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"What are Libya's tribes?"

22 Comments -

1 – 22 of 22
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"It would be interesting to find out what side his mother took in the ultra-politicized Anthropology Wars and what Obama's views of his mother's views are."

Interesting to the intersection of two sets: people who like that kind of anthropology inside baseball and people obsessed with Obama's personal life.

So, not so many people.

4/6/11, 12:47 AM

Anonymous Hapalong Cassidy said...

As backwards as the Arabs are, or have been - one of the biggest puzzles in history is how these backwards tribesmen were able to conquer much of the known world during the 8th and 9th century, in the process subjugating one mighty ancient empire (the Persians) and severely weakening another (the Byzantines). They happened to catch both empires while their fortuners were low, but still, the Arab successes seem to fly in the face of HBD memes. Such as smarter people from the North conquering established peoples in the South.

4/6/11, 4:08 AM

Anonymous hbd chick said...

got ur libyan tribes (and consanguinity rates) covered right here:

libya – land o’ tribes
all tribes, all the time!
the nyt discovers tribes!
consanguinity in libya…

(^_^)

4/6/11, 6:59 AM

Blogger elvisd said...

The most harrowing example of the intersection of tribal and modern ideological and national interests I've heard was told to me by my best friend who is an exile in every sense of the world from Lebanon.

He came from a prominant Sunni family, and went to Catholic school. He claimed friends in every religious sect, but affiliated with the Christian-dominated Kataeb/Falange in college, as he was a Lebanese nationalist. He went to meetings, and participated in demostrations that often degenerated into street fights. In 1975, the main opposition were leftist Palestinian groups, the Shiites still being marginalized and largely off the map politically.
He started getting watched by young Fatah thugs. He defnitely stuck out like a sore thumb, being outspoken son of a Sunni family running with a Christian nationalist group,the top of his class, who partied like a fiend, and would promote visiting rock bands.
One day they nabbed him. He got tortured pretty bad-broken ribs, black eyes, etc. Somebody who witnessed the kidnapping but didn't know my friend managed to find out who his family was after a couple of days and told his father. His father was a prominent doctor and scientist. He knew good and well that any attempt to use state mechanisms would end in his son's death, so he turned to the tribal institutions: one of his patients was the sheikh of a large Shiite tribe. He called the sheikh, begging him to help him get his son back. The Shiites at that time were no friend to the Palestinians.
The sheikh dispatched a couple of dozen of his tribesmen to surround the perimeter of the building where the Fatah people had my friend, and sent someone to tell the kidnappers that they had one hour to release their captive or else. My friend says that he is very lucky to be alive.

4/6/11, 7:12 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I gave you a hint before because of your articles on Iraqi consanguinity and your part time job as a movie reviewer. Now I'll say it outright The Kings Speech looks to be about the tragedy of first cousin marriages.

Stuttering in genetic or at least The Stuttering Foundation believes it is. (http://www.stutteringhelp.org/default.aspx?tabindex=492&tabid=502)

About a half dozen chromosomes have been linked with familial stuttering. There is also the possibility of a genetic connection to autism.

Prince Albert was the first cousin of Victoria. One of her grandsons was called the "Uncle of Europe" because of all of his blood connections to other various royal families.

This same phenomenon can be seen in the Habsburgs. Their famous lip was just one of the homozygous recessives from which their line suffered. They had high achievers like Charles V the Holy Roman Emperor (the baritone in Ernani). and genetic defectives like Charles II or Carlos the son of Phillip II (the tenor in Don Carlos). Phillip II married Bloody Mary Queen of England - his first cousin. Fortunately Mary was barren.

Victoria's progeny carried hemophilia and other maladies. There have been several books and movies accusing her grandson of being "Jack the Ripper" - almost certainly tripe but just plausible enough to linger as a conspiracy theory for over a century. People familiar with the royal bloodline have been willing to believe the worst.

So it's likely that The King's Speech was not some random environmental event but the consequent of the the cultivated consanguinity in the the Windsor tribe.

