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Tribal Order and the State: The Political Organization of Boir Ahmad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Reinhold Loeffler
Reinhold Loeffler*
Affiliation:
Western Michigan University
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Extract

Among the tribal peoples of the Middle East, from the Atlas to the Hindukush mountains, the most common type of political organization appears to be some form of segmentary structure in which powerful sociocultural mechanisms function to contain every tendency toward the emergence of permanent centralized power figures. Some tribes of Iran characteristically deviate from this general pattern. The Boir Ahmadi is one of them. Their political organization, as it existed during the nineteenth century and up to 1963, consisted in an intrinsically centralized system, that is, a system in which its political power figures showed a vested interest in maintaining, rather than preventing, centralized leadership. In this paper I describe--as much as is possible within a limited space--the bases and the functioning of this system, trace its emergence and inner evolution, and outline its present transformation. In conclusion, to further highlight some of its features, I compare it with European feudalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1-4: State and Society in Iran , 1978 , pp. 145 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1978

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Footnotes

My thanks to the many people in Boir Ahmad who gave me the benefit of their knowledge of the traditional political system; to the University of Chicago and the Wenner Gren Foundation for their generous support; and to E. Abrahamian, G. Beech, G. Garthwaite, R. Hahn, and T. Ricks for much appreciated discussions and information. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 10th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Los Angeles, 1976.

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