I am grateful to those audiences who have, over the last few years, heard me out on various points raised in this essay and given me of their wisdom: Harvard University's Committee on Inner Asian Studies, the History Department of the University of California at Berkeley, the American Oriental Society, and the American Historical Association. My wife Molly has given me unstinting and affectionate assistance, and my debt to her is as pleasant to acknowledge as it is immense. I would also like to thank friends who read this paper and improved it with their comments: John Masson Smith, Jr., Clive Foss, Joseph Fletcher, Jonathan Marwil, Norman Itzkowitz, John Fine, John Eadie, Jeffrey Bale, and Walter Goffart. I am especially indebted to E. A. Thompson for his kind comments. I have also benefited from conversations with three patient scholars: Geoff Eley, William Schorger, and William Irons. I alone am responsible for the errors which they could not persuade me to recant. I wrote this essay to honor those closest to me in lineage and shared interests: may it be for a blessing on my father, Frank Lindner, and the memory of my mother, Clare Kalman Lindner.

¹ Part of a colloquy between Mrs. Morris, a Hupa, and Princess Brantner, President, Yurok Tribal Association, Inc. Quoted by Fried, Morton, The Notion of Tribe (Menlo Park, California, 1975), 76, from a 1955 California Indian claim hearing.Google Scholar

² The destruction of nomads' political power lessened their reliance on horses. Barth, Fredrik, Nomads of South Persia (Oslo, 1961), 6, 13Google Scholar. In general, see Barth, Fredrik, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Oslo, 1969), 36.Google Scholar

³ For a comparison of airplanes with armored cars as weapons against nomads, see Glubb, John Bagot, The Story of the Arab Legion (London, 1948), 62–64, 75Google Scholar; idem, War in the Desert (London, 1960), 69–70, 83–87, 143–44, 146–47, 202–3, 234–35, 240–42Google Scholar; Sluglett, Peter, Britain in Iraq: 1914–1932 (London, 1976), 262–70Google Scholar. For the impact of centralized government in Iran on the tribes, see Beck, Lois G., “Herd Owners and Hired Shepherds: The Qashqa'i of Iran,” Ethnology, 19:3 (1980), 335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ For part of the material in the next few paragraphs, I would like to thank Jeffrey Bale, whose probing questions and comments in a tutorial sharpened my thought about kinship structures.

⁵ The classic description of the conical clan is by Kirchhoff, Paul, “The Principles of Clanship in Human Society,” Davidson Journal of Anthropology, 1:1 (1955), 5–10Google Scholar (originally written in the 1930s); also see Sahlins, Marshall D., Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968), 24–25, 49–50.Google Scholar

⁶ Barth, , Nomads, 84, quotes the Basseri description of the selection process: “The horse feels the rider's thigh.”Google Scholar

⁷ The segmentary lineage system is blessed with a vast and interesting literature. The classic exposition is by Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), 142–50Google Scholar. Also, Middleton, John and Tait, David, cds., Tribes without Rulers (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Smith, M. G., “Segmentary Lineage Systems,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 86:2 (1956), 39–80Google Scholar; Sahlins, Marshall D., “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist, 63:2 (1961), 322–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ Peters, Emrys, “The Proliferation of Segments in the Lineage of the Bedouin of Cyrenaica,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 90:1 (1960), 29–53Google Scholar; idem, “Some Structural Aspects of the Feud among the Camel-Herding Bedouin of Cyrenaica,” Africa, 37:3 (1967), 261–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; more recently, see Meeker, Michael E., Literature and Violence in North Arabia (Cambridge, 1979), 183–92.Google Scholar

⁹ Salzman, Philip Carl, “Does Complementary Opposition Exist?” American Anthropologist, 80:1 (1978), 53–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Ideology and Change in Middle Eastern Tribal Societies,” Man, 13:4 (1978), 618–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Salzman, , “Complementary Opposition,” 67.Google Scholar

¹¹ Salzman, , “Ideology and Change,” 629–30Google Scholar. The notion of an ideology “in reserve” is important to Salzman, who uses it to develop an interesting theory of the sedentarization of nomads. See his introduction to When Nomads Settle, Salzman, Philip Carl, ed. (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

¹² Tribal place-names have occupied the attention of Professor Faruk Siimer for many years. See his most recent research, Safevi Devletinin Kuruluşu ve Gelişmesinde Anadolu Türklerinin Rolū (Ankara, 1976).Google Scholar

¹³ For example, cadasters of central Anatolian nomads dating from the first quarter of the sixteenth century reveal divergent political and economic loyalties among groups sharing the same name. I describe this evidence in a forthcoming study of nomadism in medieval Anatolia.

