What ethnic/tribal/indigenous identities can be assigned to newcomers?

March 12, 2021 11:17 AM

What are examples of ethnicities, tribes, indigenous societies, etc. where outsiders can be accepted into and given that identity by members? Meaning that members of a group give the identity to someone who doesn’t have heritage/ancestry of that group.
posted by andoatnp to Human Relations (15 answers total)

Response by poster: Also, to help my own research, is there like a sociological term that describes the process for a group bestowing their identity on an outsider?
posted by andoatnp at 11:19 AM on March 12, 2021

Judaism. Most famously, Ruth converted, joined the Israelites, and became the great-grandmother of King David.
posted by phoenixy at 11:34 AM on March 12, 2021 [6 favorites]

kinship may be a term that can cover that in a really broad sense, there are sub categories to account for chosen kin, adoption, fictive kinship etc, (last basic anthropology class was 20+ years ago) but all of those things are sort of ingredients for social groups, which start with direct family usually and build out from there based on shared values/characteristics etc.

Metafilter is sort of a tribe that grants membership and identity to new members.
posted by th3ph17 at 11:48 AM on March 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

The Cherokee Nation just decided to accept descendants of the slaves they held as tribal members.
posted by Alison at 11:52 AM on March 12, 2021 [5 favorites]

So we're talking about this in more of a clan level? Or even larger group?

A family can adopt or allow a member to "marry in", but I know you need something on a bigger... scale.
posted by kschang at 11:58 AM on March 12, 2021

Are you asking about historical or contemporary cultures? Historically, among many indigenous groups there were processes for adoptions of outsiders into clans and cultures which varied from group to group. Haudenosaunee for instance would sometimes adopt members of other groups they might have had active conflict with and were essentially prisoners of war.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:59 AM on March 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Basque tend to use their language as being the primary identifier of the ethnic group. If you’re fluent in Basque, you’re typically considered to be Basque, culturally.
posted by furnace.heart at 12:40 PM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Hānai - roughly translated as adoption in Native Hawaiian cultural practice - is a mode of non-blood kinship. In my very fuzzy understanding, lineage and being adopted into that lineage, can be much deeper than the parent-child adoption legal model in the U.S. At the same time, hānai adoption doesn't make you _legally_ Native Hawaiian. In addition, the teacher-student lineage is also incredibly important. For example, people like Puakea Nogelmeier (who received his name from his hulu teacher).
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:45 PM on March 12, 2021

You might be interested in a recent guest column in Anne Helen Petersen's substack: The Pretendians by Chris La Tray.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 1:01 PM on March 12, 2021

My mom was an honorary member of the Crow Nation, mainly because of local politics. So is Obama.
posted by Ideefixe at 1:22 PM on March 12, 2021

Until at least the 1630s, these Cossack groups remained ethnically and religiously open to virtually anybody, although the Slavic element predominated.
posted by Black Cordelia at 1:40 PM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think it really depends how you define ethnicity - the malleability of cultural identity has been pretty common throughout history. It was and is not uncommon to convert to a different religion, learn a new language, find yourself under the rule by an invading group, or immigrate to a new land. Whether these changes count as new "ethnic" identities depends on the cultural/political context.

Here's an article that discusses this topic, with some examples from history.

Perhaps "assimilation" would be a useful keyword?
posted by toastedcheese at 1:57 PM on March 12, 2021

In traditional Ojibwa communities, there's usually someone whose informal responsibility is "taking in strays."

If you show up in the village and you want to get to know people (e.g. as a linguist doing fieldwork), you'll be subtly pushed towards one person (often an older woman) who deals with "outsiders to our group" and makes connections. (This seems to have always been the case even before colonization.)

It's not as systematic as spitbull's Inuit example, probably because Ojibwa society wasn't & isn't oriented as much around "one community = one extended family" as that, but it's another example of an indigenous "tribe" having a social mechanism for hooking up newcomers into the existing structure.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:41 PM on March 12, 2021

Judaism. Most famously, Ruth converted, joined the Israelites, and became the great-grandmother of King David.

Just to add a bit more detail: because Judaism is both a religion and a "people", conversion has an aspect of adoption. Someone who converts to Judaism receives a Hebrew personal name and is assigned the patronym (and matronym for liberals) of "bar/bat Avraham v'Sarah", that is "son/daughter of Abraham and Sarah". You are now the child of the patriarch and matriarch. (People born Jewish would have their own parents' Hebrew names instead, e.g David bar Benyamin v'Rivka, David son of Benjamin and Rebecca, a totally fictitious person I just made up).
posted by jb at 3:21 PM on March 12, 2021

Are we counting (involuntary) assimilation?

The way the Manchus took over China but was eventually subsumed into the Chinese culture seems not quite what you are asking for.
posted by kschang at 6:11 PM on March 12, 2021