Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Postcolonialism

Resistance

Felix Stein — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 14:21:43 +0000

University of Cambridge

Initially published 6 Oct 2016

Abstract:

With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected and regular feature of contemporary life. This entry explores how anthropology has linked these spectacular moments of resistance to broader social questions. It further explains how identifying a particular practice or process as a form of resistance is not always straightforward when broader context is thus taken into consideration. I do this by considering how resistance has appeared (or has been neglected) as a topic of study through the history of anthropology until the present day, and how prevailing theoretical frameworks and political contexts shaped what anthropologists made of resistance in different periods.

The entry begins from early political anthropology’s avoidance of questions of conflict and social inequality and moves through paradigm-shifting moments in the discipline – in particular, post-colonial and Marxist analyses – whereby resistance and social change became central concerns. It then examines how anthropologists began to study ‘everyday resistance’ and to emphasise how ethnography can reveal many small and subtle acts as forms of resistance, and as linked to more obvious and public forms of protest. Questions of consciousness and intentionality in political practice that are raised by everyday struggles are then considered in connection to the problem of defining resistance. In light of a focus on unconscious practices or acts that simultaneously challenge certain power structures and reinforce or create different ones, resistance is framed as that which constitutes a subversive relationship to forms of domination or systems that reproduce inequality, but that is not necessarily intentional or outside of prevailing political structures. Additionally, I consider anthropologists’ changing relation to resistance – from one of neglect to the position of activist or engaged researcher – as shifting forms of media and communication highlight researchers’ involvement in shaping perceptions of more and less organised forms of political struggle.

Introduction

It might seem like resistance is both a frequent occurrence and something that we recognise immediately when we see it. Images of protesting crowds, confrontations with police and military, workers’ strikes, or silent vigils attest to the ubiquity of resistance as various ways in which people organise themselves to challenge systems of inequality and oppression. Scenes such as massive crowds at Tahrir Square following the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, or of demonstrations and strikes in Greece opposing public spending cuts and other austerity measures, seem to define and pervade contemporary life in diverse global contexts. Anthropologists have explored the nature of these events and their political effects, understanding them as instances of resistance against domination by states and other powerful institutions as well as economic systems more broadly. The discipline has also, however, been interested in understanding the broader everyday contexts that make these spectacular events and moments possible. Seeing resistance as one element in a complex system of power relations, anthropologists have sought to describe and explain acts of resistance within the rich social, cultural, and economic fabrics in which they take place.

At the same time, anthropologists have approached the idea of resistance with some caution: do protest movements and uprisings really have subversive outcomes? And conversely, how do people resist and challenge the status quo in unintentional and seemingly un-political ways? Recognising a particular act or practice as resistance is often linked to the broader theory of power and politics employed. For example, following the famous dictum of feminism, ‘the personal is political’, anthropologists have considered women’s acts within the intimate domain of their domestic relationships as involving forms of resistance. Or, when analyzing protest movements, that people’s personal lives impact upon their capacity to act within public and organised politics. On the other hand, anthropologists have also tried to see resistance where it is less expected. This has often involved stepping back from overarching theoretical frames such as feminism or Marxism when describing and analyzing resistance.

In the following essay, I trace the history of the anthropology of resistance – from its beginnings as a moot concept within a discipline concerned with understanding order, to its attempts to analyze the contemporary proliferation of protest movements. In this way I explore how resistance can be an unintentional, unconscious, and ambiguous feature of the everyday, as well as the desired outcome of organised political movements.

Order and rebellion: resistance in the shadows

Early anthropological attention to resistance was framed in the terms of the dominant political anthropology of the time (up until the late 1950s), which emphasised the maintenance of social order and avoided questions of oppression and conflict. In light of this focus, those anthropologists who did analyze points of friction tended to depict them as the temporary release of social tensions. This would allow those who were discontent or found themselves in subordinate positions to then be re-absorbed into the normal social fabric with the threat of potential upheaval removed. A key work in this vein was Max Gluckman’s Rituals of rebellion in South-east Africa (1954), in which fertility rituals and ceremonies humiliating royal leaders among Zulu, Tsonga, and Swazi peoples were treated as moments in which social taboos can be broken and rebellious drives aired so that all involved – both the weak and the powerful – can continue in their assigned social roles without revolution. Social hierarchies are thus in fact protected, Gluckman claimed, by socially sanctioned expressions of discontent, or at least by the recognition of the existence of inequality within a society and ritualised attempts to deal with it.

