Bakhtiari Land and People

Bakhtiari land is situated between 31° and 16 min north of Ramhormoz and 33° and 22 min north of Aligudarz in the eastern Lorestan Province, according to geographical coordinates.

There are conflicting beliefs concerning the origins of the Bakhtiari people. Some argue that they are Aryans and present evidence to support this stance, while others claim that they are immigrant tribes who entered Bakhtiari land from the west of Iran (Syria) since the fifth century.

The Bakhtiaris lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle, depending on their herds of sheep, cattle, and horses for sustenance. Throughout the year, they participate in two migratory periods known as 'spring migration' and 'autumn migration.' During the spring migration, they move from their winter rangelands, known as "qishlaq," to the summer rangelands, called "yaylak." In the autumn migration, they return from the summer rangelands to the winter rangeland grounds. The duration of migration varies among nomadic tribes.

Like other nomads in Iran, Bakhtiari nomadic tribes have devised indigenous solutions for grazing and pasture management, ensuring the conservation and sustainable use of pastures during migration. However, this ancient way of life is rapidly disappearing, with many Bakhtiari choosing to leave the mountains entirely. Those who remain often rely on trucks or tractors to transport their animals and belongings.

Scholars hold different viewpoints on the etymology of the Bakhtiari language. Some believe it originated from ancient Persian, while others claim its roots lie in the Pahlavi language. It is part of a group of Persian dialects stretching geographically along the mountain tract from Pusht-e-Kuh in the west to the Kuhgiluyeh and Mamasani territories in the east. The language remains mostly unaffected by the influx of Arabic words, bearing a close resemblance to old Persian. The primary religion followed by both the nomadic and sedentary Bakhtiaris is Shia Islam, which they practice devotedly.

Within this community, women play a significant role in preserving customs and maintaining family bonds. Due to their challenging lifestyle, women actively engage in various aspects, including physical work and even participating in fighting, all while fulfilling their roles as mothers and wives.

Marriage and its various ceremonies in the Bakhtiari tribe serve not only as religious traditions to preserve their heritage but also as a means of creating, expanding, and maintaining social connections among families and individuals within the Bakhtiari tribe.
Bakhtiari Land and People

Nuer marriage

The Nuer people are a tribe of Nilotic ethnic group concentrated in the Greater Upper Nile region of South Sudan numbering about 2 million. They also live in the Ethiopian region Gambella.

For a Nuer who goes to a wedding either expects to get a cow or will have to contribute a cow. Those who contributed to the groom’s expenses will claim a cow when his daughter gets married a generation later.

Nuer marriage is a protracted affair involving many negotiations and ceremonial meetings. When the boy expresses his desire to get married and it’s agreed upon in the family, he makes the proposal to the girl. If she says no resolutely, the boy forgets about her.

If she agrees, she will not say ‘yes’ openly (this would seem bad as if she were an easy going-girl).

One cannot marry within one's own lineage or clan. In as much as clans may be very large, a wide segment of the population is thus prohibited from intermarriage.

The rule also prohibits marriage with any of the mother's lineage, though not with other lineages in her clan, and even with those considered kindred by a fiction or analogy, as for example, in the case of a boy and girl whose fathers are in the same age-set.

The Nuer people are a cattle owning society, and marriage was accomplished though a payment of cattle by the groom’s family to that of the bride.

The kinsmen of a bride would expect to receive minimum payment twenty cattle, credit was not accepted. There was also an ideal payment of about thirty-six head. But because cattle circulated as the main currency among the Nuer, bride wealth was not a method by which a man would gain wealth.

The married couple do not actually live together until a child is born. The girl is given a special hut in her own family's homestead, and the husband remains with his own family, making overnight visits to his wife whenever he can. After a child is born, the husband is fully accepted as a member of the girl's family.
Nuer marriage

Yanomamö tribal

Yanomamö territory straddles the mountainous headwaters of the Orinoco and Amazon river drainage basins along the border between Brazil and Venezuela. They depend on hunting, gardening and wild food for survival. The population has been estimated at about 8,500 individuals in Brazil and 12,500 in Venezuela living in some 250 different, small, independent villages.

The most populated area is situated in the Parima Mountains, between the headwaters of the Rio Orinoco (on the Venezuelan side), and the Rio Parima, Rio Mucajaí, and Rio Catrimani (on the Brazilian slope). They are made up of four adjacent subgroups, divided according to linguistic subdivisions: Yanomae, Yanomami, Sanima e Ninam.

Traditionally, as an interior tropical rain forest society, the Yanomamö followed a mixed subsistence economy primarily of foraging (hunting, gathering, and fishing) and secondarily of farming (swidden, shifting, or slash-and-burn horticulture).

Although hunting accounts for only 10% of Yanomamö food, amongst men it is considered the most prestigious of skills and meat is greatly valued by everyone. No hunter ever eats the meat that he has killed. Instead he shares it out among friends and family. In return, he will be given meat by another hunter.

