(no subject)

[teddywolf]

Today I was in my Imperialism class. The discussion went around the pre-modern empires and the notion of tribe. Historical tribe, by my professor's definition, is bound by bonds of blood. He brought up the Jews as the first historical pre-modern empire and, among other things, said that this was based on Jewish tribal notions which had no conversions until the modern era.

I decided I had to speak up at this point. I mentioned we had a strong history of conversions, even though they were less common before the modern era. I brought up Ruth, I brought up the Khazars, and mentioned that a number of converts were notable in our history. He then said, "Then why are you a tribe? You can't be G-d's Chosen People by blood while allowing others to join your tribe, it's not logical." I mentioned the distinction between religiously Jewish and Jewish by birth; he said the notions were still incompatible.

Do bear in mind I like my professor. He makes me think and is academically rigorous.

His definition of tribe is as something immutable, you are born to it or not, or might get forced into it by conflict.

I want to present to him examples of tribes that accepted in outsiders to become "of the tribe". I will be doing some research into this because I want to present it to him - yes, I have been looking. If any of you know of an historical example, off the top of your head, something not involving a marriage or slavery, I would appreciate a pointer. It could be somebody joining a Native American tribe, or brought into a particular African tribe, or a Chinese family, a Germanic village, what-have-you - in fact, the more diverse the better. I want to show that a tribe may have been primarily about blood but also could be something a person chose and, under exceptional circumstances, be accepted into.

Please feel free to signal boost this.

Comments

[ceo]

In early American Colonial times there were numerous examples of white colonists running off to join a local Native American tribe. Indeed, colonists who were abducted by Native tribes frequently chose to stay, whereas Natives abducted by colonists never did. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus discusses this a bit.

[asimaiyat.livejournal.com]

... what about escaped/freed Black former slaves in the US marrying or converting into Native American tribes? I know there are some of those in my husband's family tree.

(hi, btw! I'm a friend of Ayesha's.)

(I hate having that kind of conflict in class, also. :( Last year it led to a very anxious office hours meeting with a professor where I had to really awkwardly explain what it means to me to allow for queer readings of classic texts.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Herman Lehmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Lehmann) leaps to mind. He was captured as a child and raised by Apaches. He became a Apache brave as an adult, but fled the band he lived with after he killed a medicine man. He then went to the Comanches and was adopted as an Comanche.

Your professor's definition of tribalism is a false one, based on incorrect 19th century ideas of race. It certainly wasn't true of the original three tribes of Romans, from whom we get the very word "tribe." Those tribes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe), the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, were groups of families who lived in the same area but who were not -- in general -- closely related.

It is true that there are identifiable ethnic groups which are strongly endogamous (only allowing marriage within the group) and which have thus come to be seen as a tribe using that 19th century definition. But as tribes go these are the exception rather than the rule. Most historical tribes have been endogamous, continuously bringing new genetic stock into the tribe via intermarriage and adoption from outside the tribe.

[candle-light.livejournal.com]

What about the Shakers?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Your professor is..... a normal human being.

I'll see if I can get you some information about what the Talmud says about conversion-- that would be considerably pre-modern.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The entire Roman Empire. At one point, TEN PERCENT of the Roman Empire was Jewish, the vast majority of it not being born Jewish.

[sethg]

Well, obviously, if your professor wants to define “tribe” in a way that excludes anything that you can convert or be adopted into, his statements are true as tautologies. I don’t see the sociological value in doing so, of course. I would even hazard to guess that an exclusive focus on family membership “by blood” is, itself, a modern idea.

Aside from the conversion narrative of Ruth in the Bible itself, references to conversion in Jewish legal documents go back to the Mishnah (see, for example, Kiddushin 4:1), which dates to the first or second century. When does this professor consider the “modern” period to have begun?

Among the American Indians of the Northeast (possibly elsewhere as well), children captured in wartime were adopted into families of the tribe that captured them, often to make up for the adoptive parents’ dead or missing children. In wars with English settlers, some white children were adopted into Indian tribes into this fashion. I recall from my undergrad days that one girl who was adopted in this way remained part of the tribe and later wrote a memoir (which, with each revised edition, became more anti-Indian), but I can’t remember her name and Wikipedia/Google/Amazon are not helping.

There is also the case of William Adams a.k.a. Miura Anjin, the Englishman who became a samurai and retainer to the shogun Togukawa Ieyasu in the 17th century; Adams was the model for the main character in James Clavell’s novel Shōgun.