Albertosaurus

4/6/11, 8:07 AM

Anonymous dcite said...

"President Obama's mom was an anthropologist (she got her Ph.D. in 1992), so he might actually know a little of this stuff. It would be interesting to find out what side his mother took in the ultra-politicized Anthropology Wars and what Obama's views of his mother's views are."

somehow I can't imagine B.O. in a heart to heart with mom, or even in a views-exchanging dialogue. That's part of his problem. And ours.

4/6/11, 8:59 AM

Anonymous Where are the Details? said...

I'd like to see someone informed and somewhat neutral enumerate and outline the tribes involved in this Libyan civil war.

For example, list all the major tribes, their population, location and alligence (pro or anti government or neutral). A big additional piece of info would be the fighting effectiveness and attitudes towards religion and the West (although that is subject to propaganda which is rife in our current media reportage).

From the dozen(s) of rebel casualties causing them to constantly flee Gaddafi's admittedly own starved and rag tag excuse of an army despite intensive US/NATO missle strikes, aircover and boots on the ground there is obviously not much substance to the Libyan rebels.

Certainly someone must have shown Obama this info in an intelligence report.

It makes one wonder what the hell Obama was thinking staking his (and the US's) reputation by backing such a group of losers and destablizing the region. It's clear that the rebels are not popular, cohesive or effective and they cannot rule in place of Gaddfi or his tribal base.

Obama's utter lack of intellectual curiosity and his life of never being testing yet always being praised and promoted in absence of any tangible achievement has left Obama utterly incapable to deal with big issues like this. If power corrupts, BHO is the most fertile substrate for such corruption.

No doubt, he felt whatever decision he made would be correct simply because he made it. Surely he thought his time would better spent golfing or vacating in Rio than sweating the detail because life has shown him the details never matter in advancing in life.

4/6/11, 9:02 AM

Anonymous Kylie said...

"President Obama's mom was an anthropologist (she got her Ph.D. in 1992), so he might actually know a little of this stuff. It would be interesting to find out what side his mother took in the ultra-politicized Anthropology Wars and what Obama's views of his mother's views are."

Does Obama have any abiding interest in any subject that can't be directly related to his race concerns (which are in turn concerned with his self-esteem)? I'm not aware of any. So I'm guessing if he was exposed to this stuff, he probably didn't bother to take it in.

Furthermore, a man with a black father and white mother who lists himself as black on the census is probably not interested in discussing his mother's views on anything.

I think you give Obama more credit for intellectual curiosity than he merits.

4/6/11, 10:19 AM

Anonymous cruft said...

The bible again explains this situation in the description of Ismael as having his hand against every man and every man's hand against him.

4/6/11, 11:09 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're reading Francis Fukuyama's upcoming book?

Did he send it to you? Is Fukuyama a crime-thinker? I'm sure the SPLC, ADL and other professional thugs would be interested in any guilt-by-association.

4/6/11, 11:45 AM

Blogger Too Tall Jones said...

Universal male militarization, surprise attacks on apparent innocents based on a principle of collective guilt, and the careful group monitoring and control of personal behavior..

This sounds a lot like some European regimes. Germans brutally massacred thousands of innocents all over Europe based on their 'guilt' and the French likewise massacred hundreds in various colonial wars based on similar guilt. And personal monitoring has been a speciality of Russia for almost a century..

4/6/11, 12:57 PM

Anonymous ATBOTL said...

"So even after settlement, Bedouin preserve classic segmentary kinship ideology as a kind of "social structure in reserve" for times of movement, crisis, and conflict."

That sounds familiar.

4/6/11, 1:11 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

12 tribes of Israel and 120 or 1200 tribes of Ishmael(or Arabs).

4/6/11, 1:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What is the relation between tribal "chiefs" and their tribes/clans? To the chiefs inherit their position or are they partially chosen? In any case why doesn't the U.S. work with these tribal/clan groupings instead of against them when they design state-level parliamentary institutions (let the chiefs choose their areas representatives the way the "chiefs" do here in the United States) instead of imposing individualistic/nuclear family assumptions on non-Western societies? I thought that was the way empires were supposed to be built -- the way the Romans did it. Go with the local rulers. Or maybe we do already. Does anybody know?

