John Murray is famous for publishing that particular English species of travel writer, who wants nothing better than to leave civilization far behind. Murray’s back list includes Lord Byron, Lucy Atkinson (Recollections of Tartar Steppes), Freya Stark (Valley of the Assassins) and Patrick Leigh Fermor (A Time of Gifts). Now Anthony Sattin sets out on a trip, literary and geographic, in the traces of the nomad.
For Sattin this is no anthropological category—it is a metaphysical state of mind that divides mankind into the settled and the wandering. Nomad is a kind of rhapsody on how this aspect of human nature has contributed as much, if not more, to civilization, than the tillers of the soil. The latter, of course, are typically credited with the achievements of civilization. Sattin wants to set the record straight; how well does he succeed in convincing the reader of his thesis?
The nomad versus settled lens is used to re-examine the big moments of human history. It works as a way of understanding the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the first king of the first city, Gilgamesh of Uruk, confronts his nomadic counterpart Enkidu. Sattin’s argument for the importance of the nomad in history is on strongest grounds when he discusses the Mongol Empire and its successors. Several recent books have made this point in a more academic manner (The Horde by Anne-Marie Favereau). No one would argue now against the unique contributions of the Mongol empire to world civilization, though one might not have guessed that the 14th-century wimple worn by court ladies in England was a flattering imitation of the headgear of aristocratic Mongol women. His description of Tamerlane’s career as nomad turned world conqueror is erudite and evocative.
The concept of nomadism is then stretched, like a gossamer over a number of other historical actors, less convincingly, including the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals. Here he exaggerates in suggesting that these dynasties were in any meaningful way nomadic, or even that nomads were the majority of the Turkish, Iranian, or Indian populations in the periods described. There is a tendency to see nomads everywhere. He even muses on the possibility that there is a nomadic gene, associated with ADHD, that makes some people happy wanderers, and others, unhappy farmers. It is true that Turco-Mongolian nomads hold settled life in low esteem. “Stay put and live in your own shit,” they say. But one wonders whether herding, with its endless attention to calving, milking, protecting animals from predators and thieves, or bundling small babies and grannies on long migrations is any less meticulous or painstaking than farm work.
Moving to modern times, the nomad/settled polarity is replaced by the civilized/noble savage. As Sattin points out, this idea is a legacy of the enlightenment. People like Benjamin Franklin or Captain James Cook struggled to explain in what way the European way of life was superior to that of the Amerindians or Australian Aborigines. Indeed many Europeans who fell into the Amerindians’ hands were loath to return to civilization. Americans and Europeans bought into the idea of progress, while nomadism is at best circular, with empires rising and falling.
Progress is the enemy here. Sattin prefers remote, fossilized peoples:
The societies that have been most successful—because they have survived are nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies like the Aborigines. The reason for their success is no secret: they have survived because they ‘have lived with nature and within nature and haven’t tried to change it, haven’t tried to crush it, to rebuild it.
This argument views modern civilization as based on a Faustian bargain with the devil—in return for progress and prosperity, we are consuming the planet. As Mark Cohen pointed out in the Food Crisis in Prehistory (Yale, 1979) civilization is an adaptation to increasing population that allows us to use natural resources more extensively (and hopefully more efficiently). No people are more exposed to environmental degradation than hunter gatherers or pastoralists, which is why there are fewer and fewer of them.
It would be fruitless to argue this with Anthony Sattin, or with Bruce Chatwin, or even Vita Sackville-West, fellow travelers he meets on the nomad trail. We are now in the realm of pure imagination:
… much of what I have written about the Xiongnu and the Mongols, the Lakota and the Aborigine also broadly applies to Tuareg and Inuit, to Beja and Bedouin, the Guaraní in Brazil and all the other nomadic peoples. It can also apply, in our own time, to some digital nomads, to travellers, wanderers, vagrants, the houseless and migrants, and it certainly applies to the Bakhtiari.
With his erudition and winning style, Sattin is not deterred by anachronisms and over-generous generalizations. He will be walking off into the mountains with shepherds or itinerant peddlers and swapping his stories for theirs. This book deserves to be read as an ode to mobility, and not a book of history or anthropology.
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