Order in a Disordered World
381
A nth r ,
°Pos 101.2006
Fig.
1: A typical Bertha village: Shálák’o Dabus (Asosa wereda).
history of the Complutense University of Madrid,
u nder the direction of Víctor M. Fernández Marti-
nez - During this work, ethnographic material was
Sphered by the author of this article, most of it re-
ate d to the organization of domestic space among
he Bertha, as well as to pottery production and
ls tribution (González-Ruibal 2005).
The Bertha live in round huts, made of interwo-
Ven bamboo and covered with thatch, which form
Ullages of a few hundred individuals (Fig. 1). The
hts are loosely clustered in family compounds,
hich lack physical limits in rural areas but are
e hdowed with bamboo fences in urban areas (the
P Phals of the weredas) (see González-Ruibal and
^ er nández Martínez 2003). The location of houses
d compounds is mainly determined by kinship. A
. °^se, strictly speaking (that is, the place where an
^dependent married couple lives), is labelled shuli.
§roup of houses (family compound) receives the
wti ic name °f khosh, which can also apply to the
too 6 V '^ a £ e ’ known with the Arabic word hilla,
The Bertha and the Nilo-Saharan Peoples
of the Sudan-Ethiopia Borderland
The Bertha, numbering 150,000 individuals, are
the prevailing ethnic group in Benishangul-Gumuz
National Regional State, a region characterized by
its complex ethnic mosaic. They speak a language
belonging to the Nilo-Saharan family, which is a
particular branch in itself. It is not possible to link
it to the Komuz group (Bender 1994), that includes
Gumuz and the Koman languages (Uduk, Komo,
Kwama, Gwama, and maybe southern Mao). All
these groups, along with the Maban, Ingessana,
Shita, Hameg, northern Mao, and others are lumped
together in the term “Pre-Nilotes,” proposed by the
Italian colonial anthropologist Vinigi Grottanelli
in the 1940s (Grottanelli 1948). Grottanelli distin
guished the Nilotes (Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk, Azande,
etc.) from the “Pre-Nilotes,” based on different
linguistic and ethnographic criteria, such as the
symbolic relevance of cattle and the existence of
age groups among the Nilotes - both being absent