The Nomadic Alternative – Page 75

The Persian New Year remembers the victory of Ahura Mazda, the representative of light and movement, over Ahriman, the apostle of darkness and despair. In Greece St. George's day falls at the same time and heralds the start of transhumance when the grassy mountain uplands lure the shepherds from their villages. And in the merry-go-rounds, the hobby-horse parades and spring routs the country folk of Europe recovered a fragment of the ecstasy of riding to the mountains. But peasant villagers react anxiously to the mass movements of men and horses, and this will account for the ancient Greek ambivalence towards the centaurs, and why men dressed in horse costume would run through the peasant villages of Czechoslovakia to frighten the children. In India the Vedic priests reconstituted the spring excursion with the Soma festival and its visionary 'flights' to the Other World.

The Norwegian anthropologist, Frederik Barth, who has written with great sympathy and understanding of nomad migrations, records that the Basseri tribe, who migrate annually past Persepolis, were forcibly settled in the 'thirties when the Shah decided to rid himself of unruly tribesmen. But during the war the central administration collapsed and the Basseri were again free to journey to the mountains about three hundred miles to the north. Free they were, but they had no animals. Their fine-fleeced sheep had died of starvation or suffocated on the southern plains. Most families lacked livestock; yet they migrated with nothing. They became nomads again, that is to say, they became human again. "... the supreme value to them", Barth writes, "lay in the freedom to migrate, not in the circumstances that make it economically viable."

The word 'nomad' lies open to malicious misinterpretation. 'Nomos' is the Greek for 'pasture', and a nomad is a wandering pasture pastoralist.