Cow blowing, Kuhblasen, phooka, or doom dev, is a process used in many countries according to ethnographers, in which forceful blowing of air into a cow's anus is applied to induce her to produce more milk.
Cow blowing was the reason why Gandhi abjured cow milk, saying that "since I had come to know that the cow and the buffalo were subjected to the process of phooka, I had conceived a strong disgust for milk."
Cow blow, of the tribes of Khoikhoi to induce production of milk. Drawing of unknown author around 1700–1740
The Nuer people have historically been undercounted because of the semi-nomadic lifestyle. They also have a culture of counting only older members of the family. For example, the Nuer believe that counting the number of children one has could result in misfortune and prefer to report fewer children than they have. Their Ethiopian counterparts are the Horn peninsula's westernmost Horners.
The intrusion of the British in the 19th century greatly halted the Nuers' aggressive territorial expansion against the Dinka and Anyuak.
There are different accounts of the origin of the conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka, South Sudan's two largest ethnic groups. Anthropologist Peter J. Newcomer suggests that the Nuer are actually Dinka. He argues that hundreds of years of population growth created expansion, which eventually led to raids and wars.
In 2006 the Nuer were the tribe that resisted disarmament most strongly; members of the Nuer White Army, a group of armed youths often autonomous from tribal elders' authority, refused to lay down their weapons, which led SPLA soldiers to confiscate Nuer cattle, destroying their economy. The White Army was finally put down in mid-2006, though a successor organization self-styling itself as a White Army formed in 2011 to fight the Murle tribe, as well as the Dinka and UNMISS.
Cattle have historically been of the highest symbolic, religious, and economic value to the Nuer. Sharon Hutchinson writes that "among Nuer people, the difference between people and cattle was continually underplayed." Cattle are particularly important in their role as bridewealth, where they are given by a husband's lineage to his wife's lineage. This exchange of cattle ensures that the children will be considered to belong to the husband's lineage. The classical Nuer institution of ghost marriage, in which a man can "father" children after his death, is based on this definition of relations of kinship and descent by cattle exchange. In their turn, cattle given over to the wife's patrilineage enable the male children of that patrilineage to marry and thereby ensure the continuity of her patrilineage. An infertile woman can even take a wife of her own, whose children, biologically fathered by men from other unions, then become members of her patrilineage, and she is legally and culturally their father, allowing her to metaphorically participate in reproduction.
The Nuer people are a Nilotic ethnic group concentrated in the Greater Upper Nile region of South Sudan. They also live in the Ethiopian region Gambella, They speak the Nuer language, which belongs to the Nilotic language family. They are the second-largest ethnic group in South Sudan. The Nuer people are pastoralists who herd cattle for a living. Their cattle serve as companions and define their lifestyle.[1] The Nuer call themselves "Naath".
They people devoted to their herds, although milk and meat must be supplemented by the cultivation of millet and the spearing of fish. Because the land is flooded for part of the year and parched for the rest of it, they spend the rainy season in permanent villages built on the higher ground and the dry season in riverside camps.
Politically, the Nuer form a cluster of autonomous communities, within which there is little unity and much feuding; homicides are settled by payments of cattle effected through the mediation of a priest. The basic social group is the patrilineal lineage. Groups of lineages are organized into clans. The members of a clan have in their territory a slightly privileged status, although they form a minority of its population. The majority belong to other clans or are descendants of the neighboring Dinka, large numbers of whom have been subdued by the Nuer and incorporated into their society. In each community the men are divided into six age sets.
Marriage, which is polygynous, is marked by the giving of cattle by the bridegroom’s people to the bride’s kin. Because it is held that every man must have at least one male heir, it is the custom for a man’s kin, should he die unmarried, to marry a wife to his name and beget children by her, a custom known as “ghost marriage.”
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