This approach from political anthropology was picked up and elaborated into one of the most influential contributions to the anthropology of ritual and religion, by Gluckman’s student Victor Turner. Based on his fieldwork with the Ndembu of Zambia, Turner combined Gluckman’s attention to the cathartic dimension of rituals of rebellion with his own interest in rites of passage that marked, for example, the change from youth to adulthood, to suggest the idea of ‘liminality’ (1969). In the liminal phase of ritual, Turner argued, status roles could be reversed and subjugated members of a society can assume powerful positions, as ‘anti-structure’ is allowed to prevail over ‘structure’, and a temporarily egalitarian status of ‘communitas’ – a fervent and powerful feeling of group bondedness – is reached. Unlike Gluckman, though, Turner took this model and applied it to various social movements and cultural phenomena in other times and places, notably to secular contexts and to the groups in Europe and North America, such as the artists and poets of the Beat Generation and their successors the ‘hippies’, citing Bob Dylan as the ‘authentic voice of spontaneous communitas’ (Turner 1969: 165). In framing such phenomena in this way, and arguing that their enactments of different kinds of power relations were basically utopian moments that could not be sustained within the political and economic systems in which they operated, Turner maintained a conservative view of social order that made resistance seem like an anomaly or even a naïve and youthful aspiration to social change that could never be realised.

Resistance as it is generally considered - as a challenge to power or domination - was thus largely written out of anthropology of this period. When it did appear, it reinforced the view of prevailing political anthropology approaches at the time: that societies were rather static and maintained a basic equilibrium. This went hand in hand with the almost total absence in these writings of the colonial authorities’ presence in the places where anthropologists were working. The ways in which European powers maintained their rule but also faced persistent challenges to it by colonised peoples emerged later, as Marxist and post-colonial theoretical approaches gained ground in anthropological work.

From order to conflict: Marxist and post-colonial anthropology

Along with the discipline in general, political anthropology underwent a fundamental change in the wake of the national anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth century, and so too resistance began to take a more central place in analyses of political systems. As power began to look less static, both in the formerly colonised countries and with the anti-war and anti-capitalist movements elsewhere, two key theoretical approaches shaped anthropological takes on resistance. Marxist and post-colonial perspectives both introduced a profound historicisation of anthropological knowledge, sometimes in differing and sometimes in converging ways, such that no approach to power or to resistance could now render society or culture as unchanging or uncontested systems that simply reproduce themselves.

On the one hand, a Marxist emphasis on modes of production informed a generation of political anthropologists who paid attention to how people’s labour and material circumstances affected their social and cultural practices, beliefs, and relationships more broadly. Eric Wolf’s (1982) and Sidney Mintz’ (1985) work on the entanglement of local economic and political processes with global markets and systems of inequality provided key reference points for those who wished to understand how changing global economies led to sometimes unfamiliar and often ambivalent forms of resistance.

Michael Taussig’s The devil and commodity fetishism in South America (1980) remains a provocative example of this kind of work, as he argued that in the rapid change from peasantry to work on sugarcane plantations in Colombia, workers’ beliefs about money earned as wages and their integration of these with the Christian symbol of the devil expressed an indigenous critique of both capitalism and the religion of the Spanish colonisers. Increased productivity, and thus higher earnings, were thought to emanate from a pact with the devil, and the worker concerned was said to suffer a painful, early death. Taussig thus argued that plantation workers were expressing and condemning the suffering brought about by the new economy through the idiom of the pre-commoditised relationship with material objects they had as peasants, when workers and the material things they made and circulated were entwined with their very person. The banknotes earned as wages in the plantations are thus symbolised as having a magical quality that can cause suffering and bad fortune, in Taussig’s twist on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.

The point of studies like these is at least partly to disturb a historical narrative that sees the growth of global capitalism and its attendant securing of hegemony as a linear process. By pointing to expressions of resistance on the part of workers, of more and less conscious forms, and with greater or lesser immediate impacts, this focus on resistance has attempted to lend ethnographic richness to broader theoretical framings of political economy, as well as to undermine modernist accounts that anticipate such developments as inevitable and universally similar. At the same time, though, another intellectual trend to come out of this historical period questioned the sometimes unexamined assumptions of these texts about the false consciousness of workers and the ability of the ethnographer to truly know what the intentions or understandings of the people with whom they did research actually were.

