The Nuer

The Nuer The Nuer people are pastoral people who live on flood plains, they herd cattle’s and gather corn grain, and tobacco, and they also hunt for fish. The young men learn to care for the cattle while they are very young, this will be their life’s work so they must learn to do it well, when the plains flood the young men and women must take the cattle to a temporary camps where they take care of them and in the evenings the men smoke fresh tobacco they harvested and dance and sing behind their oxen to impress the women. The cattle being a very important part in these people’s lives are passed down from father to son, because only the men can have the cattle. These are patrilineal people so everything belongs to the father including the children. When a woman marries a man the man has to give the wife’s family a bride price of twenty-five cattle. These cattle play a vital role in these peoples lives; they never kill them unless it is for a sacrifice to god. An example of a sacrifice these people might make is, a mans daughter is sick and his son has died when he went off in the woods alone and he was not buried properly and the sons ghost has became a demon and went into the mother; the ghost of the boy will speak through his mother and wan an ox sacrifice and a bride, if they do not strike the ox in the heart the first time it is considered a very bad thing. They also sacrifice an ox when they pray to god and ask for crop and grain, god of grass, or they ask to remove sickness from their people, god of skin. The sickness is not always removed in 1971 when the movie was filmed only two boys became men because of the small pox. Being able to become a man is much more difficult here in the United States than it there. The young boys must first go to their father and tell them they want gar, which is markings a boy gets when he becomes a man if a male does not have these he cannot yet be married, the father must approve of this if he feels his son is ready and