The Nomadic Alternative – Page 256

which scar from infancy the lives of those committed. But people, who acquire their scars so early in life, evolve compensations to mask them. The traumatized society has learned to live with its defects, but its institutions are merely a maquillage to conceal the compounded scars of childhood. The bonded or sane society requires, for a start, that the mother protects and feeds her child from her breast for the first three years of its life. Any alteration to this pattern will force it to find compensations, however imperceptible, elsewhere.

Ib'n Khaldun said that nomads were closer to the 'first state' than settlers. So let us begin by trying to understand how nomadism will condition the future life of the child. First, the perpetual migration will satisfy its natural craving for movement, will detach him from settlement and engender in him a restlessness that seems innate. But to satisfy her husband's pretensions to virility, the nomad mother may - and often does - wish to conceive again shortly after birth.* The question of food presents no problem since milk from domesticated animals is always on tap to provide a plentiful source of protein. Nutritionally she can afford to wean her child early or at least have no anxiety that the milk supply will dry up.

Second, she does not have to carry the child on her shoulders. Nomads have pack animals. So a mother can carry two small children with her at once. Soon she can strap the elder onto a separate beast of burden. As Robert Ekvall writes of the high pasturage nomads of Tibet,

For the first few months the infant spends much of its time within the blouse of its mother's sheepskin coat, bare skin next to bare skin, and with access to her breasts whenever he is hungry. But the mother soon needs to be free of her burden, and parcels him up on a pitching basket on the wayward yak. The moment he can hold up for a day on his own he sits in the saddle beside his mother - and soon acquires a tight miniature saddle of his own.

*Note: We recall Barth's figure of 4.25 children for every nomad mother among the Basseri as opposed to Mrs. Marshall's 2.41 for the 'Kung Bushmen with no imbalance between the sexes. See: Lorna Marshall, 'Kung Bushman Bands in "Africa"', p. [illegible].