Emerging mainly out of historical studies of colonial India, the subaltern studies school of thinkers suggested that much of the ethnographic record and anthropological theorising that came with it relied too heavily on elite and colonial knowledge. It was unable to take into account the vast majority of the world’s ordinary, colonised people – the subalterns – and the ways in which they were not represented in most scholarship. The subaltern studies scholars attempted to study the resistance of groups such as peasants and the way hegemony was never complete in colonial societies, in a way that classical Marxism could not do because of its assumptions about class structure and historical change. The subaltern studies school differed from the Marxist notion that an individual’s political consciousness was determined by their position in the class system, and that this would eventually lead to collective struggle aimed at forwarding class-based interests. Rather, they proposed, different forms of individual and political consciousness existed in non-Western histories that universalist theories such as Marxism were unable to comprehend. Thus, the proposition of subaltern ‘autonomy’ (Guha 1983) – a domain of consciousness outside of elite and colonial representations – was offered as the neglected side of uprisings against the colonial state and raised issues of agency and will in resistance. This line of thought opened significant questions about the nature of consciousness, agency, and knowledge in resistance and political struggle. What do we make of acts that look like resistance, but are not interpreted as such by those performing them? Does the idea of ‘false consciousness’ provide an answer, or can we think about ways of thinking outside of systems of power and domination? With increased attention towards such forms of intention and perception in anthropology more broadly, as well as in the study of politics, the question of resistance became salient in new ways, not least because traditional theories of domination and class struggle had been shaken by emerging scholarship in the wake of decolonisation.

Culture, identity and symbolism: everyday resistance

In light of the interest in histories of resistance that had previously gone unwritten, the 1980s and 1990s saw a wave of work focusing on resistance where it had not been seen before. James Scott’s work was key in creating an analytical framework of ‘everyday acts of resistance’ that saw individual acts that were not formally part of any insurgent political movement as ways in which people resisted domination in banal and often unnoticed ways. Scott’s study built on Marxist and post-colonial attention to peasant studies, arguing that a lack of mass political action or violent uprising did not mean that resistance was not occurring. Based on his fieldwork in Malaysia, in Weapons of the weak (1985) Scott claimed that although outwardly compliant with rich local landowners, poor villagers were not taken in by inequality and domination but rather chose when and how to express discontent through low-level sabotage and private gossip that could be considered an everyday form of class struggle and resistance. In the later Domination and the arts of resistance (1990), he elaborated on these ideas and introduced the concept of ‘hidden transcripts’ – the ‘offstage’ criticisms of the powerful that show that subordinate groups are not mystified or falsely conscious, as in classical conceptions of hegemony. Among his wide-ranging examples of hidden transcripts, Scott offers the case of slaves’ ‘theft’, arguing that their taking of crops of livestock was seen as a kind of reclaiming of that which they had produced, although it was described as theft or pilfering by slave-owners or overseers. The point of taking such produce without being detected was not only to avoid punishment or to satisfy hunger but also to achieve an invisible culture of reclaiming ownership over the fruits of their own labour that subverted slave-owners’ narratives of property and theft. With this work Scott not only intervened in debates within Marxism, but also drew anthropologists’ attention to the banal forms of being dominated and resisting that domination, and offered a way of investigating these questions with the detail of ethnography rather than broad political theory.

Some of the most influential ethnographic work in this vein took this preoccupation with the everyday to classic subjects of anthropological fascination, such as symbolism, religious practice, and spirit possession, and re-read these phenomena in the light of this lens of domination and resistance. Thus Jean Comaroff, for example, studied the rise of Zionist churches among the Tshidi of South Africa as tied up in the persistence of indigenous cultural categories through colonial rule and capitalist transformations (1985). Comaroff’s argument is not that Tshidi ‘culture’ survives untouched by what are presumed to be external political forces, but that both mutually shape each other, and that the encounter is contained and expressed in various symbolic and ritual practices, which thus articulate a subversive manipulation of signs of racial and class inequality. Zionist ritual dress, for example, is adopted but transformed by Tshidi congregants, by changing its colours to those of pro-colonial symbols, or through Tshidi women wearing garments traditionally donned by male Protestant bishops. Whilst certainly still concerned with finessing Marxist concepts such as ideology and hegemony, this anthropological approach also exploited the banal nature of these phenomena to analyze how resistance takes place in the embodied and subjective realm of cultural practice, and thus Comaroff also called on other influential theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, in her analysis of how politics permeates the everyday. Similarly, Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline explores gender and female sexuality as the site of both domination and of resistance, although often of an unwilled nature (1987). In tune with the influence of feminist theory on the anthropology of gender, kinship, and production, Ong argues that Malay women factory workers’ frequent spirit possessions on the factory floor were a mode of defiance against their control by non-Malay male supervisors. Along with small acts that decrease the women’s productivity, as in Scott’s framing of the various acts and forms of speech that constitute hidden transcripts, the affliction of spirit possession and its temporary release of women from their workplace is interpreted as an unconscious resistance against capitalist power and patriarchy, within the context of their family and village lives as well as in much broader spectrums of power within the global economy.

