Richard Thurnwald, Nomads

Richard Thurnwald’s “Nomads,” an encyclopedia article originally published in 1933 and republished in the supplied 1937 version, explains mobile ways of life through the relationship between subsistence, environment, technology, and social organization. Its central distinction is between patterned movement and aimless wandering: nomads shift residence within an economically intelligible geography. The article proceeds from hunting and collecting through pastoralism to agricultural mobility, then examines how encounters between mobile and settled populations transform property, gender relations, political authority, and social hierarchy.

It does not consist in unrestricted and undirected wandering but is focused around temporary centers of operation, the stability of which is dependent upon the food supply available and the state of technical advance, which determines the extent to which the resources can be utilized.

This definition makes mobility relational rather than simply geographical. The duration of settlement depends both on available resources and on the means of exploiting them. Thurnwald’s examples of hunting and collecting peoples show camps expanding, dispersing, and relocating with seasonal abundance, animal migration, and access to water. Small related bands can assemble for economic or ceremonial purposes without maintaining a permanent concentration of population. Movement therefore does not imply the absence of social continuity: recurring affiliations and territorial rights organize a shifting residential pattern.

Thurnwald connects these arrangements to the difficulty of accumulating wealth. Hunting and collecting require extensive territories, offer irregular supplies, and make stored surpluses difficult to maintain through repeated relocation. He characterizes political life as predominantly democratic, with leadership vested in family heads, while acknowledging family privileges over customary hunting grounds. His account also places mobility within unequal relations between peoples: hunting groups retreat into remote regions under pressure from larger, better-equipped populations. Nomadism is thus shaped by displacement as well as subsistence, and some hunting peoples subsequently adopt pastoralism.

Pastoralism introduces a crucial difference: animals constitute movable wealth. Although herders travel to obtain pasture, their movements can involve systematic returns to grounds claimed as tribal property. Examples ranging from Bedouins to central Asian cattle breeders and Arabian sheep and goat herders establish variation in the distances travelled and the persistence of village connections.

Pastoral nomads retain their herds as wealth, while they live on milk or on some of the young animals or on food derived through exchange.

The herd combines a continuing resource with an accumulated possession. Pastoral mobility consequently permits greater economic security and wealth accumulation than Thurnwald attributes to hunting, although it still limits the accumulation of handicraft products. He describes relatively equal gender status within “homogeneous clans,” linking it to a strict division of labour, and presents councils of elders as characteristic political institutions. These are qualified claims within his typology: relations with other peoples can change both occupations and authority. Cattle lending and pawning, foster-parent arrangements, gatherings, and intermarriage create connections through which knowledge and cultural practices circulate. Conversely, famine and extensive barren terrain can obstruct communication.

Agricultural mobility complicates the classification. Cultivators may relocate to find new planting grounds, especially where agriculture has recently been introduced alongside hunting. Thurnwald’s Papuan and African examples show different subsistence practices distributed between men and women, making nomadism difficult to distinguish sharply from migration. This transitional discussion shifts the article from descriptions of mobile economies to an explanation of institutional change.

Contact with other peoples, especially between herdsmen and agriculturists, has led, however, to a clash of cultures; the resultant situation depends largely upon the relative number of migrants, the nature of the culture of both groups and whether the contact is peaceful or through conflict.

Contact does not produce a single predetermined outcome. Thurnwald distinguishes violent occupation, peaceful settlement by small groups, and coexistence between larger pastoral populations and cultivators. Violence may leave agricultural women working under male pastoral conquerors, reinforcing a gendered division of subsistence. Peaceful incorporation may allow herders to retain traditions while becoming local leaders. Even exchange between initially independent groups can, in his account, become domination through cattle ownership. The conceptual move is from differences in livelihood to inequalities of power, without making warfare the necessary intermediary.

When later intermarriage became frequent, ethnical stratification turned into social stratification, as in Buganda.

This sentence condenses the article’s account of state formation. Initially distinct populations become ranked social groups as intermarriage alters the basis of their separation. In Thurnwald’s Buganda example, their earlier organizations give way to aristocratic and despotic administration, ranked officials, slavery, and exploitation. He also associates wife purchase and female slavery with diminished female status and patriarchal institutions. These broad causal claims reveal the article’s historical ethnological framework rather than establishing universal sequences.

The closing discussion preserves an alternative: pastoral military organizations can maintain elder-led discipline without slavery or stratification, although conquest may later produce ranked societies. European intervention supplies another route toward agriculture and sedentary residence. The article’s enduring analytical interest lies in treating mobility as organized social life and connecting subsistence to property and authority. Its comparative reach is substantial, but its generalized descriptions and language of “pastoral brigands” also require attention to the categories through which it interprets diverse societies.