Peripatetics of Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey - Settlements

In Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, all these communities were more or less nomadic; they migrated twice a year between summer and winter camps. Their migration patterns were at least partly linked to harvest cycles of various types of agricultural produce. Whereas Ghorbat families could be found in various parts of the country, the Jalali, the Jogi, the Nausar and the Pikraj lived and migrated predominantly in northern Afghanistan. The KuṠaṠa and Sheikh Mohammadi restricted themselves to the eastern parts of the country; the Shadibaz and the Vangawala were predominantly in the east, the southeast, and parts of central Afghanistan. The Baluch had villages and migrated mainly in northern and western Afghanistan. In Iran, as in eastern Anatolia, there have always been some families of peripatetics who have lived and worked attached to each of the region's nomadic pastoral populations. Around 1960, among the Basseri pastoralists, the Ghorbat thus constituted a guest population of some fifty to sixty elementary families. They spent part of the year with their patrons, but also partly migrated independently in search of additional subsistence. In the Ottoman period, many of the communities in Turkey had a wide-ranging pattern of migration that extended over large parts of the empire. Today some of these communities have become more sedentary and have their own villages, or part-villages, or even urban localities. Many, however, still continue to migrate along traditionally fixed itineraries.