Transhumance

JOHN G. GALATY
McGill University, Canada

Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that involves the cyclical movement of herders

and their domestic animals between seasonal pastures, thus the term “trans” (across)
“humus” (land). Transhumance is distinguished from nomadism, which implies
continuous, short-range movements, or semi-nomadism, which involves occasional
and relatively unpredictable or opportunistic movements of herds and households as
they seek fresh pastures. In contrast, transhumance describes seasonally predictable
moves of an entire herd between two distant and ecologically distinct pasture areas
that thrive according to climatic cycles, whether winter–summer or dry–wet season,
usually twice a year. Vertical transhumance involves migration from warmer lowland
valleys occupied in winter to cooler highland or mountainous valleys occupied in
summer. Horizontal transhumance involves migration between lands with different
seasonal properties, often from a desertic region that can be occupied only in the wet
season to a more fertile region that can provide grazing in the dry season. In this way,
the practice of transhumance creates a bipolar pattern of land use that establishes an
oscillating rhythm of husbandry and social life.
Pastoralism in general involved the raising of domestic livestock on natural pastures,
whether for subsistence based on milk and meat and other supplements or for mar-
ket sale. The nomadic factor in pastoralism stems from the need for herders to move
grazing animals frequently in order to seek out new pastures and avoid the degradation
of any one locale. The drier the region, the more important routine mobility becomes,
while the wetter and richer the pasture, the more sedentary the form of husbandry can
become. In this regard, the Turkana of East Africa practice very frequent, short-distance
movements, in the wet season amalgamating their herds of camels, cattle, goats, sheep,
and donkeys, and in the dry season splitting their herds into complementary herding
groups to take advantage of available grazing in the lowlands or highlands. But the Loita
Maasai in southern Kenya, who inhabit a wetter and richer highland region, concentrate
around semipermanent homesteads and move their herds rarely, and then mainly into
the forest in the dry season. Contrast these two strategies of pastoral mobility, along the
drier–wetter and nomadic–sedentary continua, with a classic pattern of transhumance.
The Mediterranean shores ringed by highlands and mountains have been the sites
of transhumance for thousands of years. Ferdinand Braudel (1972, 85–95), in his
description of economic life in the sixteenth century, pointed out the distinction
between “normal transhumance” and “inverse transhumance”: in the first, sheep
farmers and shepherds who normally live in the lowlands (e.g., the salty Camargue
in the lower Rhone valley in southern France) seek out mountainous pastures in the
summer (e.g., moving to the area of Arles); in the second, shepherds who inhabit
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1403
2 T R A N S H U M A N CE

the highlands flow with their flocks down to the narrow coastal plain in the winter
and early spring to access markets. In Castilian transhumance, distances of up to
800 kilometers were traveled by “itinerant” sheep which, after spending the summer
months in their mountain homes in Leon or Segovia, descended to the warm meadows
and wide plains of the south in La Mancha, Extremadura, and Andalusia, near Cordoba
or Seville.
Transhumance routes were well marked, but there were conflicts between profes-
sional shepherds and sheep herds and neighboring villages and farms. Nonetheless,
transhumance was highly institutionalized and was protected by rules and safeguards,
sometimes including taxes on stock and regulations on the distribution of grazing areas.
The system of long-distance movement of herds was affected by the combination of ani-
mal rearing with farming, the intensiveness of which determined whether pastures were
locally available. Moves to distant pastures represented a solution to inclement winter
weather or the disappearance of local grazing lands to cultivation. In this sense, there is
a division of labor between sedentary agriculture and pastoral practice, with transhu-
mance often carried out not by herd owners themselves but by hired shepherds. Today,
the formalization of land tenure and the expansion of fields and mountain recreation at
the expense of grazing lands has limited transhumance, but the practice continues in a
modified form throughout the Mediterranean basin. Netting (1981) reported that many
Swiss alpine villages combined privately held farms in valleys with common summer
access for commune members in mountain meadows and forests (Ostrom 1990). Net-
ting observed that, in very recent years in Switzerland, intensive animal husbandry in
mountain valleys is made possible by the use of mountain pastures in the Jura and the
Alps for summer grazing, usually limited to commune members, by herds that descend
en masse in the autumn in a festival celebrated by all.
Transhumance within the same commune or region by herd owners with
long-established rights in both highlands and valleys involves less conflict than
between more distant summer and winter pastures. In the Sarhad Plateau of south-
eastern Iran, great variation in and the unpredictability of rainfall, along with great
temperature oscillations, made nomadic migrations by the Yarahmadzai Baluch with
their camel and sheep herds largely contingent on regional environmental factors
(Salzman 2000: ch. 7). In a Baluchi camp of fourteen tents and forty-three individuals
described by Salzman, frequent moves of herds and households were made to avoid
extremes of hot and cold and to find pasturage, nine moves were made over one
seven-month period, and eleven moves over another ten-month period; there were
very few in the winter months when the camp hunkered down but more frequent
ones in the spring (Salzman 2000: ch. 7). Care for animals was an important factor in
mobility, but engagement in wheat farming in the summer months, date arboriculture,
wage labor and sociability were also considered.
This complex pattern of opportunistic nomadic movement can be contrasted to the
fairly predictable transhumance practiced elsewhere in Iran, for instance, among the
Basseri who traveled a “tribal road” between annual summer and winter travels (Barth
1961) or among the Qashqai of southwestern Iran, described by Lois Beck (1991). The
five large tribes of the Qashqai occupied neighboring summer pastures at an altitude
of 2,000–3,000 meters in the Zagros Mountains north of Shira, and winter pastures
 T R A N S H U M A N CE 3