4/6/11, 2:46 PM

Anonymous Reg Cæsar said...

...what side his mother took...

Shades of the old joke:

Foreigner lost on London street: "Pardon me, sir, but which side is the Foreign Office on?"

Briton: "Yours, I'm afraid."

4/6/11, 3:15 PM

Anonymous Hail said...

Steve is behind the curve on this one. HBD-Chick has been posting about tribalism behind the Libyan Curtain for months.

It's interesting: We all sort-of accept that Saddam Hussein was partly a "tribalist", a Sunni-Arab nationalist working for his own within the "Iraq" Frankenstein-state. Yet for some reason we regard Gaddafi as simply an arbitrary autocract, whose only loyalty is to Kelptocracy. I guess it's just easier to view things in crude black-and-white.

4/6/11, 6:57 PM

Anonymous hbd chick said...

@where are the details: "I'd like to see someone informed and somewhat neutral enumerate and outline the tribes involved in this Libyan civil war.

"For example, list all the major tribes, their population, location and alligence (pro or anti government or neutral)."

yeah, i'd like to see such a list, too! there is a partial list of libyan tribes on wikipedia. and, afaict, there is -- broadly speaking -- an east-west divide in libya with most of the eastern tribes in libya supporting the rebels and, eh, quite a few of the western tribes supporting gaddafi.

but, there are divisions EVERYwhere and constantly shifting allegiances. the warfalla, for instance, one of the western tribes -- kinda/sorta supporting gaddafi -- somedays -- maybe -- it's kinda hard to tell.

it was members of the warfalla tribe that tried to oust gaddafi in '93, so clearly they're not 100% loyal to him. what are they up to now? i think maybe they're hedging -- waiting to see who comes out on top. they probably would like to see gaddafi out, but they probably want to be in charge, not let some unrelated easterners take over the place!

the warfalla, btw, is one of the major tribes with a large number of people in it. so is, iirc, the al-zuwayya tribe in the east. the gaddafi tribe is actually one of the smaller ones, numbers wise.

then there are (what look to be) tribal-based disputes within the rebel forces -- the al obaidis vs. the firjians.

so, i say, good luck to the libyans in creating a modern "democratic" nation out of all of this (if that's what they really want). i, for one, am not holding my breath.

4/6/11, 7:54 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Steve, I really miss your book reviews. I know you still do them occasionally, but not like the old days...

4/6/11, 8:03 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This sounds a lot like some European regimes.

The second bit is more or less universal in conflicts (collective guilt), but the first and last bits (militarization of males to pull together a large standing army and a relatively regimented society) could be linked with (long since deceased) late 19th century and early 20th century European ideas about how to build a militarized nation.

Just not on a tribal basis, but on a "territory-based polity" political basis and with a military doctrine and widespread acceptance of "decisive conflict".

This might be why these ideas are relatively appealing in some of these Middle Eastern societies - it's a scaling up into a national pattern of something which is not exactly alien to life as lived.

4/7/11, 12:13 AM

Blogger TGGP said...

I didn't reread the whole Kurtz piece, just jumped to the end to see if he had any suggestions for how neoconservative foreign policy can work given the tribalism of that region. I suppose it's too his credit that he doesn't do a whole lot to offer hope, understandable given that it was 2008. Parts of it reminded me of James Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed". I think Scott goes too far in what Kurtz calls the post-modern "kaleidoscopic" view on tribes, but overall I'd still recommend the book.

4/7/11, 9:46 PM

Blogger David said...

Not all the Libyan tumult is really internally generated. Here.

4/8/11, 9:20 PM

Anonymous Tommy said...

Speaking of Arabs, Steve is likely to get much more traffic after this book is released:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/authorized-biography-of-steve-jobs-to-arrive-in-early-2012.ars

4/11/11, 9:29 AM

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