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Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation in Iranian History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Leonard M. Helfgott
Leonard M. Helfgott*
Affiliation:
Western Washington University
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Extract

Historians have tended to ignore the structure of tribalism in writing the history of Iran. Numerous references to tribal leaders can be found in the literature (Turkoman, Bakhtiyari, and Qajar khans appear and reappear as important figures in Iranian political history), but the nomadic societies that produced these leaders and shaped and limited the contours of their actions have been left to the researches of anthropologists and other social scientists. While historians have undertaken detailed studies of urban and agrarian institutions, they have continued to ignore tribalism as a factor in Iranian history.

Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, pastoral nomads comprised approximately one-fourth of the population of Iran. Forming over two hundred separate tribal units divided into five major ethnic groupings (Turkoman, Iranian, Kurdish, Arab and Baluch), these pastoral groups have been and continue to be integral elements in the shaping of Iranian history.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 1-2 , Spring Winter 1977 , pp. 36 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1977

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References

Notes

1. Methodologically this paper relies heavily on the work of Marx and contemporary Marxist writers. The informaation concerning Iranian tribalism has been obtained primarily from published anthropological studies of various Iranian and other pastoral nomadic tribes and from my own study of the origins of the Qajar dynasty, i.e., L. Helfgott, Origins of the Qajar Dynasty: The Political Economy of Tribalism in 18th Century Persia (unpublished manuscript).

2. Marx, K. Grundrisse, trans, by Niclaus, M. (London: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 472-76Google Scholar; see also Marx, K. Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, ed. with an introduction by Hobsbawn, E. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), Introduction, pp. 19-27.Google Scholar

3. Marx, K. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, transcribed and edited by Krader, L. (Assen: Van Goreum and Co., 1972).Google Scholar

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5. Hobsbawm, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, pp. 19-20.

6. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 497-504.

7. Terray, E. Marxism and Primitive Societies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 29.Google Scholar

8. Godelier, M. Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 103-107.Google Scholar

9. S. Amin, “In Praise of Socialism,” Monthly Review (September 1974), p. 4.

10. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

11. See for example, G. Dalton, “Economic Theory and Primitive Society,” American Anthropologist (1961), pp. 1-25.

12. Godelier, Rationality, p. xxxiv.

13. Godelier, M. “System, Structure and Contradiction in Capital,” Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1967), p. 112.Google Scholar

14. Ibid.

15. Godelier defines distribution operations as “… those that determine in a given society the forms of appropriation and use of the conditions of production and of its outcome, the social product.” Rationality, p. 269.

16. Irons, W. “Variation in Economic Organization: A Comparison of the Pastoral Yomut and the Basseri,” Perspectives on Nomadism, ed. by Irons, W. and Dyson-Hudson, N. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), pp. 92-94.Google Scholar

17. I am succumbing to traditional usage of the concept of the natural division of labor. There is, indeed, nothing “natural” about the sexual division of labor in pre-class societies.

18. Levi-Strauss, C. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode Ltd., 1969), p. 67.Google Scholar

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21. Ibid.

22. Cunnison, Nomads and the Nineteen-Sixties (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1967), p. 16.Google Scholar

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24. No analysis of Iranian history since the eleventh century can omit the role of tribal military power in shaping the political history of Iran, and indeed, one finds endless descriptions of conflicts or conquests. However, the socioeconomic underpinnings of tribal militarism, both within the tribe and in Iranian society as a whole, remain virtually ignored.

25. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 105.Google Scholar

26. Ibid.

27. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, pp. 325-337.Google Scholar

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29. See also, Sahlins, M. Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), p. 91.Google Scholar

30. Chayanov, “On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” p. 4.

31. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, p. 132.

32. Ibid.

33. Oberling, P. The Qashqā'ī Nomads of Fārs (The Hague, 1974), p. 65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Siphir, M. al-Mulk, Lisān Nāsīkh al-Tavarīkh, Vol. I (Tehran, 1966), p. 28.Google Scholar

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36. Siphir, N.T., I, p. 28.Google Scholar

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 42.

39. See my Rise of the Qajar Dynasty, unpublished dissertation, 1972.

40. Much is made of the Qajarization of the administration during the early nineteenth century. Less known was the murder or exile by Aqa Muhammad Qajar of all of his half-brothers in order to secure the throne for Fath Ali Qajar; it is still not clear what happened to the members of the Qajar tribe during the nineteenth century when the tribe itself disappeared as a pastoral nomadic unit.

41. E. Abrahamian, Personal Communication, January, 1975. See also his “Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. V, No. 1 (January, 1974), pp. 3-31.Google Scholar

42. Anderson, P. Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), p. 40.Google Scholar