ABSTRACT
This chapter is about transhumance, the way people move animals around in relation to the seasonal availability of grazing land and usually within a broader farming system. More deeply, the aim is to understand how these movements play a part in people’s social lives, and especially how they bring together individuals of different age and gender groupings so that future life-cycle events may be learnt about. It is about meetings which are less frequent than those of a routine kind (school, workplace, home and recreation), which last for a few days or several weeks, and which are among strangers or at least among people who do not meet in daily life. These are associations that come about in relation to the annual subsistence cycle at particular times of the year and on journeys or when a part of a family is moving around.