at lower altitudes of 600–1,500 meters south of Shiraz (Beck 1991, 12–13). With their
horses, camels, goats, and sheep, the ninety households from the Qermezi subtribe
spent winters in close proximity to one another west of Shiraz but were more dispersed
in the summer. No one migration route was consistently taken, since headmen had to
negotiate access to camping sites and water. They also had to seek permission from
government representatives, given that government land reforms had ignored nomad
interests and the nationalization of pastures had created disputes with locals and offi-
cials (Beck 1991, 98–99).
In the high mountain pastures of western Tibet, pastoralists with their horses, yaks,
goats, and sheep do not move far in any single year, given the relative uniformity of
pasture growth. Rather, they remain in a home base for the three seasons of winter,
spring, and summer, living off the plants left standing at the end of a growing season.
But in late August or early September most but not all move with their herds to a fall
encampment a few days’ walk away, which has been left ungrazed, where they build
up their animals’ fat stores in the three crucial months before winter (Goldstein and
Beall 1990, 60–61). In the traditional pastoral system of the Pala region, there were
no “common” lands as such, since allocations of pasturelands were rotated between
Tibetan herding families by the Panchen Lama, who was the lord of the region, the
aim being an adjustment of herd sizes to available pastures (Goldstein and Beall 1990,
69–70). The Mongolian nomads of the Altai Mountains mainly herd sheep and goats
but also keep yaks, horses, and camels, the last used mainly for transport, under similar
constraints as are found in Tibet (Goldstein and Beall 1994).
Despite the very high altitude at which Tibetan and Mongolian herders live, their
relatively static residence over three seasons in one locale, combined with a single
move to a second locale of reserved pastures for the winter period, represents a
quite unique form of horizontal transhumance. Horizontal transhumance involves
moves between regions that offer seasonally distinct resources not engendered by the
vertical ecological contrasts of mountains and plains. An important case of horizontal
transhumance occurs in West Africa, where a series of intermingling pastoralists move
northward into the Sahara and Sahel with the wet season and then southward into
the Sudanian area beyond the right bank of the Niger River. In a symbiotic systems
of complementary range use, Tuareg with camel and goat herds move further north
into the desert with the rains and later retreat into the Sahelian zone when it is vacated
by Fulani cattle herders, who in turn move across the Niger River to benefit from
the riverine grasses and stubble from farmers’ fields (Homewood 2008, 83). The
Doukoloma Fulbe of Mali travel hundreds of kilometers between grazing areas from
north to south, their movements dictated by the cycle of rainfall, the rise and fall of the
Bani River, a tributary of the Niger that they must cross with their cattle herds, and the
agricultural cycle (Grayzel 1990, 48–54). In October, Fulbe herds move into the forest
near Doukoloma, north of the river, in order to avoid damaging the ripening millet
crop, but after the harvest, in November, the same herds are welcomed by farmers to
graze on the stubble and to fertilize their fields. The harvest comes later in villages
south of the river, but in December and January, with permission of village leaders, a
large proportion of the herds begins the transhumant southward crossing of the river
to seek grazing and water, first among villages near the river, then to regions hundreds
4 T R A N S H U M A N CE