The first historical mention of Yanomamö, by their earlier name Guaharibo, comes from a Yecuana ally of the Spanish around 1759, who knew all the rivers and passes up to the Orinoco headwaters, where they went to raid.

Until the 1940s and 1950s the Yanomamö were largely unknown to the outside world because they were so isolated, difficult to reach, and lived in an unexplored pocket of the Amazon Basin. The Yanomamö are one of the largest indigenous nations remaining in the Amazon, and supposedly until the 1980s they were one of the least acculturated (changed) by contact with Western society.
Yanomamö tribal

Tsaatan people (Dukha people): Those who have reindeer

The Tsaatan people of northern Mongolia are a nomadic people who depend on reindeer for nearly all aspects of survival, as well as cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and economic identity. The Tsaatan, which means ‘those who have reindeer’ in the Mongolian language, were originally Tuvinian reindeer herders. Tuvinians are the major ethnic group of the Republic of Tuva (in Russia), which shares a national border with Mongolia.

According to the Finnish ethnographer and linguist Juha Janhunenís brief description, the Tsaatan “can probably be regarded as the most primitive reindeer people presently living.”

Originating from the Sayan mountain region in Russian Siberia and Mongolia’s northern-most province of Hovsgol, the Tsaatan, or ethnic Dukha people, are credited as one of the world’s earliest domesticators of any animal. Written records by a traveling Chinese monk in 499 A.D., and 3,000-year-old stone carvings of reindeer in the area, are evidence of the Tsaatan’s ancient relationship with their reindeer.

According to the prolific Mongolian ethnographer S. Badamkhatan, the Tsaatan were known in early Mongolian sources as Soyot Uriankhai, taigyn irged (Mon. “citizens of the taiga”), and oin irged (Mon. “citizens of the forest”) until 1935 when the Mongolian word tsaatan, or “reindeer herder”, was first published in the newspaper Unen.

Tsaatan maintain small herds of between 7 and 160 reindeer per family, utilizing the domesticated deer (Rangifer tarandus) for renewable resources, and imbuing them with value as essential members of the community.

The Tsaatan usually live in a group comprising several families who live in tents next to each other in the forest. These residential groups are normally close relatives such as parents and their children or siblings, but the relationship can sometimes be affinal or even friendship. The former type resembles an extended family. The membership of a residential group often change seasonally.
Tsaatan people (Dukha people): Those who have reindeer

Toraja tribe

Tana Toraja is a regency in South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia, is one of the major tourist destinations famous for its burial ritual. Located in mountainous area, the region home to the Toraja tribe has a fairly cool climate.

Torajans probably arrived in Sulawesi around 3,500 years ago as apart of a general Austronesian expansion in Southeast Asia. They are Malay speakers and presently occupy the calcareous and andesitic mountains in the northern part of South Sulawesi.

Toraja society is hierarchically organized on the bases of descent wealths, age and occupation. In pre-colonial times Torajan society was roughly divided into three social strata: the aristocracy commoners, and slaves. Status was determined by birth, although economic aptitude or failure permitted some degree of social mobility.

In the Toraja tribe, the traditions maintained are: homage to the ancestor spirits realized in ceremonials funerary, pottery manufacture, chew betel and rice cultivating.

They still build their houses in the arc-like forms, they say, of the ships which once brought them, and their funeral rites, which for their nobility are unequalled for extravagance, are intended to launch the souls of the dead back to the stars of their origins.
Toraja tribe

Ancient people of Yuezhi

Chinese sources of the second century BC mention another group of early Xinjiang people, the Yuezhi, who inhabited the region around Dunhuang and the Gansu Corridor for millennia. The Yuezhi people were considered to be part of the nomadic tribes of Indo— European decent who provided jade stones to the Chinese Sang dynasty.

They defeated the Wusun in the west and killed their King Nandoumi. It is thought that the Yuezhi extended their rule to the northwest part of Gansu and the southwest part of Mongolia.

In 176 BC Yuezhi was driven out from western Gansu by Xiongnu under Chanyu Modu. Chanyu Jizhu attacked them again in 162 BC.

The attacks by the Xiongnu prompted the majority of the Yuezhi to migrate westward to the vicinity of Ili River and a smaller group to move south to settle among the highland Qiang peoples in Nan-Shan.

The Yuezhi reached Bactria (present-day northwest Afghanistan and Tajikistan) about 135 B.C. There their disparate tribes were united by Kujula Kadphises in the first century BC. Gradually wresting control of the area from Scytho-Parthian, the Yuezhi move south into the northwest Indian region traditionally known as Gandhara and established a capital near Kabul.
Ancient people of Yuezhi

Kelabit tribe in Sarawak

The life of a Kelabit community is a perennial balancing act between the longhouse and its surrounding fields on the one hand and the forest just beyond on the other. Both are important and both are expressed through food.

With the population of approximately 3000, the Kelabit form a tight-knit community and practice a generations-old form of agriculture. They are farmers who use buffalo and sophisticated methods of irrigation.