This anthropological work resonated with the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, who, although not anthropologists, led the field in producing ethnographic work sensitive to the often small-scale reverberations of much larger political and economic structures, mostly focusing on British subcultures and working class life. Paul Willis’ Learning to labor (1977) is a close study of twelve white working class English school boys, ‘the lads’, and analyses how their rejection of the system of academic achievement offered by the formal education system contributes to the reproduction of their class position and future as working class labourers. Unlike Scott’s ‘hidden transcripts’, though, Willis’ emphasis on the lads’ irreverent approach to authority and the political ramifications of their clowning around represented a more ambivalent take on resistance even as he similarly rejected the idea that these boys were duped or mystified by power. The ways in which they resisted power became, with a bitter irony, a key part of why they continued to be oppressed by it. The question this interpretation raises, then, as with the anthropology of everyday resistance, is, is it really resistance? If resistance is either not named as such by those engaging in it, or contributes only to reinforcing domination, the sense of the term becomes less clear, particularly for anthropologists interested in being true to their ethnographic material rather than only advancing a theoretical or political argument. As everyday resistance seemed to proliferate, then, anthropologists also began to take a step back and cast a critical eye on this burgeoning field of work.

Too much resistance: power and subjectivity

In light of the growing anthropological attention to resistance, in its spectacular as well as everyday forms, critical questions about this field of study began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, anthropologists reflected on what acts may truly count as resistance, and whether scholars had begun to pre-determine their analyses by looking too hard for it. Lila Abu-Lughod was one of those who critically re-evaulated earlier work, including her own analysis of women’s and young men’s love poetry and other practices among Egyptian Bedouins as subtle forms of defiance against local hierarchical and patriarchal moral codes (1986). In her later article, The romance of resistance (1990), Abu-Lughod influentially argued that resistance is not external, or in opposition, to power, but is rather a ‘diagnostic’ of it: a reflection of power structures within a given context. Thus she suggested that the resistance to local hierarchies in her earlier ethnography entailed an entanglement or complicity with another form, such as the state or global markets, which could tell us about the shifting political economy of Egypt at the time. She cited Foucault’s argument that power, rather than being only oppressive or negative, is productive of all kinds of practice, subjectivity, and knowledge, and is diffused through all spheres of life rather than held and imposed top-down by the state or other entities (Foucault 1979).

This characterisation of anthropological work on resistance as romanticising was echoed in other writing during this period, which examined the investment on the part of anthropologists in certain moral or political projects. Some claimed that this propelled them to insist on an idealised picture of the oppressed as heroically standing up against those who dominate them (Brown 1996), while others defended such ethical engagements on the part of the anthropologist but argued that they required greater reflexivity about this positionality as well as more complex ethnographic description to capture ambivalence in projects of resistance (Ortner 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1995). Similarly, anthropologists started to write about cases in which practices of resistance could simultaneously challenge existing kinds of oppression and contribute to the creation or reproduction of other kinds of hegemony (Jean-Klein 2001; Kulick 1996; Theodossopoulos 2014).

