Teaching the shepherds or learning from them?: The Iranian experience

Abstract

In an anthropological or evolutionary view, human societies are traditionally classified into four classes: hunters-gatherers, pastoralists, farmers, and industrial societies. However, in a sociological/geographical view human societies can be categorized into three classes: nomadic, rural and urban societies. Since the hunters-gatherers are very rare and sparse in the world, the merging of both classifications could leave them out. In the global perspective we could then consider nomadic and transhumant groups1 as pastoralists, rural societies as villagers, and urban people as townsmen. In this article I focus on the first class.