The silencing of unifying tribes: the colonial construction of tribe and its 'extraordinary leap' to nascent nation-state formation in Western Sahara
Scholarship has glossed over an ‘extraordinary leap' of Sahrāwī tribes to citizens of an exiled nation state in response to the threat to territorial sovereignty from failed decolonisation and invasion. The emergence of Sahrāwī nationalism has become entangled in problematic discourses of triba...
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
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Anthropological Society of Oxford
2015
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| Summary: | Scholarship has glossed over an ‘extraordinary leap' of Sahrāwī tribes to citizens of an exiled
nation state in response to the threat to territorial sovereignty from failed decolonisation and
invasion. The emergence of Sahrāwī nationalism has become entangled in problematic
discourses of tribalism and been posited as an a priori result of detribalisation. This article
examines the Spanish colonial construction of the enigma of tribe, showing how it has
become misread and ossified in post-colonial overlays of scholarship. The Sahrāwī political
vocabulary that has been obscured in the colonial records offers a more nuanced analysis of
the silencing of unifying tribes and charts the move from a customary form of centralised
political organisation to the contemporary nation state. |
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