The study of resistance becomes, in these critical perspectives, the starting point for broader questions of political agency and subjectivity. For, if we cannot identify resistance or acquiescence as clearly distinct from one another, and if both can be present in the same set of practices, this has significant implications for theories of how people act, and with what kind of consciousness or intentions, within political systems. The gendered aspects of resistance and politics, and feminist theory’s contribution to our understanding of it, were the subject of much anthropological work that considered these issues. Begoña Aretxaga’s study of women’s roles within working class Catholic struggles against British rule in Northern Ireland considered resistance within its nationalist and gendered context, arguing that women neither passively receive nor freely navigate these dominant political tropes (1997). Motherhood, for example, was held up as a central symbolic value in the communities Aretxaga worked with, and although she cites maternal suffering as a subjective motivation for political action among Catholic women, it was also a trope through which they collectively challenged husbands’ and sons’ dominance in political activism. That is, whilst being able to draw power from the potent nationalist and Catholic symbol of the mother who suffers the pains of her son, the legitimisation of women’s involvement in politics through such symbolism also contributed to their reconfiguring of domestic and intimate relations with their husbands and children. The ideology of motherhood thus bolstered women’s participation into political struggle at the national level whilst also helping to transform some of its key social and economic underpinnings. Further, Aretxaga analyzed women prisoners’ participation in the ‘dirty protest’ in Armagh prison, and the use of their menstrual blood as a transgression of powerful taboos governing the expression of female sexuality.^[1] Aretxaga suggests that whilst women’s actions were conscious and intentional, they also relied on unconscious and emotional motivations of rejecting gendered humiliation, a level of personal experience which thus becomes part of the political realm and practices of resistance.

The role of the unconscious and the emotional, or affective, in resistance, and the ways in which political contexts shape these aspects of subjectivity, raises important questions about how social change and individual action or experience are linked. The feminist philosopher Judith Butler, herself influenced by both Foucault and psychoanalytic thought, argued that agency is made possible only through the workings of power, as people can only speak and be heard through the language and cultural forms available to them within specific historical, and political, contexts (1997). Resistance and social change, in this theory, are the consequences of modifications – whether intentional or accidental – of dominant forms of expression and practice. This theoretical model of agency has been influential in political anthropology, but has also been questioned because of the way it emphasises agency as linked primarily with social change and resistance. Saba Mahmood, in her work on an Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt, argued that this aspect of Butler’s work reflects a broader problem within Western liberal feminism, in its assumptions that freedom and agency have to imply opposition to authority (2005). Mahmood demonstrated ethnographically how the women she worked with in Cairo were often interested in living up to Islamic moral teachings, rather than challenging them, and argued that this need not mean that these women were therefore reproducing their own oppression, but rather that agency does not always equate to resistance.

When resistance is seen as a subjective as well as social encounter with power, then, our view of politics and its transformations become an ever richer field of investigation, whether one is skeptical of resistance studies or argues for more attention to the ambiguities and complexities within it. With this area of intimate and embodied experience opened up as a legitimate domain of anthropological thought, these critical takes on resistance promoted a new set of theoretical vocabularies that contemporary anthropologists have been able to draw on as historical events once again made resistance a key concern for the discipline.

Imagining different futures: contemporary anthropological approaches to resistance

From the late 1990s until the contemporary moment, the prominence of anti-globalisation protests, the events of the ‘Arab Spring’, and the rise of socio-economic and racial justice movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, have brought about a renewed interest in resistance, social movements, and activism in anthropology. Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of this recent work has been its focus on media and communication technologies, both as a factor in how resistance plays out, and relating to the potential for anthropologists to be politically engaged and in dialogue with the people with whom they conduct research. Although anthropological accounts have undermined popular understandings of these movements as driven by social media, pointing to the very real and often risky presence of protestors’ bodies in public spaces, they have also not underestimated the possibilities for activism opened up by technologies such as Facebook or Twitter, and have considered how virtual networks contribute to novel forms of political organisation. An example is the ‘hashtag activism’ in the protests that followed the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and in the Black Lives Matters movement that grew after this and other similar killings in the USA. This kind of engagement became a key way in which people across the country and elsewhere expressed solidarity with those demonstrating in Ferguson (Bonilla & Rosa 2015). This online activism exposed and played with dominant media stereotypes and racist language and allowed for users to actively re-inscribe the meaning of the black body, unlike in physical confrontations with police in demonstrations where it is often cast as threatening and dangerous.

Other work has pointed to the different qualities of various kinds of online communication and media, arguing that whilst email list-servs and web fora were crucial in building and maintaining activist networks in the anti-globalisation movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s, social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been less useful for in-depth communication among activists working closely with each other but have contributed to the spread of movements such as Occupy beyond typical activist circles and have helped to create feelings of solidarity and collectivity across wide and disparate social contexts (Juris 2012). The participation of broader publics in socioeconomic justice and antiracist movements in the ‘real time’ of social media has also prompted anthropologists to write shorter and open-access pieces for audiences outside of the academy as well as within it. These are generally published faster than traditional academic articles and aim to contribute to public debates about these protests and the power structures they hope to challenge. The journal Cultural Anthropology, for example, has established the ‘Hot Spot’ forum on its website, which has published collections of essays by anthropologists and activists on the Occupy movement, the Egyptian revolution, and Istanbul’s Gezi park protests, among others.^[2]

