What is it about?
Bedouin conceal the details of their tribal organization by naming their clans and lineages after animals and plants. By giving such names to their component groups, they break the semantic links between ancestors and living people. This makes it harder for outsiders to use tribal pedigrees to clearly identify these groups and take advantage of internal cleavages.
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Why is it important?
This argument presents a new view of Middle Eastern tribes, showing that they expand by attracting clients and contract when they lose political power. They are not just produced by biological reproduction; they are politically generated social formations. Each tribe has a core of kin, surrounded by a periphery of clients and allies.
Perspectives
My hope is to improve scholarly understanding of tribal peoples in the Middle East. Their names for their families and tribes are important and deserve study. In the nineteenth century, scholars thought that the animal names that Bedouin gave to their kinship groups were evidence that these tribal people were primitives. They said that the Bedouin literally believed that their ancestors were wolves or falcons. These notions have been discarded, but the question of why some Bedouin tribes are called "Wolf" or "Falcon" still has not been answered. In my book I weigh the explanations that other writers have suggested and offer a new explanation of my own. I think that, in every society, the names that people give to their children and their families make good sense when understood in the proper context. I am trying to apply this thought to the Arab case.
Dr. William Charles Young
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Group Names, Bedouin Social Organization, and the Flow of Information, January 2024, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004690370_008.
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