Word: tribe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bush, a more primitive mercy than the King's justice awaited him. The "blackfellows" regarded white men as the returned ghosts of their own tribesmen. As a ghost, Graham was welcomed into a tribe, claimed as a husband by a lubra (squaw) and became a hunter of goanna lizard, a grubber for grubs. Author Gibbings' narrative suggests that to a lively Irishman this simple life was simply and literally a bore. Eventually, Graham gave himself up to "the authorities." But after he was back in irons, rumors came through to the New South Wales penal settlements that there...
...when Persia's modern-minded Reza Shah Pahlavi began his reign, set about freeing the women of their veils, ordered the men into Western suits and decided that nomadic existence was "a blot on his progressive country." Harried by the Shah's troops, the nomadic tribes "settled," but in 1941, when Reza was forced to abdicate after the Allies moved into Persia, the tribes went back to their ancient way of life. They stuck to it until a few years ago, when British Author Vincent (The Wise Man from the West) Cronin, who visited the Persian interior...
...Hakluyt, for nowadays history is considered more "creative" if it is presented as fiction. Cronin has recast historic events in a form which the Persians call dastan, i.e., "near-factual history, almost myth." But the hero of this dastan will be remembered: Ghazan Khan, nomad chief of a tribe that Cronin calls the Falqani and a man hopelessly caught in the paradoxes of progress...
...planning once again to resettle his people, he leads them into the uplands for the summer, and they resume their way of life-shearing their sheep, weaving cloth and dazzling-colored rugs. Ghazan knows that this summer idyl cannot last and that by fall he must lead his tribe back to its winter grazing grounds, to face the 20th century in the shape of the modern Persian army. Then, to fight or not to fight, that is the question to which Ghazan desperately seeks an answer...
Nothing is as it seems. He admires the West and progress. But the West's emissaries-an international aid mission-are uncomprehending and horrified by his tribe's backwardness, illiteracy and impractical preoccupation with poetry; civilization's missionaries depart, leaving behind two artificially inseminated ewes and predicting bigger and better herds, which the Falqani do not want. Throughout his country, Ghazan seems to see only a bizarre blend of ancient Eastern evils and too-hasty Westernization-hunger and corruption, opium smokers in grey flannel suits, profiteering officials who "displayed the refrigerator in their drawing room like...