What happens to participants during resistance, and how that in turn shapes its political effects, is also affected by its modes of communication and performance. Studies of contemporary activism have considered the collective experiences of humour and spontaneity, joyfulness and a sense of possibility, as crucial aspects of activism and as playing into a movement’s broader trajectory (Haugerud 2013; Rasza & Kurnik 2012; Sitrin 2013). These analyses sometimes recall older anthropological notions such as Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’ (1995 [1912]) – the embodied passion and fervor that comes from communal, out-of-the-ordinary action – and Turner’s ‘rituals of reversal’, and sometimes draw on more recent theoretical concepts such as ‘affect’ and ‘becoming’. In what has been labelled the ‘subjective turn’ (Rasza 2013), a central argument has been that the ability of activists to imagine and sense different emotional and inter-personal relations in the forms of non-hierarchical organisation is vital for the potential of a political movement to offer and demonstrate alternative forms of social organisation to prevailing capitalist and neoliberal politics. This perspective also provides a good example of how anthropological analysis of movements such as Occupy or the Gezi park protests constitute resistance: by adopting a broadly critical stance on contemporary capitalism, neoliberalism, and state violence, these perspectives tend to echo activists’ analyzes of certain formations of power and thus frame protest and social movements acting against them as resistance.

Persistent inequalities and enduring effects of past violence on social interaction, however, are also felt within activist groups even as they aim to resist domination. Scholars attentive to how class, gender or racial difference continue to be reproduced and enacted within protest movements have advocated for a ‘decolonizing’ approach, which aims to bring a consciousness of historical injustices of different kinds into activism that might unwittingly repeat similar patterns of domination (Liu 2013). These approaches relate to an older notion of ‘identity politics’, which has been criticised for the way in which it can reinscribe certain essentialist and even exclusionary notions of identity, and suggest that whilst more universalist political goals can be shared by various people in a resistance movement, activists must remain vigilant about questions of difference and power structures within the group. These issues were particularly visible in writing about indigenous activism and struggles for land rights and self-determination, where the very means of resistance – by recourse to legal technologies and vocabularies of rights, citizenship, and territory – involve speaking the language of the powerful in order to make certain claims (Jackson and Warren 2005; Muehlebach 2010). Thus certain members of a community, as well as the anthropologist, may, paradoxically, be more able to articulate and represent ‘indigeneity’ than those who speak only the language of the colonised. Equally, there is concern about the ways in which protest movements are represented and perhaps even appropriated in scholarship, as academics seek to capitalise on political events so as to prove the relevance or timeliness of their work whilst at the same time silencing and exploiting the knowledge and labour of local academics and activists (Abaza 2013).

The anthropology of resistance, then, is grappling with a new set of questions that have arisen from contemporary political events. Although some older conceptual questions – about social change and stasis, false consciousness and agency – remain pertinent, recent work on resistance has also been formed by different concerns. Alongside shifting theoretical frameworks, anthropological perspectives on resistance are being transformed by widespread acknowledgment of researchers’ responsibility to research participants, as well as reflexive awareness of their own roles in shaping local and global politics.

References

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Abu-Lughod, L. 1986. Veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 1990. The romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through bedouin women. American Ethnologist 17(1), 41-55.

Aretxaga, B. 1997. Shattering silence: women, nationalism, and political subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: University Press.

Bonilla, Y. & J. Rosa 2015. #Ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42(1), 4-17.

Brown, M. F. 1996. Forum: on resisting resistance. American Anthropologist 98(4), 729-35.

Butler, J. 1997. The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. Stanford: University Press.

Comaroff, J. 1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance: the culture and history of a South African people. Chicago: University Press.

Durkheim, E. 1995 [1912]. The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: Free Press.

Foucault, M. 1979 [1976]. The history of sexuality volume 1: an introduction. London: Allen Lane.

Gluckman, M. 1954. Rituals of rebellion in South-east Africa. Manchester: University Press.

Guha, R. 1983. Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Haugerud, A. 2013. No billionaire left behind: satirical activism in America. Stanford: University Press.

Jackson, J.A. & K. Warren 2005. Indigenous movements in Latin America, 1992-2004: controversies, ironies, new directions. Annual Review of Anthropology 34(5), 549-73.

Jean-Klein, I. 2001. Nationalism and resistance: the two faces of everyday activism in Palestine during the Intifada. Cultural Anthropology 16(1), 83-126.

