What is a tribe?

Lesson 1 of 5 in "Start here", about 5 minutes

In everyday speech a tribe is a group of people who share a name, a homeland, a language or dialect, and a set of customs, and who feel they belong together. Members are usually linked by kinship, which means ties of family and descent. A tribe often has its own leaders and its own ways of settling disputes, separate from the government of the country it sits in.

That is a useful starting point, but real life is less tidy. Some groups called tribes have a few hundred members. Others have millions: the Gond and the Bhil of India each number well over ten million people. Some live in forests or deserts. Many live in towns and cities. What they share is a strong sense of being a distinct people.

Where the word comes from

Tribe comes from the Latin word tribus, which the Romans used for the divisions of their own citizens. Centuries later, European empires applied it to the peoples they ruled in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania. Colonial officials liked neat lists, so they drew firm lines around groups that had been fluid and overlapping, and labelled each one a tribe.

Because of that history the word carries baggage. It was often used to suggest that a people was simple or stuck in the past, in contrast to so-called civilised nations. That idea is false. Every living society is modern in the sense that it exists now and has kept changing. For this reason many writers on Africa avoid the word and say people or ethnic group.

Where the word is still used with pride

In other places tribe is an official and accepted term. In the United States it is a legal word: the government recognises tribes as nations with their own governments, and many call themselves tribal nations. In India the Constitution lists Scheduled Tribes, and people speak of tribal communities. Many of these communities also call themselves Adivasi, a Hindi word meaning original inhabitants.

What a tribe is not

• Not a stage of history. Tribes are not an early step that all societies pass through on the way to something better.
• Not sealed off. Peoples have always traded, married, fought and exchanged ideas with their neighbours.
• Not all alike. A fishing people in the Pacific and a herding people in the Sahara differ as much as any two countries.
• Not always small or rural. Many members are teachers, soldiers, software engineers and politicians.

Scholars once arranged societies in a sequence: band, tribe, chiefdom, state. You will still meet these words, and they can be handy labels for size and organisation. Treat them as a rough sorting tool that scholars themselves debate. They do not rank peoples by worth, and history does not move in one direction along them.

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1. Household. Start small. A household is the family that eats from one hearth. Among the Hadza of Tanzania it may be a couple, their children and a grandparent sharing one shelter.
2. Band or village. Several households live together as a band or a village. A foraging band may hold 20 to 50 people. A farming village may hold several hundred. This is where daily life happens.
3. Lineage. Kinship cuts across where people live. A lineage is a set of relatives who can name each link back to a shared ancestor, usually four to six generations ago.
4. Clan. Several lineages form a clan. Members believe they share one founding ancestor, even when nobody can name every link. Clan members often may not marry each other.
5. Tribe. Clans and villages together form a tribe: a named group with its own territory, customs and leaders. Many groups prefer the words people, nation or community instead.
6. Confederacy. Some tribes join a lasting alliance. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy in North America united five nations, later six, under one council while each nation kept its own affairs.
7. People or nation. The widest circle is the people or nation. Not every people has every level, and none of these levels is more advanced than another. They are different ways to organise.

So what should you say?

The safest rule is to use the name a people uses for itself, and the general word that they prefer. If a community calls itself a tribe, a nation, a people or a community, follow its lead. When you speak about many groups at once, 'peoples' is a good neutral word. On this site we use tribe where it is the accepted local term, and people elsewhere.

Words in this lesson