Pastoralité in eastern Turkey Thevenin, Michaël
Revue de géographie alpine,
09/2014, Letnik:
102, Številka:
102-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this article, we will confront the pastoral practices of the Kurdish populations in eastern Turkey, which is a very ancient culture, to the heritage process in order to try to establish a ...pastoralité, a concept emerging in the French academic circles. Pastoral practices in eastern Turkey are characterised, like high mountains (pasture) shelters, by a great diversity due to geographical, historical and social contexts, but also to the recent establishment of the Turkish nation-state and Kurdish nationalism, the most striking trait of which is the persistence of tribal allegiance. We are witnessing an impossible standardisation of these practices and a heritage institutionalisation, although one that remains hypothetical considering how the different forces in presence play out. Stuck between three settings of representation - that of pastoral communities, those of Turkish or Kurdish nationalisms and those inherent to the internal logic of the heritage institutionalisation - pastoralism in the Anatolian East could be understood as a pastoralité defined as a resisting community, the territory being itself an actor of this resistance. In this form, the pastoralité would be an identitary construction. We would like to offer another reading, closer to a tool than to an ideology, and which can encompass both the geopolitical complexity of the Turkish land and what is at stake for the French: pastoralité could firstly be a pastoral concept and a resilience as well as a transformation field.
Dans cet article, il s’agit de confronter les pratiques pastorales des populations kurdes dans l’Est de la Turquie, culture millénaire, au processus de patrimonialisation, et de tenter d’en dégager ...une pastoralité, concept émergeant dans le milieu pastoral français.Les pratiques pastorales de l’Est de la Turquie se caractérisent, à l’instar des abris d’alpage, par une grande diversité, due à la fois au contexte géographique, historique et social, mais aussi à l’arrivée récente de l’Etat-nation turc et du nationalisme kurde, dont le trait le plus marquant est la persistance de l’allégeance tribale. Nous assistons à une impossible standardisation de ces pratiques et une patrimonialisation tout autant hypothétique compte tenu du jeu à somme nulle des forces en présence. Coincé entre trois mises en représentation – celle des communautés pastorales, celles des nationalismes turcs ou kurdes, et celles des logiques internes au phénomène de patrimonialisation – le pastoralisme de l’Est anatolien dessine les contours d’une pastoralité qui pourrait s’identifier comme une communauté faisant résistance, et un territoire acteur de cette résistance. Sous cette forme, la pastoralité serait une construction identitaire. Nous proposons une autre lecture, plus proche de l’outil que de l’idéologie, capable d’englober la complexité géopolitique du terrain turc, ainsi que les enjeux français : la pastoralité serait avant tout un domaine pastoral et une résilience, et un domaine de transformation.
This book illustrates the extraordinary diversity of ‘nomad lives’ in time and space, in a tribute to Claudine Karlin, comprising 28 texts signed by economists, geographers, historians or ...sociologists.These case studies, organized into five chapters, are invitations to meet women, men and children from all over the world. The first chapter focuses on characterizing nomads and nomadism through examples ranging from the Aka pygmies, hunter-gatherers in the Central African forest, Yakut and Kazakh herders from the Central Asian steppes, or “nomads of contemporary globalization”. The second concentrates on the material culture of camps, from the Chatelperronians in the Grotte du Bison at Arcy-sur-Cure (Yonne) to the Manteks, Kurds in contemporary Iraq. The third examines the territories and circuits inherent to nomad lives, from the first hominids of East Africa to the break in the fishing way of life brought about by the arrival of Europeans in the Magellan Strait. Magdalenian mobility trends in the Roc-aux-Sorciers (Vienne), changes in funerary practices during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Central Asian steppes (Kazakhstan), the sexual division of labour among the Tchouktcha of Russian Siberia, etc.: the social relations with the living and the dead, in and outside the group, are the main themes of the last two chapters.But throughout the pages a single apparently simple but extremely complex question emerges. The book ends with an attempt to answer this question from the combined perspective of an archaeologist, an ethnologist and a sociologist. Because, in the end, what does being a nomad mean?
The ethnographic mission to Armenia carried out by the NHASA International Associated Laboratory (LIA France-Armenia) was established to observe the pastoral practices of Yezidi and Armenian herders ...in a territory affected by the 1988 earthquake, the collapse of the USSR and the period of independence, and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The political and geographical stakes prevailing in this country at the beginning of the 21st century describe a drunkenness of statehood, a culture of mobility, the persistence of the family plot among Armenian villagers, inherited from the Soviet Union, and finally, a geographical situation of double enclavement characterized by the absence of a coastline, and 80% of the border line blocked by its Turkish-speaking neighbours. In this context, we wanted to study the mobility practices of herds and men in their seasonal movements in search of grass or in the systems of guarding, but also those related to commercial routes, from collection to import and export movements.
The results show several strong points. First, In the midst of the global crisis of pastoral communities and pastoralism, Armenia offers an exception: rich high pastures that are not exploited due to historical events and cultural and geopolitical circumstances. The possibility of expanding its pastoral domain in a context where it is shrinking everywhere else is one of the strong points of our survey. While sedentarization is becoming the norm in many pastoralist communities, Armenia offers an example of herders taking the road backwards, moving towards semi-nomadism.
There are two types of pastoralism in Armenia: “nearby” and “remove”, which could be described as “patriotic”. They both respond to a territorial injunction (the protection of the integrity of the national territory) and have as their underlying aim the fixation of the population of the Armenian state in the countryside, in marginal zones and in territories occupied before the crisis of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azeris.