¹⁴ Smith, John Masson Jr., “Mongol Manpower and Persian Population,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 18:3 (1975), 271–99. As for Salzman's own analysis of the role of segmentary lineages among territorially unstable groups (the basis for his defense of the theory), in my view, his groups are actually rather stable. While it is true that these tribesmen may alter their routes and pastures more freely than can Peters's Bedouin, their total range and selection of resources are limited by state power. They are therefore not comparable to the tribes of medieval Eurasia.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ The best treatise on genealogies “as present politics” is Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar; also see Lancaster, William, The Rwala Bedouin Today (Cambridge, 1981), 34–35Google Scholar; Barth, , Nomads, 55–56Google Scholar; Irons, William, The Yomul Turkmen (Ann Arbor, 1975), 44Google Scholar; Pehrson, Robert N., The Social Organization of the Marri Baluch (Chicago, 1966), 34Google Scholar; Humphrey, Caroline, “The uses of Genealogy: A Historical Study of the Nomadic and Sedentarised Buryat,” in Pastoral Production and Society (Cambridge, 1979), 235–60Google Scholar; Digard, Jean-Pierre, “Histoire et anthropologic des sociétés nomades: la cas d'une tribu d'Iran,” Annates, 28:6 (1973), 1427Google Scholar; Marx, Emanuel, “The Tribe as a Unit of Subsistence,” American Anthropologist, 79:2 (1977), 353CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meeker, , Literature and Violence, 189.Google Scholar

¹⁶ For the manipulation of genealogies, see Lonsdale, J., “When Did the Gusii (or Any Other Group) Become a Tribe?” Kenya Historical Review, 5:1 (1977), 123–33Google Scholar; Humphrey, , “Uses of Genealogy,” is an excellent study of the differing conditions underlying the “remembering of ancestors” as well as “structural amnesia.”Google Scholar

¹⁷ See the detailed discussion of a Kalat example in Swidler, Nina, “The Political Context of Brahui Sedentarization,” Ethnology, 12:3 (1973), 304–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an Iranian example, Bradburd, Daniel, “Never Give a Shepherd an Even Break: Class and Labor among the Komachi,” American Ethnologist, 7:4 (1980), 604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Wittek, Paul, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1938), 7–13.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The very title of an Ottoman in Turkish, Osmanh, consisted of the name of the first chief plus a tribal suffix. Tribal names compounded in this manner are common in the cadasters of Anatolian nomads.

²⁰ Barth, , Nomads, 132Google Scholar; Pehrson, , Social Organization, 20.Google Scholar

²¹ Pehrson, , Social Organization, 19.Google Scholar

²² For the most recent summary of the evidence that there were few, if any, barriers to outsiders joining a tribe, see Rada, and Dyson-Hudson, Neville, “Nomadic Pastoralism,” Annual Review of Anthropology: 1980, 48Google Scholar. For a detailed example, see Barth, , “Pathan Identity and Its Maintenance,” in Ethnic Groups, Barth, , ed., 124–25.Google Scholar

²³ Ehmann, Dieter, Bahtiyaren, Persische Bergnomaden im Wandel der Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1975), 58.Google Scholar

²⁴ Bates, Daniel G., Nomads and Farmers (Ann Arbor, 1973).Google Scholar

²⁵ Pehrson, , Social Organization, 3.Google Scholar

²⁵ For what follows I am indebted to the insights of Irons, William, “Variation in Political Stratification among the Yomut Turkmen,” Anthropological Quarterly, 44:3 (1971), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Political Stratification among Pastoral Nomads,” in Pastoral Production, 361–74Google Scholar; see also the parallel position of Burnham, Philip, “Spatial Mobility and Political Centralization in Pastoral Societies,” in Pastoral Production, 349–60Google Scholar, as well as Fried, , Notion of Tribe. There are points of difference, some of them major, separating the views of these authors from each other and from my own, but our approaches seem to me similar.Google Scholar

²⁷ Since the tribe comes into being as a result of such external prodding, which presumably forces people to choose sides, Fried, (Notion of Tribe, 99–106), considers tribes as “secondary phenomena.” In my view, Fried's discussion can be extended further back in time than the age of European expansion; were Fried to do so, I suspect he might reconsider his doubts (pp. 60–65) concerning the tribe as a political group.Google Scholar

²⁸ Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford, 1949), ivGoogle Scholar. In general, see Sahlins, , Tribesmen, 17, 38, 55Google Scholar; Meeker, , Literature and Violence, 190Google Scholar; Marx, , “Tribe as a Unit of Subsistence,” 349.Google Scholar

²⁹ The Chinese/Mongol variant on this story is best told in the many stimulating studies of Owen Lattimore, especially his Mongol Journeys (New York, 1941)Google Scholar, and the classic Inner Asian Frontiers of China, 2d ed. (New York, 1951).Google Scholar

