(12-04-2013, 04:17 PM)Xha Wrote:(12-04-2013, 02:35 PM)C Wrote: C'io Behkt did a nice write up for a few Coeurl tribe villages which I've been basing C'kayah's sept on, you might want to add that in. She speculates about a few common cultural attributes, at least among the three villages in her write up.
I'm going to jump on a modest soap box and propose a terminology change, since different people are tossing around the word "tribe" and using it to mean anything from the entire letter tribe down to a single breeding group. My suggestion is that "tribe" refers to the letter tribe only, and that smaller sub-groups have different terms - I'm not fond of "sub-tribe", because it's vague enough to cover anything down to and including a breeding group.
I'd suggest the word "sept" to cover both a tribal village (in the case of settled tribes) and a big nomadic unit within a tribe. The key with it is that the sept is culturally unified, and it's bigger than a single breeding group.
Breeding groups, of course, can then simply be "breeding groups".
So you'd have a hierarchy of terms like this: Tribe -> Sept -> Breeding group.
So, in C'kayah's case, he was born from C'xin Nunh's breeding group. That group was part of a larger Coeurl village, so that village is his sept. That sept, combined with all the other Coeurl septs, makes up the Coeurl tribe as a whole.
You wouldn't have to live with your sept to be part of it, of course. Think of the sept as an extended family. So if your Miqo'te takes part in a breeding group that opens up a new hunting area, and lives isolated from anyone else, they're still part of a sept. If your female Miqo'te joins a breeding group from another sept, they'd effectively be marrying into that new sept. They might talk about their new and old septs the same way that we talk about our families and the families we marry into.
So addapting this for Keepers "tribe" would become the maternal surname, sept could represent villages or wandering groups, and breeding groups would be all the females who 'share' a male?
So in this case Xha'li Moui would be from the Moui tribe, Coetheras Foothill sept, and one of only 4 in the K'zhuzu breeding group along with, Xha'a, Xha'to, and Xha herself.
Why would males have anything to do with it? The family is built around the female, her brother is part of her family. Just because he goes off and has sex with someone doesn't mean thing. That child would in fact not be family.
