Tribes and Tribalism: Qashqaʾi
TRIBES AND TRIBALISM: QASHQAʾI
Turkic-speaking (western Oghuz Turkic) tribal people of the southern Zagros Mountains of southwestern Iran, in the vicinity of the city of Shiraz.
The Qashqaʾi form a historically important tribal confederacy that originated in the late eighteenth century. Until the 1960s, the majority of Qashqaʾi were nomadic pastoralists. In the 1990s, many Qashqaʾi continue to rely on nomadism (increasingly by motorized vehicles) for a livelihood. Many have settled in villages, some for part of the year, and agriculture plays an increasingly important economic role.
Qashqaʾi territory is ecologically rich and diverse. Low-altitude winter pastures near the Persian Gulf and high-altitude summer pastures to the north and northeast are separated by hundreds of miles, and the migrations of spring and autumn each last from two to three months. The people follow Shiʿism and numbered approximately 600,000 in 1990. The Qashqaʾi have a strong sense of ethnic and national-minority identity, especially because of periodic repression of them by Iranian state rulers.
Bibliography
Beck, Lois. Nomad: A Year in the Life of a Qashqaʾi Tribesman in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Beck, Lois. The Qashqaʾi of Iran. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
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