[avram]

Have you asked him why he defines tribe as he does?

It's possible that Jews aren't a tribe. Whatever word ancient Jews used to describe themselves was probably Hebrew, and any translation of that word into English is going to be approximate. Jews don't actually have any sort of obligation to live their lives according to your professor's definitions.

The traditional view has it that Jews are all subscribers to the Covenant of Abraham. Now, Abraham himself was not a Jew by birth, so presumably the Jewish god has the power to make people Jews who weren't born Jewish. If the Jewish god has that power, then it makes sense that religious ritual can invoke that power, and transform non-Jews into Jews.

Though this invites a new argument about whether we should use the word Jew to describe people prior to the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians in the 8th century BCE.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

If he's not accepting Ruth, I'm not sure that any logical argument will work - she's pretty much the classic example.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Typo alert - I think the second time you mean "exogamous".

[thespian.livejournal.com]

Simply (though likely harshly) put, I think he's misinterpreting Morton Fried's work for his own bias. The issue is that if you accept Fried's concept, tribes bond/are created out of kinship. He's making an assumption that kinship MUST equal blood kin (consanguinity), and not sympathetic kinship (affinity), which even in pre-modern times, was simply not the case.

Oddly, I find this is refuted not by historical proof (of which there is plenty, and I suspect if your professor was female, and therefore part of the half of the gender that got swapped around like trading cards by these tribal states to avoid inbreeding, he would recognize more readily). Instead, it's more readily disproved by Dian Fossey, who was accepted, eventually by the mountain gorillas not because of any sort of modern conversion, but instead because eventually, the primate brains recognized her as a benefit to their tribe, and as a result, 'one of us'. That was not a 'modern conversion', but in point recognition that when a group recognizes an advantage to inclusion, they will absorb. It's an instinctual movement, not an intellectual one, as modern conversions are.

The problem isn't the stories that will convert his PoV are not the big showy stories like Ruth...they're the more day to day issues of genetics that pushed for the alliance theory of anthropology (if you interpret Fried's work under the work of Levi-Strauss' usage of kinship, you get a better idea of how blood kinship is often put aside for practical reasons, like not wanting to sleep with your sister).

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. Thank you.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

uhm. I don't get to talk anthropology much, and I was really into it once.

Just sayin'.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I do that all too often - not the kind of typo where your fingers hit the wrong keys (well, I do that too) but the kind where your brain pops out entirely the wrong word.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I will observe that any professor who dismisses actual facts because they do not fit his hypothesis is, misguided. Although Toynbee's famous "fossil" comment comes to mind.

There are a variety of answers to his question, btw, embedded in the religious literature.

[janice-lester.livejournal.com]

During the early days after the arrival of European traders and colonists in New Zealand (pre-1840), it was not unheard of for white men (I don't know of any women) to join local Māori tribes by choice. They did so because they were curious, because it was convenient (they were on the run from something) or simply because the lifestyle called to them. They lived with Māori, learned te reo (the language), married, had children, and sometimes took the facial tattoos which were/are a huge deal (Māori today remain hugely uncomfortable with outsiders appropriating their symbols--it's become a bit of a craze, cf Robbie Williams's arm tattoo--and I can't imagine they would have been prepared to put the full warrior's facial tattoos on someone who was not respected and felt to belong). They were termed Pākehā Māori (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pākehā_Māori), which could be viewed as a sign that they were regarded as different, as not entirely of the tribe, but could also be read as meaning that they brought something new to the tribe.

[redbird]

The obvious answer is that if the notions are incompatible, he should get rid of the abstraction (the specific definition of "tribe") rather than dismiss the evidence of what lots of people have done over time.

The snarkier answer is "Who is he to tell God how to choose his people?"

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Religion has to be logical? o.O Certainly people attempt to paint a double-coat of logical appearance over it. One could argue that all mythology is an attempt to make sense out of life, the universe, and everything (thank you Mr. Adams for summing it up so nicely), to make what appears to defy logic to in fact serve logical ends. Doesn't make it so.

His definition is his definition. His is an academic one used as a label with no actual value to tribal societies or people. I will bet you dollars to drafts that any examples you present him, he will already have labelled as part of other social arrangements which will all be part of a internally-consistent set of logical arrangements... none of which matter outside his head and your recorded grades. Tell him what he wants, pass the class and move on to wider mental vistas.

