The Basseri count their numbers and describe their camp groups and sections in terms of tents (sing.: khune = house). Each such tent is occupied by an independent household, typically consisting of an elementary family; and these households are the basic units of Basseri society. They are units of production and consumption; represented by their male head they hold rights over all movable property including flocks; and they can even on occasion act as independent units for political purposes.
The external sign of the existence of such a social unit is the tent. This is a square structure of cloth woven from goat-hair, supported along the sides and in the corners by tent poles, and in the case of the larger tents also along the central line by a row of T-shaped poles. The size of the tent varies according to the means of the family which resides in it; but it is typically about 6 by 4 m, and 2 m high, supported by 5 poles along the long side and 3 poles along the short side, and composed of 5 separate cloths: 4 for walls and one for roof. These cloths are fastened together by wooden pins when the tent is pitched. At the proper position for each tentpole is a wooden loop, attached to the roof cloth; the ropes are stretched from these loops and the notched ends of the tentpoles support the ropes adjoining the loop, rather than the tent cloth itself. The lower part of the wall is formed by reed mats which are loosely leaned against the tent cloth and poles.
When travelling, the Basseri frequently pitch a smaller tent with fewer poles, using the roof cloth also for one wall and thereby producing a roughly cubical structure. When the weather is mild, a short or even a long side of the tent is left open, frequently by laying the wall cloth on top of the slanting tentropes; when the weather is cold the living space is closed in snugly by four full walls, and the tent is entered by a corner flap. Very occasionally in the summer when the tribe passes through openly forested areas, the tent may be dispensed with for a night and the households camp in the open under separate trees.
The living space within the tent is commonly organized in a standard pattern. Water and milk skins are placed along one side on a bed of stones or twigs; the belongings of the family are piled in a high wall towards the back, closing off a narrow private section in the very back of the tent. A shallow pit for the fire is placed close to the entrance. Though these arrangements are fairly stereotyped, they are dictated by purely practical considerations and are without ritual meaning.
This structure is the home of a small family group. In one camp group of 32 tents the average number of persons per tent was 5.7. The household is built around one elementary family of a man, his wife and their children, with the occasional addition of unmarried or widowed close relatives who would otherwise be alone in their tent, or the wife and children of a married son who is the only son, or the most recent son to be married. The different types of household in one camp group were distributed as follows:
Composition of households:
incomplete families:
widow(er) and Chi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
single man and Mo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
elementary families:
Hu, Wi and Chi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
elementary families with additions:
Hu, Wi and Chi + HuMo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Hu, Wi and Chi + HuBr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
polygynous families
Hu, 2 Wi and Chi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
extended patrilineal families
Hu, Wi, Chi, SoWi, SoChi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
The household occupying a tent is a commensal and property owning group. Though title to animals and some other valuable items of movable property may be vested in individual members of the household, the right to dispose of such is controlled by the head of the household, and the products of the animals owned by different members are not differentiated but used in the joint economy of the house hold.
In addition to the tent, the household, in order to exist, needs to dispose of all the equipment necessary to maintain the nomadic style of life rugs and blankets for sleeping, pails and skins for milk, pots for cooking, and packbags to contain all the equipment during migrations, etc. Even between close relatives the lending and borrowing of such equipment is minimal.
The household depends for its subsistence on the animals owned by its members. These must as a minimum include sheep and goats as producers, donkeys to transport the belongings on the migrations, and a dog to guard the tent. All men also aspire to own a riding stallion, though less than half the household heads appear ever to achieve this goal; and wealthier persons with many belongings also need a few camels for transport.
Among the Basseri today each household has about 6-12 donkeys and on an average somewhat less than 100 adult sheep and goats. Every adult man has his distinctive sheep-mark, which by a combination of a brand on the sheep’s face and notching or cutting of one ear or both endeavours to be unique. Brothers frequently maintain their father’s brand when dividing the flock, but modify the earmarks. Yet there is no great emphasis on lineal continuity of brands, and men sometimes arbitrarily decide to change their brand. Though the herds may be large, adults have a remarkable ability to recognize individual animals; and the sheep-marks are used more as proof of the identity of lost sheep vis-d-vis outsiders than to distinguish the animals of different owners who camp together.
