What ethnic/tribal/indigenous identities can be assigned to newcomers?
March 12, 2021 11:17 AM Subscribe
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.
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]
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]
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]
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
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]
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]
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
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
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
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]
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
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
Anthropologist here and of course from my perspective it’s more complicated than the binary distinction. In general you’re talking about “fictive kinship,” or kinship bestowed by adoption, marriage, or ceremony. Every variety of inclusion/exclusion you can imagine is attested in the ethnographic literature. The concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” and “nation” and “tribe” as a superseding political state above the level of the local kin group are not universal abstractions, or they weren’t before European colonialism imposed them as a uniform categorical structure.
For example, I work with two Inuit communities. Both are different “tribes” in modern terms, and speak related but not mutually intelligible Inuit languages. Historically, before western contact, Inuit peoples did not recognize language differences as commensurate with “tribal” identity. There was no conception of a transnational Inuit polity. The village (based on kinship and — crucially fictive adoptive kinship) was the salient political unit. It was the nation, the tribe, the ethnicity, the land tenure, and the family. Also traditionally, Inuit communities all practiced systematic adoption — of strangers who showed up, of captives in war (often from adjacent non-Inuit tribes), and of Inuit from other villages not connected by blood kinship. To this day, Inuit communities invoke the metaphor of “adoption” to absorb outsiders (myself included) and assign them a fictive kinship identity because — this is key — their entire culture is calibrated to center on kinship roles, rights, obligations, and bonds. A person without a family is really not a person (which is what “Inuit” and all of the other related ethnonyms used by Inuit people mean). So to be “adopted” is to become “Inuit” — a person, one of us — and obligates you to labor and entitles you to shares of others’ labor.
Adoption is so normalized that it has persisted as a thriving social structure into the present. I have been to many funerals for elders where the funeral program listed two or even three sets of parents, and affiliated other kin, since the elder had been raised as a child (in the 1930s-50s now) by multiple adoptive families, often themselves related, as the general principle is a child goes where there is room for her/him in the house, and the hearts, of different nuclear families. The nuclear family is now a strong structure thanks to missionization and modern culture, but under that a more complex and extended multi-household kin group is still the norm, and children can be and are moved around within this for their own best advantage. It is remarkable to enter that structure and see the persistence of this “traditional” view in everyday life; but it runs up against a world that demands racialized and ethnicized and linguistic expressions of indigeneity for indigenous people who may not “traditionally” have reckoned relationality in those terms at all. Now it matters what your blood quantum is — how purely ethnically Inuit your ancestry is — for calculations of things like shares of tribal dividends and claims to ancestral plots of land, and for many dealings with governmental structures as diverse as the criminal justice system, education, medical care, and military service. So the modern “racial” understanding of identity is ascendant and fluently deployed, as is a discourse of confronting racism and a demand to be recognized as a racial minority for some purposes, as “indigenous” for others, as “American” (or Canadian, Russian, etc.) for many others, and as all three together most of the time.
You can — as any kind of non-Inuit at all- indeed appear in many Inuit communities as a stranger, and if you seek connection and offer your labor and heart and are a good friend, someone will likely decide to adopt you. If you marry in (as many Filipinos, African Americans, Tongans, Samoans, Latinos, and Anglos have) it will be obligatory to your ability to function in your role as a spouse and parent. Even (perhaps especially, as adoption is also a means of surveillance and control and a structure of obligatory reciprocity) an anthropologist must be adopted by a family and given an Inuit identity. It is a remarkable experience, and nearly 20 years on from my adoption I feel very much like I gained more family, in ways that far transcend my professional role. But — and this is key — no one thinks I’m ethnically Inuit, there is no confusion over an adopted Taniq. Indeed the term “culturally adopted” is the preferred nomenclature for the official status accorded people like me who work in the community over long periods of time. It doesn’t make me Indigenous. But it makes me “one of us for” for both political and emotional purposes. And for contributing (and being entitled to my shares of) labor and resources. It’s a fine but important distinction.
Had I grown up in the community as a child of one of many white/Inuit marriages, my adoption would go much further in significance even if I was still recognized as ethnically white.
Belonging, in other words, is not binary in most human societies I know anything about. Citizenship may well be. Identity certainly isn’t easily collapsed into such neat categories. What does it mean to feel an identity is yours? I’ve spent my professional life interested in that question.
