In recent coverage of Iraq, I often encounter the word “tribe.” I.e. “Sunni tribes.”
I know the term may smack of an outmoded view of non-western cultures, and carries negative connotations. But, in a strictly anthropological and historical sense, my understanding of “tribe” is that it refers to very small, pre-state polities.
Aren’t these IraqiArabs people who live in very large cities and permanent farms. In fact, this area is exactly where non-tribal, urban, state-centered living began, right?
Or am I missing something. Does tribe have another meaning that has a direct translation in Arabic.
Sunni is a subset of Islam, albeit, the largest; so describe it as a ‘tribe’ is wrong. Like describing Catholics or Jews as a tribe.
Tribes are more accurately extended families, where members may not necessarily be blood relations, but they are all seen as ‘family’ in the wider sense. Native American tribes are a good example.
In this sense, a tribe is a familial group that exists *outside *of a state, organisationally rather than geographically. Whether they physically reside within state boundaries or live in cities is irrelevant because the individuals’ primary social affiliation is to the tribe. If the tribe in turn gives loyalty/allegiance to some greater state that doesn’t overrule the tribe, it’s an additional commitment.
That’s the reason these groups are termed tribes, not simply ethnicities. Contrast them with, say, Irish ethnicity in the US. While their are cultural and genealogical links between ethnic Irish, their isn’t some Irish council who dictate behaviour and custom and decide when the Irish don’t need to follow the law of the US and when they must follow laws in addition to those of the US. Yet that is precisely what the Iraqi tribes are like.
Whether tribe is outmoded or not, there isn’t an alternative, common English word that accurately captures the dynamics of these groups. They are not simply ethnicities or clans, They are effectively sub-nations with varying degrees of commonality and conflict with the larger nation and geographic ranges that commonly cross national borders. They are tribes.
“Tribe” is a word that has more than one meaning, and its use is often contested. The original sense refers to a group of people forming a community, and claiming a descent from a common ancestor (who may well be mythical). Tribes can co-exist with states; the twelve tribes of Israel co-existed with the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Simlarly, in the Roman republic the patricians were divided into three tribes, and (later) the plebians into thirty. (In the Roman cases the common ancestry was pretty notional, and was well understood by everyone to be so.)
Essentially a tribe is a community which is distinct from the state, which doesn’t depend on the state to constitute it and which, often, enjoys some degree of recognition by, and accommodation within, the state. You could argue that a state which exempts, say, Quakers from compulsory military service is treating the Quakers as a tribe, except for the fact that Quakers are not defined, even notionally, by common ancestry. But with the accommodations afforded to native American nations in the US, “tribe” is probably accurate.
When somebody talks of “Sunni tribes”, they are not necessarily saying that all Sunnis form a tribe. They may be talking about a tribe defined conventionally, a community claiming common ancestry, or a number of such communities, which happen to be predominantly Sunni. Are their tribes in this sense in Iraq, and are some of the Sunni? I have no idea, but it’s not implausible.
“Tribe” is sometimes pejorative if used to suggest that the people concerned have a qualified or conditional loyalty to the state, the wider community, etc because their primary loyalty is to the narrower community which is their tribe.
There are about 150 different tribes (or more, depending on how you define it) in Iraq, most of them part of one of nine tribal federations. Iraqi tribes are led by “sheiks”, an Arabic word meaning leader, and, especially in the more rural parts of Iraq, tribal identification is important. The tribes exist alongside the state, and, historically, one of the roles of the sheik has been to act as an intermediary between the individual and the central government.
If you’re interested, here’s a briefing from the Council on Foreign Relations:
I worked long ago with a fellow from Nigeria, and if someone asked him what tribe he was from, he would indignantly say “ethnic group, mon! Ethnic group!” (Yoruba, BTW).
What I read about the middle east, it’s not exactly ethnic groups - perhaps a better description and less loaded word would be “clans” like Scottish highlanders, but the article uses that for subgroups of tribes. (Our view of “tribes” is probably coloured by more primitive cultures like North American Indians, and others more close to hunter-gatherer).
In a culture where law is arbitrary or non-existent, the only people you can depend on are family. The article describes how this works its way up from family groups to several large groups. The people tend to marry inside their clan (or kham) thus ensuring a larger group of people who will stick together when times are tough.
