"Drawing upon twenty-seven months spent among the men, women, and children of the Yarahmadzai tribe of Iranian Baluchistan, Philip Carl Salzman shows that such labels as "pastoral," "nomad," "chiefdom," "Muslim," and "subsistence" are misleading, because they reduce a complex and mutating multiplicity to an imagined essence.

Relating the details of the group's life - from tent living and the division of daily labor to kinship ties, lineage organization, and religion - Salzman discusses how Baluch shift between decentralized, egalitarian, segmentary lineage politics and centralized, hierarchical, chief-based politics. He also compares and contrasts the people of the Sarhad with other livestock-rearing, mobile peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

Maintaining that scholarly conceptions of society have too often overemphasized unitary structural integration, Salzman argues that alternative stances or tendencies can remain embedded in a culture's repertoire, ready to be called forth in response to changing conditions."--BOOK JACKET.