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The 'Daasanach' are an ethnic group of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. Their main homeland is in the Debub Omo Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region of Ethiopia, around the North end of Lake Turkana. The number of persons in this ethnic group exceeds 30,000.
There are a number of variant spellings of Daasanach, including Dasenach and Dassanech (the latter used in an episode about them in the TV series Going Tribal). Daasanach is the primary name given in the Ethnologue language entry[1].
The Daasanech are traditionally a pastoral people by tradition, but in recent years have become primarily agropastoral. Having lost the majority of their lands over the past fifty years or so, primarily as a result from being excluded from their traditional Kenyan lands, including on both sides of Lake Turkana, and the 'Ilemi Triangle' of Sudan, they have suffered a massive decrease in the numbers of cattle, goats and sheep. As a result, large numbers of them have moved to areas closer to the Omo, where they attempt to grow enough crops to survive. There is much disease along the river (including tsetse, which has increased with forest and woodland development there), however, making this solution to their economic plight difficult. Like many pastoral peoples throughout this region of Africa, the Dassanech are a highly egalitarian society, with a social system involving age sets and clan lineages - both of which involve strong reciprocity relations.
The Daasanach language is a Cushitic language, notable for its large number of noun classes, irregular verb system, and implosive consonants (for instance, the initial D in Daasanach is implosive, sometimes written as 'D).

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Further reading

External links

Further reading

★ Uri Almagor, "Institutionalizing a fringe periphery: Dassanetch-Amhara relations", pp. 96-115 in ''The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia'' (ed. Donald L. Donham and Wendy James), Oxford: James Currey, 2002.

★ Claudia J. Carr, ''Pastoralism in Crisis: the Dassanetch of Southwest Ethiopia''. University of Chicago. 1977.

External links

★ ''Going Tribal'' - "Crocodile Hunting", a look at the Dassanech (Anthropology.net)