“the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”¹

The last chapter explored the mobile pastoralist social origins of religions deemed monotheistic, based on the worship of Ahura Mazda and YHWH, respectively. It appears that social and spatial mobility, characteristics of these religions, can be reasonably linked to the same features in mobile pastoralist societies. In mobile pastoralist contexts, spatial mobility underlies social mobility: individual freedom of choice is predicated on (and enforced by) the physical freedom to “walk away” from society. This freedom (and the connected responsibility) to choose whether or not to belong to a community appears to have shaped certain building blocks of these religions deemed monotheistic including, emphatic concepts of “Truth”, perceptions of “incompatibility” with other religions (primarily those deemed polytheistic) and perspectives that separate social or “ethnic” identities from religious identities. The last chapter explained that the freedom of individuals in mobile pastoralist societies is balanced by the constant need for survival in challenging social and physical landscapes. The category of religions deemed monotheistic also appears to be linked to the category of mobile pastoralist societies through the significance of violence to the struggles of biological and cultural competition. Key to this dissertation is the role of the natural environments that contextualize these competitive processes. This chapter will examine the category of “agricultural marginal landscapes” within which mobile pastoralist societies appear to develop.

Calling this category of environmental zones “agriculturally marginal landscapes” points to the difficulty of specifying a set of ecological features to describe the various contexts in which mobile pastoralist societies function. In Pastoralists Salzman writes, “Nomadism is found in both isolated, remote, and unpopulated regions and in more crowded and developed regions. Some nomadic populations occupy remote regions, environmentally marginal and distant from centers of civilization and power…But other nomadic populations…migrate through regions of agricultural settlements and pass and even stop at major cities.”² This observation emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of the category of “mobile pastoralist societies” and the logical diversity that might be expected of a category that encompasses the various landscapes that contextualize them. By highlighting the pragmatic responsiveness of mobile pastoralist societies to physical and social landscapes, Frachetti’s Non-Uniform Complexity Theory articulates the diversity of institutional developments that underlie this heterogeneity. Frachetti and Salzman seem to agree that the variety of mobile pastoralist societies is linked to the range of different environmental contexts in which they function. The diverse character of ecological conditions, within which mobile pastoralist societies survive, supports Frachetti’s notion that the thread of continuity across the category is constant and strategic “Environmental Pragmatism.”