There is normally no loaning or harbouring of animals except for weaning purposes; each household keeps its flock concentrated. Occasionally, however, wealthy men may farm out a part of their flock to propertyless shepherds on a variety of contracts (cf. Lambton 1953:351 ff.)- These are, among the Basseri:
dandune contract: the shepherd pays 10-15 Tomans (1 Toman = roughly 1 shilling) per animal per year, keeps all products, and at the expiration of the contract returns a flock of the same size and age composition as he originally received.
teraz contract: the shepherd pays approximately 2 kg clarified butter per animal for the three spring months, and keeps all other products. If one of the flock stops giving milk in less than 45 days, he may have it replaced; if an animal is lost through anything but the negligence of the shepherd, the owner carries the loss.
nimei or nisfei contract (for goats only) : the shepherd pays 30 Tomans/year per goat and keeps all its products; after termination of the contract period, usually 3-5 years, he keeps one half of the herd as it stands, and returns the other half to the original owner.
Such contracts are most common in periods when the flocks of the Basseri are large.
Domestic organization. Within each tent there is a distribution of authority and considerable division of labour among the members of the household. But this follows a highly elastic pattern, and it is characteristic that few features of organization are socially imperative and common to all, while many features vary, and appear to reflect the composition of each household and the working capacities of its members.
All tents have a recognized head, who represents the household in all dealings with the formal officers of the tribe, and with villagers and other strangers. Where the household contains an elementary family, the head is universally the husband in that family, even when his widowed father or senior brother resides with the family. Where the tent is occupied by an incomplete family, the senior male is the head. Only where there are no adult male members of the household, or where they are temporarily absent, is a woman ever regarded as the head of a household; and in such cases she is usually represented for formal purposes by a relative.
However, with respect to decisions in the domestic and familial domain, men and women are more nearly equal, and the distribution of authority between spouses is a matter of individual adaptation. Thus decisions regarding the multitude of choices in the field of production and consumption (but not decisions about migration routes and camp sites), all matters of kinship and marriage and the training of children, and decisions that will greatly affect the family, such as whether to change one’s group membership, or become sedentary, these are all decisions that are shared by the spouses and to some extent by the other adult members of the household, and in which the wiser or more assertive person dominates, regardless of sex. The internal authority pattern of the Basseri is thus very similar to that of the urban Western family.
Labour is divided among household members by sex and age, but few tasks are rigidly allotted to only one sex or one age group. The various labour tasks may be grouped in three categories: domestic work, the daily cycle of migration, and tending and herding of animals.
Domestic tasks are mainly done by the women and girls they prepare food, wash and mend clothes, spin and weave, while the men and boys provide wood and water. But this latter is also frequently done by girls and sometimes by poor women, while men frequently make tea, or roast meat, or wash their own clothes. Spinning and weaving are never done by men, and male villagers are often ridiculed by the nomads for pursuing these activities. Most repairs of equipment and tents, twining of ropes, etc. are done by men.
About 1 20 days out of the year, the average Basseri camp is struck and repitched at a new location; and these frequent migrations consume much time and labour and strongly affect the organization of the daily round. Activity starts well before daylight, when the sheep and goats, which have spent the night by the tent, depart in the care of a shepherd who is usually a boy or man, but may also be a girl. The tent is usually struck before sunrise, while the household members snatch odds and ends of left-over food and drink tea for breakfast. The donkeys, which have roamed freely during the night in a common herd, are retrieved by a boy or man of the camp. Packing and loading are done by all, usually in a habitual way but with no formal division of labour. The total process of breaking camp may take about 1.5 hours.
Most family members ride on top of the loaded donkeys during the migration, while one boy, man, girl, or occasionally woman follows on foot and drives the beasts. Men who own horses usually ride these at the head of the caravan. They thus determine the route and decide on the place to camp usually after roughly 3 hours of travel at a brisk pace. Tent sites are seized by the men, sometimes with a certain amount of argument, and the donkey caravan disperses to these sites. All household members co-operate in unloading the beasts and pitching the tent, the men moving the heaviest pieces. The donkeys are let loose and driven off by a child, or several children, while a larger child is sent off for brush to make a fire for tea.
The sheep and goats arrive in camp at about noon; after these are milked the women prepare a meal. Various domestic tasks are per formed in the afternoon; just before sunset the flock is milked again, and the evening meal is taken late, just before sleep.
