet is not clear. Pennington finds that children in poor Herero households are taller, heavier and apparently better fed than those from cattle-rich households. Overall, the Herero children are no taller or fatter than the neighbouring !Kung hunter-gatherer children under age ten, although Herero adults are much taller than !Kung, and often obese. The findings are unexpected and unexplained.

The editors start the volume with a quote from Spooner (p.2): ‘there are no features of cultural or social organization common to all nomads or even that occur exclusively among nomads’. Each of the societies included in this book could usefully support a whole volume on their population and health: it overloads this volume to try to present enough description to make comparisons worthwhile. Hence, this volume of high-quality papers will be of most interest and reward to the specialists in nomadic pastoral societies who already have a lot of factual knowledge about these societies.