Talk:Al-Ameriki tribe

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[edit] Categories are navigation tools for related articles and need to be taken with a grain of salt

Again, Slackerlawstudent, you are being overly precise to insist this article doesn't belong in Category:Tribes of Iraq. No one is going to be confused by this article's inclusion in this category into thinking that the American occupation of Iraq is actually an expansion of a pre-existing tribal existence in that country, but it is "in Iraq" (frankly, you sound like Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf to suggest they are not!) and with 170,000 members with a unique cultural background, there people meet a loose definition of "tribe" both in my mind (although one without children, which is an oddity) and, apparently, in the minds of the Iraqi people, hence the nickname even if it is only a mild jest. To what extend a reader or researcher looking at Category:Tribes of Iraq considers that a matter of trivia is something we should leave up to them to decide. -- Kendrick7^talk 18:20, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

So because I'm one of the 99.99999% of people in this world who don't think of the US army in Iraq as a tribe, I'm acting like the former Iraqi propaganda minister? How nice.

People who are looking through the category of "Iraqi tribes" will be looking for bona fide Iraqi tribes, and would not even think of looking for something like this within the category. The other categories you put in the page are more than sufficient to guide people to this page, particularly the people who would be interested in this sort of page.

Just because a group of people wear a uniform and speak the same language does not make them a tribe, certainly not in the sense that Iraqis conceive of tribes. Who even gave you the idea that Arab tribes all share the same clothes and customs? I belong to a tribe, and we certainly don't all share the same customs or clothes. Our tribes are based on kinship. Also, a group of people have to think of themselves as a tribe first, before you can consider them a tribe. Really, the way you insist on abusing the term "Iraqi tribe" destroys the meaning of the word "tribe" and destroys the integrity of the category. Categories get debated, modified, and deleted all the time on WP because they can be taken seriously; they are not always to be taken with a grain of salt.

This was clearly a throw-away line that this writer was using to talk about all the "great developments" in Iraq. It clearly was not intended to mean that all Iraqis consider this a tribe, nor does it present any evidence that more than a handful of people in Iraq even know this term (which was clearly intended ironically anyway). Frankly I find this very patronizing as an Arab to imply that we genuinely think of any group of people with a common language and a uniform as a tribe, as if we can't conceive of other societies being organized differently than our own.

Aside from the category issue, I just don't see how this page can be expanded into an article without engaging in OR. It seems like it belongs as a line in an article on the US occupation or on the surge. I'd be very interested to see where you take this, but please don't insist on adding this false category. -- Slacker (talk) 18:48, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

If your groups are based on kinship then the correct English word is clan, not tribe. Especially in the American sense of the word, where it naturally conjures up the idea of Native American tribes, which were generally large collections of clans who shared a common culture. For example, I recall creating a diorama in grade school of the dozen different funeral rites of the dozen different major Native American tribes in Texas. Even in original European sense, a tribus in the Roman Empire was some large group of non-Roman and later non-Christian pagans just beyond the border, e.g. the Germanic Tribes. Perhaps a long time ago the British Empire convinced you this was the correct word and you had no reason to believe you were being gently insulted, but don't blame me for that. Although, I am perhaps also biased as someone who is part Iroquois. My tribe's culture of representative democracy, equal rights (even for women), and absorbing other tribes into our melting pot have survived (in the long run) despite a large influx of British and European monarchists. Long before they came we rejected the idea of genetic kinship as a collective principle or a way to select our leaders. But the downside of that approach is we're now simply genetically intermixed with the colonizing population.

But I digress. I'm willing to concede about the category. I had originally created this as a redirect to begin with, and would have forgotten about it had some one not prodded it as nonsense, so I can't really reject to it being merged somewhere else, although I don't know what a good place would be. Perhaps if there is an article on the occupation forces themselves that would be a good fit. -- Kendrick7^talk 18:42, 27 February 2008 (UTC)