Short essay on the concept of tribe

The social anthropologists have made certain attempts to define the concept of tribe. Take, for instance, the evolutionary thinker Morgan (1877). According to him, the tribal forms of social organization are specific.

In this respect Morgan’s book Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) is very important. He says that in a tribal society kinship relations dominate all forms of relations.

In these kinship relations, there is an internal logic and the social anthro­pologist tries to identify the internal logic. This logic could be discovered by the study of marriage rules and kinship terminologies, customary rules and laws. Morgan says that the concept of tribe thus may be defined as below:

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A tribe is a completely organized society, therefore, a form of social organization capable of reproducing itself.

Morgan further explains his position and says that a tribe is syn­onymous to clan. Therefore, in a broad way, a tribe is a collection of clans. It is characterized by a social organization having the following traits:

(a) It is not civilized,

(b) It is not a political society,

(c) It is not a state,

(d) It is a collection of clans,

(e) It has a name,

(f) It has a separate dialect, and

(g) It has a government.

Marshall Sahlins, a forward looking contemporary social anthro­pologist, for the first time in 1961, defined tribe as under:

A tribe is a type of society within the framework of comparative an­thropology as well as a stage of social evolution within a theory of history.

Sahlins argues that a tribe can be properly analyzed if looked at from evolutionary and historical perspectives. According to him, there are four stages of the development of the concept of tribe:

(i) The band,

(ii) The tribe,

(iii) The chiefdom, and

(iv) The state.

In his later work of 1968 he arranged these stages into three and eliminates the chiefdom stage. His definition of tribe now runs as fol­lows:

A tribe is of the order of a large collection of bands but it is not sim­ply a collection of bands there is a kingdom also which coordinates economic, social and religious activities and redistributed a large part of the production of local community.

Sahlins differs from Morgan. His thrust of definition is on the col­lection of bands. For a tribe some government is essential. This government coordinates other activities of the tribe.

Thus, it is clear that the tribe is a collection of clans or bands. It has a name, a dialect, a state, a government and above all it is a kind of society having some specific mode of production. It is at a certain level of development stage. However, our understanding of a tribe is based on the European concept of tribe.

Before we shift to India and define tribe, we must stress that in the above definitions we have approached the concept of tribe from a universalistic perspective. We now employ the particularistic approach, that is, Indian approach to the definition of tribe.