Tribes of the World and the Regions They Live In

Tribes of the world is pure matching work, and the examiner asks it in one line: which tribe lives where. The groups worth learning are the ones tied to a clear natural region, a desert, an equatorial forest, a grassland, a tundra or an island, because the region explains how they live. This note arranges them continent by continent and ends with the words for their homes and for shifting cultivation, which are asked just as often.

Africa

The Masai are cattle herders of the savanna grassland of Kenya and Tanzania, in and around the Great Rift Valley; their homestead is the manyatta and their best known custom is the jumping dance. The Pygmies, among whom the Mbuti, Baka and Efe are counted, live by hunting and gathering in the equatorial rainforest of the Congo basin, including the Ituri forest, and are the shortest of the world's peoples. The Bushmen, properly called the San, hunt with poison arrows in the Kalahari desert of Botswana and Namibia and speak languages with click sounds; the neighbouring Khoikhoi, once called Hottentots, herd cattle and sheep. The Tuareg, a Berber people of the Sahara in Niger, Mali and Algeria, are the veiled caravan traders called the blue men of the desert, while the Berbers proper live in the Atlas mountains of Morocco. The Fulani herd cattle across the Sahel, the Zulu live in South Africa and the Hausa in northern Nigeria.

Asia

The Bedouins are the Arabic speaking nomads of the Arabian and Syrian deserts, who move with camels, sheep and goats and live in tents of woven hair. On the Central Asian steppe and the Pamirs the Kirghiz, Kazakh and Mongol herders live in the round felt tent called the yurt or ger. In Siberia the Yakut of the Lena basin and the Chukchi and Koryak of the far north-east keep reindeer. The Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido in Japan, the Vedda of Sri Lanka and the Semang and Sakai of the Malay peninsula are forest dwellers, the Dayak and Punan live in Borneo, and the Sherpas of the Nepal Himalaya are the mountain people best known as climbers. The Kurds of Turkey, Iraq and Iran and the Pashtuns of Afghanistan are large highland communities rather than forest tribes.

The cold lands

The Sami, long called Lapps, herd reindeer across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola peninsula of Russia. The Inuit, formerly called Eskimo, live along the Arctic coasts of Greenland, Canada and Alaska; they hunt seal and caribou with the harpoon, travel in the kayak and the larger umiak, and use the snow house called the igloo in winter and the skin tent called the tupik in summer.

The Americas and Oceania

The Amazon basin holds the Yanomami, Boro, Jivaro and Kayapo, who practise shifting cultivation in the rainforest. The Andes were the home of the Inca, central Mexico of the Aztec and the Yucatan and Guatemala of the Maya. The Pueblo, Apache and Sioux belong to North America, where the Plains peoples used the tipi. On the pampas grassland of Argentina the cattle herding cowboys are the Gauchos. In Oceania the Aborigines of Australia are known for the boomerang and the didgeridoo, the Maori of New Zealand for the haka, and the Papuans for the highlands of New Guinea.

Tribe and region at a glance

Names of shifting cultivation

The same practice of clearing a patch, burning it and moving on carries a different name in every region, and the list is a favourite one-liner: milpa in Mexico and Central America, conuco in Venezuela, roca in Brazil, ladang in Malaysia and Indonesia, humah in Java, chena in Sri Lanka, taungya in Myanmar, ray in Vietnam, tamrai in Thailand, masole in the Congo and jhum in north-eastern India.