IK

You may also be looking for the abbreviation IK.

The Ik (also derogatorily called Teuso) are an ethnic group living in the mountains of northeastern Uganda, next to the larger Dodoth and Turkana, numbering a few thousand. They were expelled from their land to create a national park, and as a result of this suffered extreme famine; furthermore, their weakness relative to other tribes meant they were regularly raided. Colin Turnbull wrote an extremely disparaging anthropology book about them called The Mountain People. Their language, the Ik language, is of interest to linguists as a member of the highly divergent Kuliak subgroup of Nilo-Saharan.

The Ik create several small villages in clusters that are part of a "community." Each small village is surrounded by an outer wall, then sectioned off into familial- or friend-based "neighborhoods" called Odoks which have a wall around them as well. Finally each Odok is sectioned into walled-off households called asaks, with front yards (for lack of a better word) and sometimes granaries.

Children are typically expelled from the household at three years old and are not allowed into the house afterward. They form groups called age-bands with people in their age group; the Junior Group consists of children from the ages of three to eight and the Senior Group is a band of children between eight and thirteen. There are no adults that look after these children and they teach each other the basics of survival.

External links

[Ik - Hoffman]

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