From the Disappearance of 'Tribes’ to Reawakening of the Tribal Feeling : Strategies of State among the Formerly Nomadic Bidân (Arabophone) of Mauritania

This essay will attempt a broad outline of the strategies of State employed in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. The nomadic population there is organized into kinship groups, or corporated groups called qabâ'il (sing. qabîla) or ‘tribes.’ —even if the ‘tribe’ is not a ‘total society’, but —as Emanuel Marx suggest (in this volume)—“it is merely one of a variety of organizations in which the nomad [or the formerly nomad] participates. ” These groups underwent considerable restructuring during the period of French colonial rule (from the end of the nineteenth 19 century to 1960) and over the half-century since Independence (1960).