Why Iran's nomads are fading away
I found the article interesting in part because this is one of the largest remaining nomadic cultures in the world. It would be a little like if a Native American tribe were still traveling from summer camp grounds to winter ones while civilization sprang up around them without relegating them to a reservation.<p>I was an American military wife for a couple of decades. That is a form of modern nomad and the life is vastly different from that of most civilians, so different that it&#x27;s hard to quantify and comprehend for those doing it, much less try to explain it to others.<p>Enlisted personnel don&#x27;t have high salaries, but they have a package of rights and benefits, everything from housing to medical to free legal help and access to swimming pools and their own stores where no tax is charged. As a wife, I had those rights too in a way you don&#x27;t see with civilian jobs and it&#x27;s really hard to explain. When I got divorced, my sister made some comment about me being financially dependent on my ex and how vulnerable I was and what a fool I was. But it wasn&#x27;t like that and she simply didn&#x27;t understand, even though our father had also been career military. My package of rights made my situation fundamentally different from her experience of divorce.  If my ex hadn&#x27;t paid me, I would have written his commander and his pay would have been garnished. I would have been paid first, before him.<p>Nomads and settled peoples have a long history of friction. This remains true of the American military. If you are a military member or dependent, you can cash a check at any PX&#x2F;BX because you probably have a bank in another state and locals don&#x27;t want to cash your check. Spouses have high rates of unemployment, in part because locals don&#x27;t want to hire them, in part because the benefits are so good that you can afford to live on one income.<p>Re women&#x27;s rights and different cultures:<p>From what I have read, some tribal peoples are more egalitarian when it comes to sex. In a lot of settled cultures with more material wealth, female chastity and fidelity is emphasized because wealth is handed from father to son and men can&#x27;t be certain it is their child the way women can be. Cultures that are matrilineal with less material wealth sometimes have traditions that ensure that children will be provided for in a way that makes paternity matter a lot less. In such cultures, women sometimes have sexual freedom of a sort that would be deemed shocking and scandalous to many settled peoples.<p>I read that there was a Black man that accompanied Lewis and Clark and all the Native women wanted to sleep with him because they wanted a Black baby. This is behavior that would be unfathomable for most White women of that era. You would be disowned, which was a potential death sentence for you and your child.<p>The article indicates the nomadic women don&#x27;t inherit. But it also indicates they typically ride horses, own firearms and it says their faces are brown from the sun. It also shows pictures of their faces.<p>Iran is a Muslim country where women are expected to be veiled. This is not just a nuisance. Pakistan has high rates of vitamin D deficiency among girls because of the degree to which women are expected to be covered.<p>National Geographic is a Western publication. It doesn&#x27;t mention this detail, at least not that I noticed. The author of the article probably thought nothing of the unveiled faces of the nomadic women because unveiled faces are the norm in Western countries. But women in Iran are still protesting the law requiring that they wear the veil. So it is something that women experience as very burdensome and restricting.<p>An awful lot of things that are normal for your own culture aren&#x27;t things you think of as <i>rights</i> and you may not really think too much about the consequences of losing that option. You may not think it matters until it is irrevocably gone and has been gone long enough to see some of the consequences that weren&#x27;t apparent when you chose to leave X thing for Y thing.<p>The first week, month or year of wearing a veil may not seem like a big deal as the price you pay for participating in this other culture. It may not seem like a big deal until you are diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency and realize you can&#x27;t readily fix it because you are required by law to cover everything, including your face.<p>I&#x27;m not suggesting that the nomadic women have it better than other Iranian women and will regret leaving this way of life behind. I&#x27;m only suggesting it is likely more complicated than they appreciate at first blush, and something total outsiders reading HN likely can&#x27;t begin to fathom. Most of us just don&#x27;t know enough about either of the cultures in question.