Juris, J. 2012. Reflections on #Occupy everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation. American Ethnologist 39(2), 259–79.

Kulick, D. 1996. Causing a commotion: public scandal as resistance among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Anthropology Today 12(6), 3-7.

Liu, Y.Y. 2013. Decolonizing the Occupy Movement. Cultural Anthropology website (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/87-decolonizing-the-occupy-movement).

Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: University Press

Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking-Penguin.

Muehlebach, A. 2010. What self in self-determination? Notes from the frontiers of transnational indigenous activism. Identities 10(2), 241-68.

Ong, A. 1987. Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in Malaysia. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Ortner, S. B. 1995. Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1), 173-93.

Rasza, M. 2013. The subjective turn: the radicalization of personal experience with Occupy Slovenia. Cultural Anthropology website (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/74-the-subjective-turn-the-radicalization-of-personal-experience-within-occupy-slovenia).

Razsa, M. & A. Kurnik 2012. The Occupy Movement in Žižek's hometown: direct democracy and a politics of becoming. American Ethnologist 39(2), 238-58.

Scheper-Hughes, N. 1995. The primacy of the ethical: propositions for a militant anthropology. Current Anthropology 36(3), 409-40.

Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

——— 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sitrin, M. 2013. Occupy trust: the role of emotion in the new Movements. Cultural Anthropology website (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/76-occupy-trust-the-role-of-emotion-in-the-new-movements, accessed 2 February 2015).

Taussig, M. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Theodossopoulos, D. 2014. The ambivalence of anti-austerity indignation in Greece: resistance, hegemony and complicity. History and Anthropology 25(4), 488-506

Turner, V. 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Willis, P. 1977. Learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Note on contributor

Fiona Wright is an anthropologist interested in activism, dissent, and ethics, and how they are linked to sovereignty and violence. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Israel/Palestine and is currently researching the politics of debates over free speech in British universities.

Dr Fiona Wright, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. fcw28@cam.ac.uk

[1] Developing out of their ‘no-work’ protest and refusal to wear prison uniforms, the Armagh dirty protest took place from 1980-1981, and involved women prisoners refusing to bathe, to use lavatories, or to clean their cells over long stretches of time. Combined with hunger strikes and Republican male prisoners’ similar acts at a different prison, the dirty protest was one of the more violent and tense episodes in the history of British rule in Northern Ireland.

[2] See Cultural Anthropology website: http://www.culanth.org/conversations/4-hot-spots (accessed 28 February 2016).

Tribe

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

David Sneath

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16tribe

Abstract:

The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been largely abandoned as a sociological category. Although the origin of the word was rooted in the ancient Roman tribus, the modern concept of tribe emerged in the era of Euroamerican colonial expansion. It became the standard term for the social units of peoples considered primitive by the colonists, and for those thought to be uncivilised in historical accounts of antiquity. In the nineteenth century, the term tribe was woven into the theories of primitive society governed by the principles of ‘kinship’ proposed by the emerging social sciences, including the anthropology of Morgan and the sociology of Durkheim. This evolutionist thinking remained central to anthropology throughout most of the twentieth century, but in the post-colonial era of the discipline, more and more doubts were raised as to the usefulness of both the category ‘tribe’, and the particular models of kinship society that had been proposed for it. By the beginning of this century ‘the tribe’ had been widely discredited as an analytical term outside some specialised fields such as theories of early state formation. It is now commonly considered an ethnographic, rather than an analytical, term by Western-trained social and cultural anthropologists; a feature of the public culture studied, and reflecting the word’s popularization and colonial heritage.

Origins

Until the latter part of the twentieth century, ‘tribal society’ was widely thought to be the primary subject of anthropological inquiry. The study of ‘modern’ industrial society was the remit of sociology, while social and cultural anthropologists specialised in ‘traditional’, ‘primitive’, pre-industrial societies that formed ‘tribes’.^[1]

Paradoxically, although the concept of the tribe has been largely discredited and abandoned among Western-trained social and cultural anthropologists, the early anthropological promotion of the term was so successful that among the non-academic public worldwide, the category ‘tribe’ remains the single most prominent and dominant popular anthropological notion for imagining and referring to human society outside bureaucratic states.