of kilometers farther south, up to the Koro region of the Bani River. Back home, the
remaining cattle graze locally but, up to March, many still cross the river to seek better
pastures. Ending the hot, dry season, rain begins to fall in the south in June, stimulating
herds to move north to avoid mud and mosquitos, the first to cross the river northward
being plow oxen needed to prepare the fields near Doukoloma. As the river rises, herds
hasten to cross, so by mid-July all the livestock have returned, creating a moment of
celebration, especially famous in the Mecina region of Mali, which is a national event.
Herds remain corralled in their villages up to September, as the crops grow, until
they again prepare to move into the forests in October. Although the Fulbe represent
a scant percentage of the population, they tend the majority of the herds and their
transhumant movements make it possible for the remainder of livestock to subsist in
and near their home villages throughout the year. The great West African north–south
transhumance, described here, represents a major regional transethnic strategy of
exploiting variation in seasonal resources between the drier north and the wetter
south, by moving southward into harvested fields with the dry season and northward
with the rains, in some cases into enclosures and in other cases to wet season grazing
further north. Cycles of rainfall underpin the intricate negotiations between herders
and farmers to maintain mutually beneficial management of crops and livestock, a
form of complementary land use that is progressively being undermined—along with
the political conditions necessary to facilitate the great transhumance—by the formal-
ization of land rights for farmers, dam projects that will eliminate swamp grazing by
lowering river levels, and programs of pastoral sedentarization by governments of the
region.
Transhumance is an ancient pastoral strategy for benefiting from geographical
variation in grazing resources by moving livestock herds between distant pastures on a
seasonal basis. Although variation in pasture quality is always a factor in mobile animal
husbandry, transhumance is distinguished from nomadic and seminomadic pastoral-
ism by its predictable, pulse-like, cyclical movements entrained by seasonal pasture
growth, in contrast to the more frequent, unpredictable, and opportunistic movements
associated with the latter system of pastoral production. Vertical transhumance exploits
the different ecological niches provided by mountain pastures and lowland fields,
respectively exploited in summer and winter, whether in or near the Mediterranean
coastal mountains, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Atlas, the many outgrowths of the
Himalayas, or in the Andes, where one adaptation involves the exploitation of distinct
altitudinal zones by many camelid llama and alpaca herds (Browman 1990). Horizontal
transhumance makes use of factors of environmental variation, apart from altitude,
such as seasonal differences in climate and temperature, as in southeastern Iran or
the West African north–south gradient in rainfall, from the arid Sahara, the semiarid
Sahel, to the more humid Sudanean climates and grassland regimes. However, by
focusing on the ecology of transhumance we should not forget that social, economic,
and political factors are often critical in determining access of pastoral communities to
resources.

SEE ALSO: Animal Management and Stock Keeping; Deserts and Desertifica-
tion; Ecological Anthropology; Environmental Institutions and Governance; Land
 T R A N S H U M A N CE 5

Rights; Migration; Mountain Environments; Nomads/Pastoralists and Development;

Pastoralism; Pastoralists; Political Ecology; Property

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

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Beck, Lois. 1991. Nomad: A Year in the Life of a Qashqa’i Tribesman in Iran. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Braudel, Fernand. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Browman, David L. 1990. “High Altitude Camelid Pastoralism of the Andes.” In The World of
Pastoralism: Herding Systems in Comparative Perspective, edited by John G. Galaty and Douglas
L. Johnson, 323–52. New York: Guilford Press.
Galaty, John G. 2013. “The Indigenisation of Pastoral Modernity: Territoriality, Mobility and
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Goldstein, Melvyn C., and Cynthia M. Beall. 1990. Nomads of Western Tibet: The Survival of a
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