What is a tribe?
Presented by ClearTrust Free for classrooms, newsrooms and the curious.
A tribe is a group of people who share a name, a sense of common descent, a culture and usually a homeland, and who organise much of their life through kinship instead of through a state. The word has no single agreed definition, and many groups prefer 'people', 'nation' or their own name.
In everyday speech a tribe is a community bound by family ties, shared customs, a shared language and a home territory. Members usually believe they descend from common ancestors. A tribe is often made up of smaller units such as clans and lineages, and its leaders may be chiefs, elders or councils.
Scholars once used 'tribe' as a stage between small bands and large states. Most anthropologists now avoid that idea, because real societies do not fit neat stages and because the word was used by colonial governments to label very different peoples, from groups of a few hundred to kingdoms of millions.
The word also has precise legal meanings. In India a Scheduled Tribe is a community listed under the constitution. In the United States a federally recognised tribe is a self-governing nation with a formal relationship to the federal government. Because of this mixed history, the safest approach is to use the name a people use for themselves, and to use 'tribe' where the people or the law use it.