The work of tending the animals consists mainly of herding and milking. The shepherd for the main flock is almost always a male; as he is occupied with the flock from c. 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. he cannot simultaneously serve as head of household and perform the male domestic tasks in the tent and during migration. Boys down to the age of 6 are therefore frequently used as shepherds, while married men only exceptionally do such work. The smaller and less wide-ranging flocks of lambs and kids are usually looked after by smaller children of both sexes; or they may be divided, the weaned ones accompanying the main herd, the unweaned ones tethered in the tent.
Milking is done by bdth sexes, but mostly by women. The animals are fairly easy to control and may be milked individually by a single person. But a simpler and more systematic arrangement is preferred, whereby the flock is driven by shepherding children into a spear-head formation and forced to pass through the narrow point at its apex, where they are held by the shepherd or another male, while being milked by two or more persons on either side of the shepherd. There by those who do the milking need not move their pails, and the milked animals pass through and roam off, separated from the unmilked animals.
Household economy: A picture of the resultant economy and standard of living of the average Basseri household may be formed and to some extent cross-checked by a little simple arithmetic. The average suggested above of somewhat less than 100 sheep/goats per tent is based on Basseri estimates and agreed with a few rough counts that I made of the flock associated with tent camps. Only very few herd owners have more than 200 sheep, while informants agreed that it was impossible to subsist on less than 60. To maintain a satisfactory style of life it was generally considered that a man with normal family commitments requires about 100 sheep and goats so at present,a majority of the Basseri fall somewhat short of this ideal. However, the flocks in 1958 were still suffering from losses experienced during and after a very bad season in 1956-7, and were thus unusually small.
The market value of a mature female sheep was at the time of fieldwork c. 80 Tomans, so the average flock represented a capital asset of c. 7,000 T., (roughly 350 or $ 1,000). In a different context, I was able several times to discuss family budgets in detail. The consensus of opinion and data is that a normal household needs to buy goods for an average value exceeding 3,000 T., while a comfortable standard of living implies a consumption level of 5-6,000 Ts’ worth of bought goods per year.
These requirements seem at first sight out of proportion to the pro ductive capital of 8,000 T. corresponding to the ideal average of a flock of 100 head. However, an estimate of the income produced by a fertile ewe gives consistency to the picture. In 1958, its estimated value was:
From one ewe in one year:
wool c. 20 T.
clarified butter c. 25 T.
lamb: skin c. 15 T.
Sum c. 60 T.
leaving lamb’s meat, buttermilk, and curds to be consumed by the nomad and his family. This sum, formerly greater, has suffered a severe reduction with the collapse of prices on “Shirazi” lambskins, until recently bought for as much as 50 T. Yet allowing both for a 10 % population of rams and billygoats in the herd, and a 15 % per annum rate of replacement of stock, a flock of 100 head should give a total product per annum of more than 5,000 T. value at 1958 prices.
Estimates based on different kinds of data thus agree on an average net income from the sale of produce of 3-5,000 T., or roughly 200, per annum per household for the Basseri in 1958, together with a considerable production of foodstuffs consumed directly, such as milk, milk products, and meat. This confirms one’s overwhelming subjective impression of a high standard of living among the Basseri nomads relative to most populations in the Middle East.
Household maintenance and replacement. The description so far has been static, and has not touched on the crucial problem of the continuation and replacement of household units as a process spanning the generations. These problems are particularly interesting among pastoral nomads, and may be discussed in terms of the concept of household “viability” used by Stenning (1958) in his article on the pastoral Fulani.
The household units of the Basseri are based on elementary families; and this means that after a new marriage, when the nucleus of a new family is established, this nucleus forms a new and independent household. A woman joins her husband upon marriage, and after a few nights in a separate small bridal tent lives with him and his natal family in their tent. But the young couple’s period of residence there is usually brief and rarely extends beyond the birth of the first child; as soon as possible they establish themselves in a separate tent as a separate household. As such they form an independent economic unit, and to be viable as such they must possess the productive property and control the necessary labour force to pursue the pastoral nomadic activities described above. In the following I shall try to describe the standard Basseri arrangements whereby productive property in the form of herds and equipment, and additional labour force, are provided to secure the viability of newly established, or in other respects incomplete, elementary families.
