Nomads of Luristan: History, Material Culture, and Pastoralism in Western Iran.

• Author: Watson, Patty Jo

This is a large (29 x 24 x 3.5 cm, weight 2 kg), beautiful, and sad volume. The 450 photographs depict a vanished lifeway, vanished, not because the people gradually changed their culture and society over the generations, as people normally do, but because a brutal campaign by Reza Shah Pahlavi from 1922 to 1933 destroyed their pastoral nomadic existence. Mountain passes were blocked by the army and migration through them was prohibited; black tents were confiscated and burned; Luri leaders were imprisoned, hanged, poisoned. Tribal members who survived were forced to settle in either their summer or their winter pastures to lead a marginal existence as sedentary peasants.

The wonderful photographs, many in color, presented in Mortensen's book, document some vestiges of Luri nomadic life as encountered in 1935 by Carl Gunnar Feilberg (during a four-month stay in Luristan) and in 1964 by Lennert Edelberg (during a one-month stay). Feilberg (born in 1894) was a geographer, and Edelberg (born in 1915), a botanist and geographer. Both were Danes who specialized in Western Asia. Feilberg, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, stayed with KAMPSAX engineers (in Bala Gariveh, southern Luristan) who had been contracted during the mid-1930s to build the Trans-Iranian railway. Edelberg lived with (and apparently at the expense of) the Danish Archaeological Expedition to the Hulailan region of Luristan in 1964. (The author of the volume under review - Inge Demant Mortensen - was also a member of the Danish Archaeological Expedition to Luristan [in 1974 and 1977]. Besides excavating a Paleolithic cave site, she recorded the monuments in several cemeteries created and used by Luri nomads over a two hundred year period.) Feilberg was appointed to the chair of human geography at the University of Copenhagen in 1949 (he died in 1972); Edelberg was a high-school teacher who also pursued a career as ethnographer and botanist (he died in 1981). Both men made collections of ethnographic materials and took many pictures of people, working and relaxing; of tents and winter dwellings; of tools, rugs, carpets, and other domestic equipment; of animals; and of weddings and musical instruments. The photographs and collections are curated at the Danish National Museum (Copenhagen) and at the Prehistoric Museum (Moesgaard).

Mortensen has wisely featured high-quality reproductions of Feilberg's and Edelberg's field photographs as well as archival photos of the items they...