³⁰ Burnham, , “Spatial Mobility,” 350.Google Scholar

³¹ Marx, Emanuel, “The Ecology and Politics of Pastoral Nomadism in the Middle East,” in The Nomadic Alternative, Weissleder, Wolfgang, ed. (Chicago, 1977), 60.Google Scholar

³² Irons, , “Political Stratification,” 362Google Scholar; see also Lattimore's, OwenStudies in Frontier History (London, 1962), 476.Google Scholar

³³ Irons, , “Variation in Stratification,” 152–54Google Scholar; Irons, , “Political Stratification,” 366Google Scholar; Spooner, Brian, The Cultural Ecology of Pastoral Nomads (Reading, Massachusetts, 1973), 35Google Scholar. Also see Salzman, Philip Carl, “Tribal Chiefs as Middlemen: The Politics of Encapsulation in the Middle East,” Anthropological Quarterly, 47:2 (1974), 203–10, although I do not believe that the historical evidence supports all of Salzman's contentions. The Ottomans, for example, preferred administering the affairs of a tribe through mid-level leaders rather than through the chief in order to undercut his authority, and thus to weaken and divide the tribe's political structure. The tribes of medieval Anatolia, however, were a greater military threat than are the tribes of today, and Salzman is of course describing the ethnographic present.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ This is not a thinly veiled “great man” theory of history. Such theories ring hollow because they affect to explain events in an environment of sizeable bureaucracies, the sluggish and countervailing forces of a host of social and economic institutions, and a population with multiple and varied interests. The tribe and its chief represent an adaptation to life in environments where a few, well-defined needs are shared. Once a tribe came to have competing or complex interests, the position of the chief became something different, as we shall see: although the founder of the Ottomans was a tribal chief, his grandson was no longer first among equals but a sultan far above his subjects.

³⁵ No literary source discusses pastoralism among the Huns in Europe: Maenchen-Halfen, Otto, The World of the Huns (Berkeley, 1973), 171Google Scholar. I have tried to demonstrate, in a companion essay entitled “Nomadism, Horses, and Huns,” Past and Present, no. 92 (1981), 3–19, that crossing the Carpathians resulted in a severe decline in the amount of pasture, and thus the number of horses, available to the Huns—and also, incidentally, to the Avars, Magyars, and Mongols.Google Scholar

³⁶ Thompson, E. A., A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948), 57.Google Scholar

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³⁸ Thompson, , History of Attila, 128.Google Scholar

³⁹ For the following calculations I am indebted to my mentor, John Masson Smith, Jr., who first pointed out their possibility to me.

⁴⁰ Jones, A. H. M., The Roman Economy (Oxford, 1974), 207.Google Scholar

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⁴³ For similar stipends paid to the Avars, see Wiita, John E., “The Ethnika in Byzantine Military Treatises” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1977), 131–32.Google Scholar

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⁴⁵ Apollinaris, Sidonius, Carmina VII. 319–25Google Scholar; see the comments of Thompson, , History of Atilla, 136.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Anon. Valesianus 8.38: “Orestes Pannonius qui eo tempore quando Atlila adltaliam venit se illi iunxit et eius notarius factus fuerat.” In the context of Attila's organization, the words se illi iunxit can only mean that Orestes joined the tribe.

⁴⁷ Priscus, frag. 8, Historici Graeci Minores, I, 305 (hereafter cited as HGM). Whether the detail in the dialogue between Priscus and this (Greek) Hun about Roman justice is fabricated or not does not affect my argument here.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Maenchen-Helfen, , World of the Huns, 117.Google Scholar

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⁵¹ I discuss this encounter in “Nomadism, Horses, and Huns.”

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⁵⁶ These processes are discussed in greater detail by Joseph Fletcher in a series of forthcoming essays on “bloody tanistry.” I am indebted to him for kindly showing me drafts of these papers.

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⁵⁸ A more detailed exposition of the material in the following paragraphs is contained in my forthcoming study of medieval Anatolian nomadism.

⁵⁹ In fact, the career of the general Alexius Philanthropenus in Asia Minor is very much that of a successful tribal chief—and perhaps that is how his Turkish supporters treated him. On this fascinating episode, see Laiou, Angeliki E., Constantinople and the Latins: The Foreign Policy of Andronicus II, 1282–1326 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972), 80–82Google Scholar; Arnakis, George G., Hoi Protoi Othomanoi (Athens, 1947), 42–43Google Scholar; Laiou, Angeliki E., “Some Observations on Alexios Philanthropenos and Maximos Planoudes,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 4 (1978), 89–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schreiner, Peter, “Zur Geschichte Philadelpheias im 14. Jahrhundert (1293–1390),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 35:2 (1969), 378–83.Google Scholar

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