Famous for their rice-farming, they also cultivate a variety of other crops which are suited to the cooler climate of the Highlands. Bario rice is renowned for its delicate flavor.

The Kelabit are also known for their great strength and for their cultures so building megaliths, such as dolmens in honour of ancestors.

Before the Second World War, the people of the Kelabit Highlands were scattered over the area. Since then, most of the population has become concentrated in an area now called Bario in the northern part of the highlands, where the only government-run airstrip is situated.
Kelabit tribe in Sarawak

Yanomami tribe

The Yanomami Indians also known as Yanam, Yanoama, Yanomano or Sanema - are the largest indigenous tribe in South America. For centuries, the Yanomami Indians have lived a Stone Age existence unhampered by the onslaught of 20th century civilization.

Isolated and protected in vast tracts of dense Amazonian rainforest, they dwell in around communal huts called malacos, have no written language, wear little or no clothing and use poison-tipped arrows to hunt wild boar and birds.

The Yanomami have become famous in anthropological literature because some anthropologists have stated they have an innate violent nature.

The custom of ash eating is a fundamental part of the religious life of the Yanomami Indians. As a consequence of the fear of losing one’s soul in the case that the body is not burned and the ash is not eaten by relatives, the practice of ash eating is extremely important for the afterlife of this Indian group.

Yanomami speak a language that is not clearly related to neighboring languages; they lack a gene that is almost universally found among other indigenous Americans; and they are the only horticulturist in the region who grow plantains as their staple crops.
Yanomami tribe

Semangs people of Malay Peninsula

Semangs are commonly known by the racial term ‘Negrito’. The Semangs of Malaysia were traditionally nomadic hunters and gatherers. They wander in small groups of twenty to thirty and depend for food on roots, stalks, leaves, fruits, insects and fish.

The Semangs are found in a broad arc running form foothills of the northern West coast across the peninsula along the Thai border and then down strip between the coastal plains and the mountains on the East coast.

Semangs are generally found in river valleys, building their shelters close to the river banks, a pattern also displayed by Proto-Malay communities.

The term ‘Semang’ appears to be of Malay origin and has come to be used by anthropologist to refer to the Negritos whole by hunting and gathering, although the term is not so restricted by the Malay.

The Thai sometimes call them khon pa, ‘forest people’ a term that finds a parallel in the orang bukit or orang liar, used sometimes by the Malay.

Semang are speakers of the North Aslian sub-branch, which includes the languages of Batek, Batek Tanum, Batek Nong, Kensiw, Kintaq, Jahai, Mendriq, and the a various Meniq peoples of South Thailand.
Semangs people of Malay Peninsula

Dani people in Indonesia

The word Dani actually refers to about 30 sociocultural groups, or clans, each of which has its own recognized territory and distinct individual identities. They live in small thatched-roof huts and burn wood for heat.

The Dani people traditionally love in self-contained fenced compounds, with its own cooking house, men’s house, women’s house and pigsties.

A traditional house is circular, topped by a thatched dome-shaped roof.

The very first contact between Dani people and outsiders occurred in early 1910. In that year a mountain climbing expedition led by the Dutch explorer H. A Lorenz, tried to climb to the snow –covered to of Peak Trikora.

Peak Trikora lies just within the southern boundary of the Dani Speaking area, and several Dani visited the base camp of the explorers.

The Dani people live in the central Highlands of Irian Jaya, which is the eastern-most province of Indonesia. They are found in the valleys of the upper reaches of two major river systems, the Mamberamo, which flows north-west to the Pacific Ocean.

They are one of the most populous tribes in the highland, and are found spread out through the highlands.

They live simply off the land. Their staple diet consists of sweet potatoes and some meats such as birds, pigs and other small animals.

The Dani remain subsistence farmers who cultivate mostly sweet potatoes in gardens in the Baliem valley in West Papua, Indonesia.

Women continue to raise pigs, which men strategically exchange to promote their status and to strengthens their politically alliance.
Dani people in Indonesia

Sentinelese people

The Sentinelese is an indigenous people who live on one of the India’s remote Andaman Islands. They are considered as the only Paleolithic people in the earth.

The Sentinelese is frequently described as Negritos, a somewhat indistinct anthropological term, which has been applied to variously widely-separated peoples in Southeast Asia.

The Sentinelese maintain an essentially hunter-gatherer society, obtaining their subsistence through hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plants; there is no evidence of any agricultural practice among them.

For thousands of years they have lived on their island without any kind of contact with the outside world. The Sentinelese are hostile to outsiders and do not permit anyone to land on their shores.

They are said to have been discovered in 1967 and to have 50-200 people. By their long standing separation from any other human society, they are among the most isolated and unassimilated peoples on Earth.

In 1974 National Geographic sent a team to try to win the trust of the Sentinelese in order to film and photograph them; the entire team was met with a volley of arrows, one of which wounded the film director in the thigh.

Little is known of their origins, their lifestyle, their language or even their numbers.
Sentinelese people