Informal Social Control of the Desert: Falconers of Qatar

Hunting using falcons, an activity referred to as Falconary, is a popular sport among the native Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula. It consists of simply training a wild falcon that is usually brought by merchandisers from Persia, Egypt, or as far as Serbia, to be able to hunt down migrating birds during the winter season. It is a sport that is usually affiliated with manhood and pride within its lovers, and with that comes the culture of falconers.

Social control can be both formal and informal. It can be the laws and regulations written in the books or social values and beliefs that a certain society have. Murder and theft are considered crimes because they are written in law as deviances that must be punished for. However, disrespecting your elders is an informal social deviant, yet a person will not be necessarily punished for doing so.

Within the falconers there are many informal rules that has been around for a long time, and that set the boundaries of norms of the hobby. For example, when hunting, a hunter can claim the prey bird before he even finds it. This is true when a hunter finds the signs of footprints of the prey bird in the desert, and therefore gets clear evidence that there is a bird he can hunt near by. When that happened the prey “belongs” to the person who first saw the footprint, and when the bird is finally been seen, he has the saying on what to do with it.

Hunters positively sanction those who obey such desert rules. For example, last week my brother found a bird named Kurwan in the Southern desert of Doha. However, after a few minutes a car drove to him and he was told that the Kurwan does not belong to him because another hunter was tracking the footprints since the morning. Therefore, my brother accepted to give back the prey to its rightly hunter. By doing so, he got a positive sanction when the other hunters came and asked him to join them for dinner that night as a gesture of respect to his generosity.