Being Chosen

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

To begin with, the very term itself, "Chosen People", is entirely Christian, and semantically unrelated to the proper Hebrew term. This is very deliberate bastardization of the term, that was created to serve Christian Replacement Theology. By saying that the Jews are Chosen, we can then say G-d can later chose somebody else, i.e. the Christians. This "mistranslation" has SO thoroughly entered the public discourse, that most people today (inc. many Jews) simply have no idea what being "Chosen" means. The term has even been translate "back" into Hebrew, increasing the confusion.

The proper term in Hebrew is {Ahm Segulah}. The best way to translate/explain "Segulah", is by finding another example this root/word is used in, such as the Periodic Table of Elements. In English we speak of the "Specific gravity" of an element, that value which uniquely identifies it (see streaker Archimedes and the Gold Crown). The term for this in Hebrew is {Mishkal S'guli} - that weight/density which is [uniquely] inherent to the element itself.

So as a group we have those innate qualifications to make G-d chose us. Basically, we were the only ones qualified for the "job". Thus Abraham could become, by his behavior, the proto-Jew, and thus so can any non-Jew, who chooses to follow the path of Abraham, also become a Jew, and are in fact referred to as the children of Abraham and Sarah.

In this regard, the transfer of this "innateness" by blood is the "odd" exception - if ones' mindset is limited to the "natural world", and chooses to ignore the metaphysical one.

[cellio]

And if he won't accept Ruth because of some perceived vagueness, the talmud is pretty specific and Maimonides, a prominent medieval scholar, answered questions about conversion without seeming to blink. (The famous one is the convert who asks him if he should refer to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov as "our" fathers when they aren't his ancestors. The Rambam replies that when you join the people you get the ancestors.)

The professor has a peculiar-sounding definition of tribe. If he means bloodline only, well, he's free to structure his world-view that way, but it doesn't have much to do with Judaism.

[avram]

The Rambam was clearly familiar with the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.

[tehuti.livejournal.com]

To piggy back on this, in the 18th century, many Indians congregated into villages after their own tribes were destroyed, forced to move or somehow became non-viable. The most famous of these settlements was at Saint-Francis, in Quebec, known as Odanak both then and now. The Abenaki were particularly hard hit doing the colonial conquest of North America, and refugees (from nearly every nation or tribe that once lived in New England) gathered in great numbers at this settlement, forming a new tribe in the process. Partially because of this, the Abenaki have a very hard time proving that they are a "tribe" that meets the US federal definition, although they are recognized in Canada.

[mrgoodwraith.livejournal.com]

He brought up the Jews as the first historical pre-modern empire.

Um, no. The Akkadian, Sumerian, Mitanni (Hurrian), Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires all predated any "Empire of Israel" (if such a thing could ever be said to have existed).

"Then why are you a tribe? You can't be G-d's Chosen People by blood while allowing others to join your tribe, it's not logical."

This is simply boneheaded. Sure, genes from outsiders can be (and have been) viewed as undesirable or "dilutive," but if one's tribe is the Chosen Race, it is also possible to conclude that the tribe's genes are so powerful that they can dominate any outside genes (rather than vice versa).

I want to present to him examples of tribes that accepted in outsiders to become "of the tribe".

The Wikipedia "Proselyte" article has this helpful section:

"The Law of Moses made specific regulations regarding the admission into Israel's community of such as were not born Israelites. The Kenites, the Gibeonites, the Cherethites, and the Pelethites were thus admitted to levels of Israelite privileges. Thus also we hear of individual proselytes who rose to positions of prominence in the Kingdom of Israel, as of Doeg the Edomite, Uriah the Hittite, Araunah the Jebusite, Zelek the Ammonite, Ithmah and Ebedmelech the Ethiopians. According to the Books of Chronicles, in the time of Solomon (c.971-931 BCE) there were 153,600 proselytes in the land of Israel and the prophets speak of the time as coming when the proselytes shall share in all the privileges of Israel."

I've been trying to dig up Wikipedia examples of tribal adoption that don't involve slavery or capture, but I'm not having much luck.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Thank you, and especially for the citation.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

The word Oy comes to mind - I can see the government's point, but frankly given the cultural and nearly-actual genocide done to the Indians they should cut the tribe a break.