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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Boir Aḥmad is the territory of the largest tribe (or confederation of tribes) of Kohkīlūyah in South Iran, located roughly south of the Bakhtīyārī and west of the Qashqā'ī. Its population (75,000 in 1966) subsists on a mixed economy of agriculture and animal husbandry, which in the highly segmented mountainous topography necessitates a variety of nomadic and transhumant adaptations.
The political position within the wider Iranian context of the area presently called Boir Aḥmad has had a variegated history. Under the rule of the Atābegs of Lur-i Buzurg (12th-14th cent.) it was fairly well integrated and administered, with a flourishing economy and a largely sedentery population. In the following centuries, less stable "anarchic" forms of political organization seem to have prevailed, until the Qājār rulers tied the area to the center by appointing the local khāns as tax collectors and through interfering in their power struggles.
An abridged version of this paper was read at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Binghamton, New York, November, 1972.
1. National Census of Population and Housing, November, 1966; Vol. 138: Kohkiluyeh Shahrestan, and Vol. 164: Ahmad, Boyer and Kohkiluyeh Farmandarikol (Tehran: Plan Organization, Iranian Statistical Centre, 1968)Google Scholar.
2. R. Löffler und Erika Friedl, "Eine ethnographische Sammlung von den Boir Ahmad, Sudiran," Archiv fur Volkerkunde, Vol. 21 (Wien, 1967), pp. 97-99.
3. For summaries of the history see: V. Minorsky, "Lur" and "Lur-i Buzurg," Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. III (London, 1936), pp. 44-48. M. S. Ivanov, Plemena Farsa (Moskva, 1961), pp. 60-61. The archaeological evidence substantiates this point.
4. H. H. Fasā'ī, Tārīkh-i Fārsnāmah-i Nāṣirī (Shiraz, 1314), pp. 271-273. M. Bāver, Kūhgilūyeh va Īlāt-an (Gachsaran, 1324), pp. 93-99.
5. The fieldwork which provided the following material was gratefully supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
6. R. Löffler, "The Representative Mediator and the New Peasant," American Anthropologist, Vol. 73, No. 5 (October, 1971), pp. 1077-1091.
7. N. A. Naderi, īl Bahme'ī (Tehran: Institute of Social Research and Studies, University of Tehran, Tribal Section, Report No. 7, 1347), p. 121.
