Ik

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The Ik (also derogatorily called Teuso) are an ethnic group living in the mountains of northeastern Uganda, next to the larger Dodoth and Turkana, numbering a few thousand. They were expelled from their land to create a national park and, as a result, suffered extreme famine. Furthermore, their weakness relative to other tribes meant they were regularly raided.

1 Community structure
2 Culture
3 The Mountain People
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Community structure

The Ik people create several small villages in clusters, forming a "community". Each small village is surrounded by an outer wall, then sectioned off into familial- or friend-based "neighborhoods" called Odoks, also surrounded by a wall. Each Odok is sectioned into walled-off households called asaks, with front yards (for lack of a better word) and, in some cases, granaries.

[edit] Culture

It has been observed that children are expelled from the household at three years old and not allowed into the house afterward. They form groups called age-bands with people in their age group. The Junior Group consists of children from the ages of three to eight and the Senior Group is a band of children between eight and thirteen. There are no adults that look after these children, so they teach each other the basics of survival. Howewer, it is not certain whether this tradition is typical for the Ik or was temporarily caused by unusual famine conditions.

[edit] The Mountain People

Colin Turnbull wrote an extremely successful ethnography about the Ik, titled The Mountain People, which was quite disparaging.^[1] The Ik language, Icetot, is of interest to linguists as a member of the highly divergent Kuliak subgroup of Nilo-Saharan languages.

Turnbull's book, while highly popular, was controversial. The accuracy and methodology of much of his work is highly questionable.

He advocated to the Ugandan government forcable relocation of random tribal members (with no more than ten people in any relocated group). Turnbull defended his relocation advocacy by arguing that the Ik society was already destroyed and all that could be done was to save individual tribal members.^[2]

There is strong evidence that Turnbull had limited knowledge of the language and cultural traditions of the Ik, as well as almost no knowledge of the flora and fauna of the area, and that he completely misrepresented the history of the Ik by claiming they were traditionally hunters and gathers who were forced to become farmers. There is ample linguistic and cultural evidence that the Ik were farmers long before the creation of Kidepo National Park, which Turnbull claims caused the Ik to be driven from their major hunting grounds and forced them to become farmers. Some of his main informants were not Ik, but Diding'a. Lomeja who helped him learn the Ik language was undoubtedly Diding'a, and according to informants of Bernd Heine, who studied the Ik in early 1983, spoke only broken Ik. Turnbull's claims that adultery was common is completely at odds with the statements of informants interviewed by Bernd Heine.^[3]

[edit] References

^ Turnbull, Colin M. The Mountain People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. ISBN 0-671-21724-0.
^ Knight, John, 'The Mountain People' as tribal mirror. Anthropology Today, Vol. 10, No. 6, December 1994.
^ Heine, Bernd, The Mountain People: Some Notes on the Ik of North-Eastern Uganda. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 55, No. 1, 1985, pp 3--16.