Various groups that ruled Iraq have tried to reduce the influence of the tribes, but that’s a two-edged sword. They eliminate a competing power, but that does not mean the young hotheads listen to their new overlords. One item I read said that by marginalizing the heads (sheiks) the US military made it easier for al Qeda and other recruiters to go in to recruit new members. Normally the elders would stop this sort of activity. OTOH, encouraging their power means a competing, very anti-progress power structure.
Of course, all this organization falls apart when millions are tossed together in large cities. Education, jobs, commerce all throw together people from multiple groups and reduce time spent with and familiarity with extended family.
Another article I read about all this discussed this same issue in Palestine. It described a much similar social structure there, and said that the underlying cause of a lot of the Palestinian internal issues - Hamas vs. PLO, even the vicious infighting in Gaza after the split - were as much tied up with tribe vs tribe as with politics or religious fanaticism.
In fact, Jews sometimes describe themselves as a tribe. It is a more accurate designation than religion or ethnicity - Judaism is not simply a religion (as you can be an athiest and a Jew at the same time), and it is not simply an ethnicity (you can convert to Judaism; there are Jews both Black and White).
It isn’t necessarily a perjorative term. In anthropology, “tribe” often refers to a pre-state measure of social hierarchy (band, tribe, chiefdomship, state, in that order), but that is not its only meaning. In the modern world, it can mean something like ‘a primary self-identity, based on a shared fictive ancestry and/or a religion, which members may join by adherence to communal norms and the acceptance of existing members’.
The word in Arabic is Qabila, and it means precisely tribe, as in the English of being a group of the supposed descendants of a common ancestor and have the political ties. The Sheikh, that has the basic meaning of the elder in Arabic, is the leader. In the Arab east it is very lively in rural places and in urbanisations that have more recent urbanised peoples.
It is not incorrect as a usage for the tribes of the Iraq and the Jordan.
He was right. That is because the meaning is not right.
Yorubu is a language or language family. There were Yorubu tribes and kingdoms, but not one single idea of Yorubu, which is from the Europeans.
Yorubu as united by language is an ethnic group.
It is not hard to understand the difference I think.
Various groups that ruled Iraq have tried to reduce the influence of the tribes, but that’s a two-edged sword. They eliminate a competing power, but that does not mean the young hotheads listen to their new overlords. One item I read said that by marginalizing the heads (sheiks) the US military made it easier for al Qeda and other recruiters to go in to recruit new members. Normally the elders would stop this sort of activity. OTOH, encouraging their power means a competing, very anti-progress power structure.
Of course, all this organization falls apart when millions are tossed together in large cities. Education, jobs, commerce all throw together people from multiple groups and reduce time spent with and familiarity with extended family.
[quote=“Malthus, post:9, topic:690976”]
In fact, Jews sometimes describe themselves as a tribe. It is a more accurate designation than religion or ethnicity - Judaism is not simply a religion (as you can be an athiest and a Jew at the same time), and it is not simply an ethnicity (you can convert to Judaism; there are Jews both Black and White).
[quote]
There is no thing in the sociological concept of the ethnic group that makes a difference there and with the supposed blood basis that is most often behind the idea of the tribe, it fits more badly than the idea of the ethnic group to the situation of the Jewish identities.
Jews believe they have common ancestry. For example, the Black Jews of Etheopia believe they are descended from the union of Solomon and Sheba.
“Ethnic group” typically implies an actual commonality, rather than a fictive or ancient historical one. Moreover, typically one cannot convert to becomming a different ethnicity by an act of will - you are born into it. A tribe, by contrast, can adopt members.
I’ve heard the Angles and the Saxons (whence “Anglo-Saxon”) referred to as Germanic “tribes” in a historical sense, but they no longer exist as cohesive ethnic groups. There is no Saxon Council or Angle Family Reunion anymore. Anyone with UK ancestry is almost certainly descended from the Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Romans, and Celts in some mix that is nearly impossible to untangle.
This is not correct at all in the usage in anthropologue studies:
You have made up this distinction. The acceptance of any outsiders to a tribe or to an ethnicity is not a thing that is conistent to the deifnitions or the practices, but it depends on the culture.
