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From Many, One: The Social Construcnon of the Rashäyida Tribe in Eastern Sudan William C. Young Department of Sociology and Anthropology Georgia Southern University Acknowledgment I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Social Science Research CouncÜ and die Fulbright-Hayes Commission for my field research (1977-1980) and die funding awarded me by Georgia Southern University for my archival research in 1996. 1 am very grateful to have received diese grants; without diem I would have had neitiier die resources nor the freedom to study die Rashäyida. Of course these institutions are not to blame for any errors in this article, nor can theybe held responsible for die opinions about the Rashäyida and tiieir history that it contains. To write the history of Middle Eastern and North African societies, scholars must deal with tribes.1 This can be an especially difficult task, since die tribe is not easy to define as an historical object.2 Is the tribe a purely genealogicalunit, consisting ofthe sons ofa man and tiieir descendants , with all die members of the tribe being merely the products of a biological process that unfolds uniformly generation after generation? If it were, then no social history of this object could be written; the history would be notiiing more than a pedigree. To avoid reducing tribe to biology , some writers have simply added information about migrations, wars, and shaykhs to the tribal genealogies they have collected.3 The problem with this approach, however, is tiiat it leaves die notion of tribe unexamined . In Eric Wolfs words, it "treats each group as a 'tribe' sufficient unto itself and endows it "witii die qualities of internally homogeneous and ^Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Vol. 4, No. 1 (New Series) 1997, pp. 71-108 71 72 William C. Young externally distinctive and bounded objects," creating "a model of the world as a global pool hall in which die entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls."4 This view impedes our understanding ofhow small-scale societies interact and are transformed by tiiis interaction. In this paper I will represent one tribe—the Rashäyida5 of eastern Sudan—as a socially constructed formation whose structure was grounded in political and economic alliances rather than in genealogies. I have chosen my words carefully here. Although the components of this tribe were observable groups ofpeople (households and camps tiiat carried out die tasks ofproduction and reproduction, families that transmitted property along well-definedlines ofdescent, and so on),6 it was not merely an assembly of families. Social relations among die members of the tribe were not merely a matter of concrete interactions or the transient associations of individuals; they were backed up by more abstract notions of common identity, values, and origins. But the tribe was not solely the realization of some abstract system of ideas, categories, and symbols7 (even tiiough abstract genealogies provided a model by means of which inter-family relations could be conceptualized, described, and negotiated ). As a socially constructed reality, the tribe had both a material base and an abstract component that were creatively joined togetiier by its members and re-joined in a new way with every new generation. To write an ethnohistory of the Rashäyida, I will try to show how various family units (households and small local descent groups) were put together to make a new society during the late nineteenth century. I will trace the migration of some Rashldl families from Arabia to Sudan and Eritrea and try to show how they merged to form a tribe, a social formation that was forged under the unrelenting pressures of European colonial expansion, on the one hand, and die Mahdist rebellion of the 1880s, on die otiier. To carry out this diachronic analysis I will have to detach die many family histories that make up part of the Rashäyida's oral tradition from the overarching genealogical and mytiiological framework that they use to hook diese disparate narratives together. This means dismissing, for the time being, the genealogical canopy on which they hang their family histories and replacing it with a more conventional historical narrative based on...

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