Large mobile pastoralism, called “remove”, could be described as “opportunism”. This pastoralism is favoured by a culture of mobility, a geographical promiscuity but also by the expansion and challenges of the meat market in the Middle East and the GCC (including the Iran-Saudi Arabia rivalry), the status quo maintained by Russia on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and at least by the climate crisis. It offers the example of informal transnational transhumance, but also of possible future relocated transhumance. This pastoralism is affected by the workings of globalisation (professional mobility and transnational multilateral issues), but also by fundamental movements. Intensive livestock farming, the marketing of live animals and the health risks associated with their transport and slaughter are increasingly criticized throughout the world. The continuation of extensive livestock farming, the construction of standard slaughterhouses and the development of the chilled meat market are preparing Armenia for this paradigm shift.
The “nearby” village pastoralism with its system of collective guarding, probably inherited from the plot system during collectivism, offers a good example of management of common property. It is a form of social resilience in the face of economic, emotional and psychological shocks due to the multiple crises of today's world. It is also a strong reminder of the centuries-old pluriactivity of the people of mountains and their tendency to have a double life. Multi-activity becomes a response as much as an injunction to ensure both the means of subsistence, but also a network that constitutes in this context a purse of opportunity.
•This article is based on a solid ethnographic work. The empirical materials are rich, clearly illustrated.•The approach of the auteur allows us to appreciate the focus on the two types of mobilities, the "remote" and the "nearby" one.•Such a typology, brings him to frame the analysis of local pastoralism in "geopolitical" terms.•Furthermore, the article benefits from an important and pertinent support of images and tables.•This is a valuable contribution both for regional studies and wider debates on pastoral peoples.
From Central Asia to the Middle East, cane-screens made of woven strips of reed, wicker or other stems are traditionally used in nomadic shelters. Those of the Iraqi Kurds, called çîẍ, are used as ...the outer walls of the tents and inside, they separate the diwanxané, an area dedicated to hospitality, from domestic places, creating de facto male and female spaces. The interior çîẍ of the Mantik tribal identity breeders of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Governorate (KRG) has the particularity of being decorated entirely with ornamental diamond-shaped motifs. This type of decoration on the interior cane-screen is new in the group, of the order of two generations. In this way, we will see that this nomad object encompasses both a physical and symbolic capacity, but also participates in opening. They participate in the maintenance of the boundaries of the Mantik breeders in a violent regional, social and geopolitical context. The particularity of the group is that the two vertical poles of pastoral attraction (wintering and summering), as well as their routes, are located in areas of political and armed tension. The Iranian and Turkish armies regularly bomb the summering zone because of the presence of Kurdish armed identity groups. In the wintering zone, the Mantik villages are located around the ceasefire line since the end of the civil war between the two rival major Kurdish parties: the KDP and the PUK. On the way to the summering mountain pastures, tensions are fraught among all the protagonists. In their techniques, visual compositions and use, cane-screens, with or without patterns, show surprising permanency for a typical object with a constant figurative corpus from nomadic culture, in a Kurdish society wounded by years of erasing anthropological locations. The terms gul and nresh gul and the repetition of the diamonds echo the composition of a garden, an allegory of paradise awaiting the believer and of carnal pleasures that contribute to a type of eroticization of the household’s daily life. The ornamental çîẍ also carries the values of hospitality, protects the family’s intimate space from the gaze of strangers, and turns the envious eye away in the evocation of Paradise. Finally, due to the operational chain, but also to the gift and reciprocal exchange of work in which they participate, the çîẍ incorporates solidarity injunctions inside the group: first between female members, and female and male members of the samebinamâl; then between the various lineages. The Mantik’s ornamental cane-screens, as diplomatic objects, belong to what the philosopher Alfred Gell calls the techniques of enchantment, a conception of art according to which it is propaganda for maintaining the status quo, a technical and aesthetic means of accepting common rules in a society. In the context of the KRG and the Mantik herders: a ritual of protection, solidarity and territorialisation where the tent is set up..
BACKGROUND: In a book dated 2002, there is a map of the Mediterranean region which identifies areas where seasonal movements of sheep flocks still take place. Turkey figures prominently, but only the ...western part of the country is mentioned. From the eastern part, the Kurdish region, nothing seems to filter through. In fact, for the past 40 years, Kurdish shepherds and their traditions seem to have been forgotten by the pastoral world and also by Kurdish elites. After the period of conflict in the 1980s and 1990s, a general ethnographic updating is due. RESULTS: Pastoralism in southeast Turkey has two aspects: village pastoralism and pastoralism with vertical and horizontal movements. The latter comes in many forms and is practiced by seminomads or nomads within complex issues of identity. CONCLUSIONS: The daily lives of these Kurdish shepherds are affected by the changes in their environment and the difficulties of the Turkish nation at whole. Today, Kurdish pastoralism is a heritage that remains to be assessed, which includes an example of enclosed nomadism in a settled context, that is able to persist notwithstanding its adaptability and malleability.
Over mountain and vale Thévenin, Michaël; Mashkour, Marjan; Amiri, Sarieh ...
2021
Book Chapter
We describe the pastoral life on the Northern foothills of the Lesser Caucasus and adjacent plains including the district of Gədəbəy and Şəmkir in Azerbaijan. Our main objective was to determine the ...types of present-day seasonal migratory movements of caprines (sheep and goats) and bovines in a remote region of western Azerbaijan. This area was traditionally involved in larger trans-national transhumant networks, before the political upheavals. We were able to observe several herding practices ranging from semi nomadism for very large herd mostly in the low lands and a rural pastoralism practised by the inhabitants of mountainous zones orchestrated by the limitations and regulation of the soviet and post-soviet era for land-use and production of domesticate herd. The idea behind this work that regrouped an ethnologist and three archaeozoologists was to create a modern isotopic baseline on bioarchaeological material originating from a selection of animals from various pastoral contexts. This will be useful for interpretation of prehistoric archaeozoological material originating from the Caucasus.
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