Desert Culture & Structure

Desert culture is nomadic. Desert culture is combative. Desert culture is traditional. Desert culture has a plethora of characteristics that are specific to it, and though the traits may describe anything from agriculture to warfare, they all root from one master characteristic, the amount, specifically the scarcity, of water. Peoples of the desert are nomadic, because they need to move for water. Desert culture is combative, because of the competition for water. Desert culture is traditional, because, when survival lies on knifepoint, due to the lack of water, tradition can hold you aloft.

Sure, there seem to be other things that affect the desert. Nomadic peoples move around to follow food, not water. However, if there was more water, there would be more game, and the wandering would no longer be necessary, as there would always be plenty of food in the local area. The violent streak has another explanation too; the book Triumph of the Nomads talks of the fighting and warlike nature of the nomads, and attributes most of the fights to revenge, for other previous conflicts, a long, bloody, back-and-forth. Though the reasons for fighting are, at the surface, revenge, following the string of attacks and retributions reveals original reasons, that all share a common theme: one mob consuming or robbing the resources that another mob considers theirs, be it food, land, or even women. All of these can be linked to water: food is more plentiful when water is plentiful, land contains water or water-based resources, and women are part of the population, which is limited by the amount of water. Because water is so scarce, these crimes are much more important, and retribution is quicker to come.

All of the characteristics and reasons are heavily connected in various ways. The fighting of the nomads can be explained by the reasons above, but they can also be explained by the fact that the conflict limits population, which is actually healthy for the group, because of the lack of enough water to support a large population. In Triumph of the Nomads, there’s a statistic about war casualties, “In an average year of those two decades the north-eastern part of Arnhem Land lost through warfare one person in every 300.” But many of these interconnected causes and effects seem somewhat unwieldy in application. It’s doubtful that the nomads think, “Oh, our population is larger than our water supply, lets go to war to kill off our people.” The way it happens is more long term and is by trial and error, or evolution. The groups that are too peaceful, and thus too large in population, run out of water and food, and die out. The remaining groups that survive and contribute to the desert nomad stereotype are the groups that are warlike enough to keep a sustainable population. In the same way, tough, fit people tend to survive more often then kinder people, in such a competitive and challenging environment. Thus the desert stereotype is tougher and more athletic.