Though the herd of a household is administered and utilized as a unit, individual members of the household may, as noted, hold separate title to the animals. It is therefore possible for a young person to build up some capital in flocks while he still lives in his parents’ tent. In times of plenty fathers frequently give a few animals to their younger sons, partly to stimulate their interest in caring for the animals, partly to test their luck as herd owners. Boys whose fathers are very poor usually seek work as shepherds for others; and in return for such work they are given a few lambs every year, and with good luck can build up a small herd that way.
The main transfers, however, take place at the time of marriage. The various transactions at marriage will be analysed below; we are here concerned only with those that contribute directly to setting up the new household. The expense of this is carried by the groom’s father, who provides a cash bride-price which the bride’s father is expected in part to use to equip his daughter with rugs, blankets, and household utensils, while the women of both households may contribute labour to weave cloth for the new tent. A payment of sheep is also usually made, and it is expected that these will later be passed on by the bride’s father to his son-in-law, though this is not always done.
These customs contribute to the setting up of the married couple in a separate tent; but they do not provide the new household with the necessary flocks. This is achieved by a practice explicitly regarded by the Basseri as anticipatory inheritance, whereby a son at marriage receives from his father’s herd the arithmetic fraction which he would receive as an heir if his father were to die at that moment. In such divisions, the right of the “widow” to a small share is recognized; otherwise only agnatic heirs are considered, and close agnates eliminate all more distant agnates, while a man often reserves for himself a share equal to that he allots to each son.
For example, as a boy a certain Alamdar, one of 5 brothers, was given a flock of 60 one-year-old lambs and kids; but he had bad luck and nearly all the animals were lost, his father appropriating the few that were left. When he married, his father made the bride payments and then gave Alamdar 1/6 of his herd (there being 5 sons plus him self and his wife to share).
In another case, Barun, the eldest of 6 sons, was married. At the time his father had 145 sheep, 9 donkeys, and 3 horses. The bride payment asked was 20 sheep. His father, wanting to set up his son well, waived his own right to a share, allotted 5 sheep to his wife, leaving 20 sheep as the share for one son. Barun also received 3 donkeys (which, being forbidden as food, increase more rapidly than sheep) and 1 horse. Barun received no return from his father-in-law on the bride payment.
A few years later his brother was married. Meanwhile the father’s flock had grown to 200, and the groom received 40 sheep as his share as one of 5 remaining sons. No adjustment was made because of this difference between the shares given the first and the second sons on their marriage. In fact Barun’s flock had meanwhile grown to 50 sheep; but evert had he been propertyless by then he would have had no right to a further share. In such divisions, bride payments are always made before the departing son is allotted his share, while payments received on girls are added to the father’s estate at the time of receipt, and sons who have separated from him before that time have no rights in such payments, and no other remaining claims on their father’s flocks.
On the death of the father, however, a certain estate remains to be allocated. If the old man was living with a married son, or even a married daughter, all household property is regarded as the property of the resident spouses, with possible adjustments made in the case of particularly valuable items such as rugs etc. If a household is dissolved by the death of its head, his heirs divide the property. In such cases, daughters who are married in their natal tribal section, or are present for other reasons at the time of their father’s death, usually receive a share of his estate.
In addition to flocks and household property, some nomads also own land, or money in a bank. Such property is never passed on while the owner is alive, but is divided by his heirs on his death. Though the claim is usually made that Koranic inheritance rules are observed with respect to land and money, they are in practice usually side-stepped, and the estate appropriated by the agnatic heirs. In cases of conflict over inheritance, the tribal authorities usually defer to the decision of civil or religious courts, where the rights of a daughter to half the share of a son are upheld. To forestall daughters in their claims to a share of the land, male agnatic heirs frequently give them for a few years “gifts” of a reasonable fraction of the produce of such lands.
Through such practices, a marrying couple are provided with the property in animals and equipment which they require to set them selves up as an economically independent household unit. But to maintain themselves in this position they must perform the whole set of tasks connected with pastoral nomadic subsistence. This requires the co-operation of at the very least three persons: a male head of household who performs male tasks around the tent and connected with the migration, a woman to perform female domestic tasks, and a male shepherd. Only in a restricted phase of its development, while it contains adolescent children, can an elementary family be expected to contain this necessary personnel. The ideal, and in fact relatively common, situation is one where the husband and head of household remains close to the tent, and accompanies the caravan on migration, while one or several sons serve as shepherd boys. Where the family alone does not contain this labour team, other arrangements must be made.