Yes, as I suggested too, “tribe” is a loaded word which conveys different images, especially in western culture. (Hence the Nigerian’s indignation) Maybe “groupings” is as close to a valid name as we can come. The article mentions several local names (like “kham”) which probably only have approximate translations which in English tend to convey a different image than the real one, since we have no direct equivalent.
the point is, the social structure is rural, pre-industrial. As people move to the big cities, get thrown in closely with people from other “tribes” and separated from their traditional structure - as I understand it, this structure breaks down. A few generations and much of it is left behind, perhaps like immigrants from the “old country” to America who no longer appreciate or care about their grandparents’ traditions, prejudices or feuds - except, every so often these Iraqi urban dwellers may go back to visit that extended family.
After all, everyone recognizes that nepotism is not always the best way to do business; your own relatives are not always the best or most honest at what your business does. In trade colleges and university, or working in factories, you meet a diverse group of people and families are no longer that important. The dictators that have fallen over the last few decades were doing more to modernize the middle east than democracy ever does - by ruthlessly suppressing the competing traditional power structures’ hold over the people, negating the power of the mullahs and sheiks. .
You have not understood. In Iraq it is in fact the tribe.
Khams (in my arabic it is khums) merely means fifth (5=Khamis). It is not hard to find equivalent.
The difference made is with the Yorubu, who are more the equivalent of the word Arab, a language ethnicity. There is no ‘tribe’ that is Yorubu, but there were Yorubu tribes, like Arab tribes.
The urbanisations of many of the population is still new, not generations old, and you are presuming more loss of rural habit than is the reality.
It is a common compliant among the old city families of the ruralisation of the cities in the last decades. It is not required for you to be politically correct about the word tribe in Iraq.
I’m just agreeing with he OP (and the Yorubu fellow) that “tribe” in the west has certain connotations of backwardness that are not applicable to more settled and civilized groups. The Yorubu man, no doubt with a British education, bristled at a term that seemed to equate him with bushmen and pygmies wandering the wilds - which is an implication that I and the OP seem to pick up on, most likely because its most common application in the west is for more primitive cultures. The in-depth description of traditional middle eastern social structures in fully settled areas is obvious very new, not having been at the forefront of public attention until recently.
If the Iraqis have no problem being described as “tribes” for lack of a better term in English, good on them for not being overly sensitive (or perhaps, being unaware or don’t care) of the nuances of English - not the language, but more the culture which attaches that baggage to the word “tribe”. (whereas the more closer to home groupings of the Scottish highlands use the word “clan” and conveys a more civilized social grouping to anyone who does not know any Scots .)
So I’ll take your obviously informed word for it that the locals who know English do not find the translation offensive.
Thank you.
You do not understand. I made no comment on the idea of a offensive nature of the word tribe.
It is the nature of the accuracy that I was making a comment on.
The Yorubu are no way a tribe and never were a tribe. to call them a tribe was always not correct, unless you called the Arabs all together a tribe or all German speakers together a tribe… It is here that the objection to the word tribe for them comes, that something that in no way was a tribe, but in fact like a european language nationality or ethnicity, like the Germans.
The tribes of the Iraq are factually tribes. It would not be an insult to call them what is their name in their own language, for Qabila means tribe in Arabic and has the same definition and meaning as in the English and the French, etc…
The political correctness is misplaced and false.
Of course it is not all the Iraqis who are members of a tribe.
The arabic wikipedia calls clan 3shira, a tenth, which is most often a sub-group of a Qabila.
Basing self-identity on an (ancient) shared ancestor, rather than on obvious visible characteristics of shared identity (shared language, shared external appearance, etc) is more commonly associated with the tribe than with ethnic groups.
Perhaps so, but your quote does not disprove the point I was making.
It states that ethnicity is based on “perceptions of shared social experience or ancestry”; however, not to put a fine point on it, I cannot think of many “ethnicities” that have as obviously varied a social experience or ancestry as Jews - a group which contains Black Africans and White Eastern Europeans.
All they share is a fictive ancestry, and a religious and cultural tradition.
Generally speaking, you cannot by an act of will join an “Ethnicity”. You cannot, even by learning French and becomming Canadian, “join” the pure lane Quebequois; you cannot, just by saying so, become a Black American. However, a Black American can become a Jew - just ask Sammy Davis Jr.
It is not of necessity to be able to join a tribe across any culture where the concept occurs, and for some ethnic ideas it is possible. you are making distinctions that are not supportable.
.)