As Bakhtin said, the word in language is half someone else’s. And as the brilliant Canadian Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear puts it, Indigenous identity isn’t about what you claim, but about who claims you.
posted by spitbull at 2:09 PM on March 12, 2021 [33 favorites]
For example, I work with two Inuit communities. Both are different “tribes” in modern terms, and speak related but not mutually intelligible Inuit languages. Historically, before western contact, Inuit peoples did not recognize language differences as commensurate with “tribal” identity. There was no conception of a transnational Inuit polity. The village (based on kinship and — crucially fictive adoptive kinship) was the salient political unit. It was the nation, the tribe, the ethnicity, the land tenure, and the family. Also traditionally, Inuit communities all practiced systematic adoption — of strangers who showed up, of captives in war (often from adjacent non-Inuit tribes), and of Inuit from other villages not connected by blood kinship. To this day, Inuit communities invoke the metaphor of “adoption” to absorb outsiders (myself included) and assign them a fictive kinship identity because — this is key — their entire culture is calibrated to center on kinship roles, rights, obligations, and bonds. A person without a family is really not a person (which is what “Inuit” and all of the other related ethnonyms used by Inuit people mean). So to be “adopted” is to become “Inuit” — a person, one of us — and obligates you to labor and entitles you to shares of others’ labor.
Adoption is so normalized that it has persisted as a thriving social structure into the present. I have been to many funerals for elders where the funeral program listed two or even three sets of parents, and affiliated other kin, since the elder had been raised as a child (in the 1930s-50s now) by multiple adoptive families, often themselves related, as the general principle is a child goes where there is room for her/him in the house, and the hearts, of different nuclear families. The nuclear family is now a strong structure thanks to missionization and modern culture, but under that a more complex and extended multi-household kin group is still the norm, and children can be and are moved around within this for their own best advantage. It is remarkable to enter that structure and see the persistence of this “traditional” view in everyday life; but it runs up against a world that demands racialized and ethnicized and linguistic expressions of indigeneity for indigenous people who may not “traditionally” have reckoned relationality in those terms at all. Now it matters what your blood quantum is — how purely ethnically Inuit your ancestry is — for calculations of things like shares of tribal dividends and claims to ancestral plots of land, and for many dealings with governmental structures as diverse as the criminal justice system, education, medical care, and military service. So the modern “racial” understanding of identity is ascendant and fluently deployed, as is a discourse of confronting racism and a demand to be recognized as a racial minority for some purposes, as “indigenous” for others, as “American” (or Canadian, Russian, etc.) for many others, and as all three together most of the time.
You can — as any kind of non-Inuit at all- indeed appear in many Inuit communities as a stranger, and if you seek connection and offer your labor and heart and are a good friend, someone will likely decide to adopt you. If you marry in (as many Filipinos, African Americans, Tongans, Samoans, Latinos, and Anglos have) it will be obligatory to your ability to function in your role as a spouse and parent. Even (perhaps especially, as adoption is also a means of surveillance and control and a structure of obligatory reciprocity) an anthropologist must be adopted by a family and given an Inuit identity. It is a remarkable experience, and nearly 20 years on from my adoption I feel very much like I gained more family, in ways that far transcend my professional role. But — and this is key — no one thinks I’m ethnically Inuit, there is no confusion over an adopted Taniq. Indeed the term “culturally adopted” is the preferred nomenclature for the official status accorded people like me who work in the community over long periods of time. It doesn’t make me Indigenous. But it makes me “one of us for” for both political and emotional purposes. And for contributing (and being entitled to my shares of) labor and resources. It’s a fine but important distinction.
Had I grown up in the community as a child of one of many white/Inuit marriages, my adoption would go much further in significance even if I was still recognized as ethnically white.
Belonging, in other words, is not binary in most human societies I know anything about. Citizenship may well be. Identity certainly isn’t easily collapsed into such neat categories. What does it mean to feel an identity is yours? I’ve spent my professional life interested in that question.
As Bakhtin said, the word in language is half someone else’s. And as the brilliant Canadian Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear puts it, Indigenous identity isn’t about what you claim, but about who claims you.
posted by spitbull at 2:09 PM on March 12, 2021 [33 favorites]
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 [1 favorite]
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 [1 favorite]
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
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 [1 favorite]
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 [1 favorite]
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posted by andoatnp at 11:19 AM on March 12, 2021