Such arrangements may be of several kinds. A shepherd or servant may be engaged; childless couples may adopt a brother’s son or other close male agnate; while most households enter into small co-operative herding units to secure additional labour by sharing the burdens.
The relationship between a shepherd or servant and his master is based on an explicit economic contract, whereby the former is supplied with food and shelter, new clothes at Nowruz (Spring equinox, the Persian New Year), and a salary of no more than 40-50 T. per year. Such contracts are taken only by propertyless, usually unmarried men; only rarely is the relationship so stable and remunerative for the shepherd that he can establish a family of his own.
The partners in such contracts are rarely close kin; on the other hand there is considerable reluctance to engage a shepherd or servant who is an outsider, and even more so if he is a stranger, since it is necessary to place considerable trust in him, both with regard to his treatment of the animals, and his respect for the family and property of his master. He lives as a member of the household by which he is engaged, but generally eats separate from, or subsequent to, his master. The ambition of such servants and shepherds is to establish themselves with a family as a small independent herd owner; and this goal they not infrequently achieve after 10-15 years of work. Less than one household in ten has the means to employ outside labour in this way.
Occasionally when a marriage proves barren, the childless couple may adopt a close agnate of the husband, preferably his brother’s son,as their own child. In such cases the boy is used as shepherd as a real son would have been, and ultimately inherits his foster-parents estate to the exclusion of other heirs.
Both these devices serve to maintain the isolated, individual household as a viable unit by supplementing its labour pool from outside sources. This independence and self-sufficiency of the nomad household, whereby it can survive in economic relation with an external market but in complete isolation from all fellow nomads, is a very striking and fundamental feature of Basseri organization.
However, to facilitate the herding and tending of the flocks, Basseri households usually unite in groups of 2-5 tents. These combine their flocks and entrust them to a single shepherd, and co-operate during milking time. As noted, a shepherd is readily able to control a herd of up to 400 head, and there is some feeling that very small herds are relatively more troublesome; while milking is made easier when numerous people combine to drive and control the herd.
The tents of such a herding unit are always pitched together, in a line or a crescent, with the herd spending the night beside them; and when the herd is driven in for milking, most of the members of the unit assist. But each woman, or, occasionally, man, milks only the animals belonging to her or his own household, and generally departs when they are all done, not waiting for the other members of the herding unit to complete their milking.
The relationship among members of a herding unit is contractual, and is always regarded as a partnership among equals. Household heads are free to establish the relation with anyone they wish inside their own tribal section. The division of labour between members is based on expediency, and the person or persons who serve as shep herds are in no way regarded as the servants of the others; rather, the work they do is regarded as a favour, and rewarded by gifts of lambs. At any time, a member of a herding unit may withdraw from that group and work alone, or join another unit; and through time the constellations of households in herding units change completely.
By joining a herding unit, households can persist without the full complement of personnel to make them viable as fully independent units. It is sufficient that one of the component members of a herding unit provides a shepherd; and smaller households are thus motivated by practical considerations to join households with a secure labour supply, while these are interested in increasing their income by serving as herders for others.
Such practical considerations, as well as friendship and enmity, and a beKef in the good or bad herding luck of different persons, seem to dominate a man’s decisions about which herding unit he joins. Thus when disagreements arise, or the compositions of households change, herding unit membership tends to change.
Considerations of nearness of kinship, on the other hand, seem to be irrelevant to the composition of herding units. While married sons initially tend to retain their flocks in the old herd, and thus stay in the herding unit of their father, these bonds are freely broken at any time; and there are no apparent regularities in the kinship composition of the herding units of the camp with which I spent most of my time. These are illustrated in Fig. 10; and in every unit, persons have combined with distant relatives and non-kin in spite of the presence in camp of very close kin. The composition of herding units thus seems to be determined by considerations of the availability of labour, the sizes of herds, and the distribution of friendship and mutual trust.
In this chapter I have tried to describe the basic unit of Basseri social organization: the household occupying a tent, and the activities whereby this unit maintains itself and reproduces itself. The picture is one of relatively great independence and self-sufficiency, whereby many households are viable in complete isolation from other Basseri, though strongly dependent on an external market in sedentary and agricultural communities. For purposes of more efficient herding, how ever, these households combine in small herding units, the composition of which reflects practical expediency for herding purposes, rather than kinship or other basic principles of organization.