Professor William Irons

Willian Irons was an Ethnographer of Yomut Turkmen and Anthropologist of Nomadic Peoples.  “Everything I thought I knew at the end of my first year of fieldwork was wrong,” William Irons said to me when first I met him in Tehran, at the British Institute of Persian Studies, in 1967.

Irons was in the course of his second stint of research among the Yomut Turkmen of the Gorgon Plain, to the east of the Caspian Sea, having after his first stint of fieldwork taken a study break of several months at the University of London. I had just arrived to Iran to begin my fieldwork in Baluchistan, and I was impressed by Irons’ observation. As in so many other things, Irons proved to be correct, at least as measured by my experience in Baluchistan. Irons’ reports of his findings among the Turkmen are striking, both because of the interest of his discoveries, and the clarity and persuasiveness of his accounts. Written by Philip Carl Salzman Chair, Awards Committee.

His written works include: 

• 1971 “Variation in Political Stratification among the Yomut Turkmen,” Anthropological Quarterly 44 (3): 143-156. 
• 1972 “Variation in Economic Organization: A Comparison of the Pastoral Yomut and the Basseri,” in Perspectives on Nomadism, Wm. Irons and N. Dyson-Hudson, editors. Leiden: Brill.
• 1974 “Nomadism as a Political Adaptation: The Case of the Yomut Turkmen”, American Ethnologist 1: 635-658.
• 1975 The Yomut Turkmen: A Study of Social Organization Among a Central Asian Turkic Speaking Population. Anthropological      Paper Number 58, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
• 1979a “Political Stratification among Pastoral Nomads,” in Pastoral Production and Society, L’Equipe Ècologie et anthropologie des      sociétés pastorale, editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 1979b “Cultural and Biological Success,” in Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, N. A.      Chagnon and Wm. Irons, editors. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury.
• 1994 “Why Are the Yomut Not More Stratified?” in Pastoralists at the Periphery: Herders in a Capitalist World, C. Chang and H. A. Koster, editors. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.