The Ik (sometimes called Teuso) are an ethnic group numbering a few thousand people living in the mountains of northeastern Uganda near the border with Kenya, next to the more populous Dodoth and Turkana peoples. The Ik were displaced from their land to create a national park and consequently suffered extreme famine. Also, their weakness relative to other tribes meant they were regularly raided. The Ik are subsistence farmers who grind their own grain.

The Ik language, Icetot, is a linguistic member of the highly divergent Kuliak subgroup of Nilo-Saharan languages.

Community structure

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

Culture

Children by age three are at least sometimes permanently expelled from the household and form groups called age-bands consisting of those within the same age group. The 'Junior Group' consists of children from the ages of three to eight and the 'Senior Group' consists of those between eight and thirteen. No adults look after the children, who teach each other the basics of survival. However, it is not certain whether this practice is typical Ik tradition or merely triggered by unusual famine conditions. Tainter ^[1] proposes this fragmentation to be an artifact of the dire circumstances where each person must depend on their own resources alone to find food and the age peers band together primarily to protect themselves from older stronger children who would take their food. He also argues that the present social fragmentation is the result of extreme deprivation on a more complex and functional culture, an argument also made by Turnbull.^[2]

The Mountain People

Colin Turnbull wrote an ethnography about the Ik, titled The Mountain People.^[3] While highly popular, the book was controversial, and the accuracy and methodology of Turnbull's work has been questioned.

Turnbull advocated to the Ugandan government forcible relocation of random tribal members (with no more than ten people in any relocated group), arguing that Ik society was already destroyed and all that could be done was to save individual tribal members.^[4]

There is evidence that Turnbull had limited knowledge of Ik language and tradition-- and virtually no knowledge of the flora and fauna of the region. He seems to have misrepresented the Ik by describing them as traditionally hunters and gatherers forced by circumstance to become farmers, when there is ample linguistic and cultural evidence that the Ik were farmers long before they were displaced from their hunting grounds after the formation of Kidepo National Park - the event which Turnbull claims forced the Ik to become farmers.

Some of Turnbull's main informants were not Ik, but Diding'a people. Lomeja, a local who helped teach Turnbull the Ik dialect, was undoubtedly Diding'a, and according to informants of linguist Bernd Heine (who studied the Ik in early 1983) spoke only broken Ik. Moreover, three out of the six villages Turnbull studied were headed by non-Ik people.

Turnbull's claim that Ik raided cattle and frequently did "a double deal" by selling information concerning the raid to the victims is not corrorborated by the Dodoth County Chief's monthly reports, as well as records of the Administrator in Moroto between 1963-1969. Rather, these files and reports actually suggest that the largest number of cattle raids occurred in parts of Dodoth County where no mention of Ik raiding livestock can be found in any of these documents.

Turnbull's claims that adultery was common among the Ik is contrary to statements of informants interviewed by Bernd Heine in 1983. They reported that during the two years Turnbull stayed in Pirre there was only one case of adultery. Heine writes: "All Ik elders interviewed stated that there are no indications whatsoever in the oral traditions to suggest that adulterers were burnt in the past."

Heine adds, "...Turnbull's account of Ik culture turned out to be at variance with most observations we made — to the extent that at times I was under the impression that I was dealing with an entirely different people." ^[5]

Cultural references

In 1975, Turnbull's book provided the source material [1] for a play called The Ik, written by Colin Higgins and Dennis Cannan, ^[6]. (Higgins wrote the screenplays to Harold and Maude, Silver Streak, and Nine to Five [2].) The play, directed by Peter Brook premiered in Paris in 1975[3], and was produced in London in 1976 by the Royal Shakespeare Company [4]. It also toured the United States in 1976 as a bicentennial gift from the French government.

Notes

See also

• Aridification
• Drought
• Posttraumatic stress disorder
• Societal collapse

External links

• http://home1.gte.net/hoffmanr/
• http://www1.dragonet.es/users/markbcki/trnbll.htm

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Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "Ik". Image Credit.

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