Why Iran's nomads are fading away
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
That shift's been happening all over and I guess the trend continues - Here, 'urban maori' losing touch with their whakapapa is an challenging cultural issue.
These days, kids still have to go to school, but adults spend tremendous amount of time trying to screw the system, do petty crime and theft and avoid contributing anyhow to society, just taking social benefits. If they would spend the same amount of energy for some sort of job, they could be well off. Unemployment for them is 90+%.
No politician dares to tackle this in past 20 years. Simply because you can't fix it in 4 years, and no politician cares beyond that. EU tried, and failed. Free equipped apartments just given with no strings attached were completely destroyed in 1-2 years. Why on earth would somebody totally destroy the only place they live in?
I feel sorry for them, growing up in that environment sets you up for same lifestyle, parents being violent drug addicts, frequent inbreeding and family rapes. I wouldn't end up much better in that environment for sure. But I just don't see any democratic way out of that.
One example out of many [1]
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=lunik+9&source=lnms&tbm=is...
I admit a certain amount of wistful nostalgia, but I personally don't consider nostalgia to be the same thing as sadness. Nostalgia is most often a delusion, not a genuine recollection of the good old days.
In the UK the industrial revolution and agricultural mechanisation caused a huge migration from the countryside to the cities. Today, you can still see plenty of ruins of old settlements, cottages, churches, etc. which were abandoned and left to decay. In many parts of Scotland, you can walk to shielings, which were housing for herdsmen during the summer months. They would migrate there with their cattle and stay up in the hills, and migrate back down during winter when it was too inhospitable. They would have had a fairly boring and miserable existence. Living in relative isolation with no company but the animals, all food having to be brought in, and then long walks to the towns and cities to sell them. Today, cattle are kept in fields, fed with grass and cattle feed, and moved around in lorries. While there's a certain romanticism for the migratory lifestyle, and it might even be novel and interesting for a short while, I don't think the drudgery in the long term is something I could tolerate.
As Terence McKenna put it:
“All culture is being destroyed, all culture is being sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse”
Change is life! World is moving forward! And you are sad about primitive cultures adapting, progressing and trying to catch up. Don't be ridiculous.
Not from the perspective of the starving, abused people that choose a better life, no longer at the mercy of uncaring mother nature.
(cue someone coming in here pointing out how their privacy and nature walks far exceed anything they have in the Bay Area, and how natural living is the highest goal of all who live and breathe)
I respect these nomads, and wish them well.
I was an American military wife for a couple of decades. That is a form of modern nomad and the life is vastly different from that of most civilians, so different that it's hard to quantify and comprehend for those doing it, much less try to explain it to others.
Enlisted personnel don't have high salaries, but they have a package of rights and benefits, everything from housing to medical to free legal help and access to swimming pools and their own stores where no tax is charged. As a wife, I had those rights too in a way you don't see with civilian jobs and it's really hard to explain. When I got divorced, my sister made some comment about me being financially dependent on my ex and how vulnerable I was and what a fool I was. But it wasn't like that and she simply didn't understand, even though our father had also been career military. My package of rights made my situation fundamentally different from her experience of divorce. If my ex hadn't paid me, I would have written his commander and his pay would have been garnished. I would have been paid first, before him.
Nomads and settled peoples have a long history of friction. This remains true of the American military. If you are a military member or dependent, you can cash a check at any PX/BX because you probably have a bank in another state and locals don't want to cash your check. Spouses have high rates of unemployment, in part because locals don't want to hire them, in part because the benefits are so good that you can afford to live on one income.
Re women's rights and different cultures:
From what I have read, some tribal peoples are more egalitarian when it comes to sex. In a lot of settled cultures with more material wealth, female chastity and fidelity is emphasized because wealth is handed from father to son and men can't be certain it is their child the way women can be. Cultures that are matrilineal with less material wealth sometimes have traditions that ensure that children will be provided for in a way that makes paternity matter a lot less. In such cultures, women sometimes have sexual freedom of a sort that would be deemed shocking and scandalous to many settled peoples.
I read that there was a Black man that accompanied Lewis and Clark and all the Native women wanted to sleep with him because they wanted a Black baby. This is behavior that would be unfathomable for most White women of that era. You would be disowned, which was a potential death sentence for you and your child.
The article indicates the nomadic women don't inherit. But it also indicates they typically ride horses, own firearms and it says their faces are brown from the sun. It also shows pictures of their faces.
Iran is a Muslim country where women are expected to be veiled. This is not just a nuisance. Pakistan has high rates of vitamin D deficiency among girls because of the degree to which women are expected to be covered.
National Geographic is a Western publication. It doesn't mention this detail, at least not that I noticed. The author of the article probably thought nothing of the unveiled faces of the nomadic women because unveiled faces are the norm in Western countries. But women in Iran are still protesting the law requiring that they wear the veil. So it is something that women experience as very burdensome and restricting.
An awful lot of things that are normal for your own culture aren't things you think of as rights and you may not really think too much about the consequences of losing that option. You may not think it matters until it is irrevocably gone and has been gone long enough to see some of the consequences that weren't apparent when you chose to leave X thing for Y thing.
The first week, month or year of wearing a veil may not seem like a big deal as the price you pay for participating in this other culture. It may not seem like a big deal until you are diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency and realize you can't readily fix it because you are required by law to cover everything, including your face.
I'm not suggesting that the nomadic women have it better than other Iranian women and will regret leaving this way of life behind. I'm only suggesting it is likely more complicated than they appreciate at first blush, and something total outsiders reading HN likely can't begin to fathom. Most of us just don't know enough about either of the cultures in question.
They say women should wear head scarves, yes, but not a veil that covers their faces.
In fact, if you go to their capital city many of the women have just as much of their head covered as the nomadic women you saw in these pictures. (Note, in other, more religious areas women will tend to cover all of their hair, but that's the only real difference)
https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-relationship-women...
I can't manage to copy and paste the text, but a portion of it indicates that it is still state law, though it is enforced less strictly than it once was and not applied to foreign women, and women still protest it.
Here in Europe, my Iranian wife with her natural darker skin color has indeed a Vitamin D deficit albeit wearing western clothes: the long, dark, cold winters that are mostly spent inside houses let her body not produce enough Vitamin D, so she takes supplements.
Migrations and lifestyle changes will be even more drastic in the decades to come.