Diamous

In the "Give & Take" post, I went into a small part of the importance of diamou, or tribal names, in Mali. I would often get asked if/how many diamous are in America, and I always struggled with the answer. There are of course the Native American tribes, but I don't think there is the same kind of joking relationships that Malian tribes enjoy, and lumping all the anglos together doesn't do justice to the variety therein. Last names, on the other hand, seem too numerous to really create the same kind of team mentality that seems to be inherent to the diamou.

I don't know if this map will totally answer the question, but it goes a long way. It's a geographical tag cloud of last names, color-coded by ethnic origin. Pretty cool.