The Changes And Adaptation Of The Settled Herdsmen

Herdsmen’s settlement to the rural areas is a key action to raise their production and improve their living conditions. The change of their lifestyle from nomadic way of life to the settlement in the rural areas is bound to lead to a variety of corresponding changes in the organizational form, modes of production and cultural education in the pastoral area. Herdsmen have to adapt to the social and economic development after their settlement in the new places. To thoroughly solve the problem of poverty in the northwest pastoral areas, to improve the herdsmen’s living standard and better the ecological environment, the herdsmen settlement policy has been implemented in the northern and southern pastoral areas of Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang. Herdsmen settlement project inevitably involves population migration and the change of their place of residence, their trade and their way of living.Therefore, herdsmen settlement is a huge social transformation stage, a transformation of their national culture, which herdsmen need to walk for a long time to go through and adapt to. Settled, the herdsmen have their own land to cultivate.Their settlements have the basic construction of infrastructure and service facilities and the herdsmen’s living environment has been improved greatly. The herdsmen are slowly beginning to change their way of life, modes of production and livelihood.In this paper, through reviewing the literature within the framework of the theories in ethnology and anthropology, by using the cultural change theory and social vicissitude theory as the instruction, by taking Wulezett village of Nairenker township in Hoxud county, Mongolia Autonomous Prefecture of Bayinguoleng as an example, I took the household survey and adopted in-depth interview method, mainly doing an investigation with Wulezett village of Nairenker township into such deep-seated problems as the social background of herdsmen settlement, their present living situation, the implementation of the herdsmen settlement process, the changes of the settled herdsmen’s way of life and their modes of production, and their adaptation to their settlement. At the end of the paper, I put forward some personal thinking to perfect the model of the herdsmen settlement, hoping to find the“herdsmen settlement" policy can really be for "the people" and play a practical and effective role for the improvement and development of the economy, society and cultural life of the herdsmen at large.