Changing Nomads in a Changing World - Softcover

Ginat, Joseph; Khazanov, Anatoly M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845191994 ISBN 13: 9781845191993

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2014

Synopsis

This book contains a chapter entitled Great Scholar, Great Man, Great Friend (Remembering Ernest Gellner), brings together leading anthropologists who discuss how pastralists are coping and changing as the societies they inhabit change at an unprecedented pace. The different issues pertaining to the different geographic areas covered are united by a general theme: socioeconomic and cultural changes in contemporary pastoralist societies and groups. These changes are far from being spontaneous. They result from the painful adaptation of the mobile and extensive pastoralists to the modern (some scholars would argue already postmodern) world, in which pastoralists occupy only a marginal and inferior economic and sicial position. This is true even with regard to Middle eastern countries, although in some of them a social prestige connected with pastoralism. Discussion focuses on the worldwide deterioration of the sicio-political and economic standing of the pastoralist, the historical factors of colonization/de-colonization, and how modernizing sedetary society (with its technological inventions, modern infrastructure, and national requirements of taxation and education) impacts on change in nomadic societies.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph Ginat was an Israeli author and anthropologist. He was the chairman of the Jewish-Arab Center at Haifa University, the director of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, and chairman of the Committee for Relations with Arab and Muslim Countries. He is the author and editor of numerous works on Arab affairs. Anatoly M. Khazanov is an anthropologist and a historian. He is the Ernst Gellner professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of numerous books, including Nomads and the Outside World.

Review:

The contributors discuss how pastoralists deal with and are themselves transformed by the unprecedented changes taking place in the societies they inhabit. Also included is a tribute by Khazanov to the anthropologist Ernest Gellner. Choice

About this edition

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1845191994
• ISBN 13: 9781845191993
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258