The word 'tribe' itself is derived from the Latin term tribus, the administrative divisions and voting units of ancient Rome (Cornell 1995: 117).^[2] It came to be used in biblical texts for the thirteen divisions of the early Israelites and appears with this meaning in Middle English in the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth century it was being applied to non-biblical contexts in ways that resembled concepts such as race and lineage (Murray 1926: 339).

The notion of the tribe took on a very particular role in the era of colonial expansion. It became the social unit – and characteristic life-organising social form – of peoples considered more primitive than the Euroamerican colonists. As Yapp remarks:

It was only with the sixteenth-century expansion of Europe into the Americas and Africa that the association of tribes with a more primitive order of mankind began, and only with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that this was formalized into that concept of progress which set tribal people outside the pale of civil society. It was then supposed that the natural course of human development was a progression to higher levels of social, economic and political organization, which could be equated with civilization; and that those people who remained grouped in tribes represented an earlier, lower form of life, left behind by the march of history and destined to be redeemed and refashioned by the intervention of superior forces. The epithet most commonly found in association with the word ‘tribe’ was ‘savage’ (1983: 154).

Tribe became the standard term for the political groups of those thought of as barbarians, both in colonial encounters and in historical accounts of antiquity. Early modern and Enlightenment accounts of ancient Roman history came to routinely apply the category of tribe to the societies of Gauls, Germans, and others considered barbaric by the classical authors (e.g., Gibbon 1790). But in fact, since the primary meaning of the Latin term tribus was a Roman administrative unit, the term ‘tribe’ that appeared in such modern translations and commentaries only rarely referred to what had actually been called tribus by ancient Romans themselves. When sources such as Caesar and Tacitus described Gauls and Germans, they commonly used other terms.^[3] But European colonial elites compared themselves to the patricians of ancient Rome, and the same modern vocabulary for civilised and barbaric peoples was applied to both eras.

Tribe and evolutionism

In the nineteenth century, the emerging discipline of anthropology, dominated as it was by grand theories of historical progress and social evolution, wove the term tribe into the narrative of primitive society governed by the principles of ‘kinship’. The most influential anthropological theorist of his generation, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) created a general scheme for the evolution of human society through three broad stages, from ‘savagery,’ to ‘barbarism’, and then to ‘civilisation’. He based his scheme on his readings of classical Greek and Roman history, in particular the theory of ancient Hellenistic state formation proposed by liberal politician George Grote in his 1846–1856 history of Greece. In Morgan’s schema the ‘tribe’ (the Greek phylon) was the political unit formed by a number of kinship units called phratries each composed of several ‘clans’ (gens) composed of families sharing descent from a common ancestor.

Morgan’s scheme fitted into a broader evolutionist perspective that assumed primitive society was organised by the principles of kinship and as a result could not be really hierarchical. Morgan, Maine, Marx, and McLennan all saw extended ties of kinship as forming the basis for pre-state society, later giving way to territory as the basis for social organization in civilizations. Maine, for example, who was concerned with the colonial administration of India and who grounded his work on primitive society in studies of classical Greek and particularly Roman sources, declared ‘The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions’ (1861: 106). The progress from barbarism to civilization entailed the change in social organization from one based on egalitarian kinship to one structured by hierarchical and territorial administration. This theory of change became the frame in which the anthropological conception of tribe developed. As the unit of barbaric society, then, the tribe stood in contrast to the state.

Colonial rule powerfully institutionalised the term tribe as an administrative category throughout much of the colonised world, particularly in Africa. In British Africa, such tribes became indispensable features of indirect rule; local rulers were maintained, and sometime installed, as ‘chiefs’ of their respective ‘tribes’, under colonial oversight and regulation. ‘Native law and custom’ became a central category of administration and the unit to which it was attached was generally the tribe.^[4] Only the most serious crimes were dealt with by the colonial judicial system; most local disputes were to be resolved by tribal courts using ‘customary’ law.

By the early twentieth century, the key assumptions regarding the tribe in evolutionist thought, that it was a form of primitive society, and that it was a kinship unit of common descent, had become common features in anthropological treatments. So, for example, the entry on ‘Tribe’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 first describes the meaning of the word in terms of Roman administration and then continues: ‘Its ethnological meaning has come to be any aggregate of families or small communities which are grouped together under one chief or leader, observing similar customs and social rules, and tracing their descent from one common ancestor.’^[5] No serious attempt was made to establish a common definition, however, and many anthropologists tended to use tribe as a heuristic term to indicate some level of social aggregation of the ‘primitive’ societies they studied (Ekeh 1990: 662).^[6]

However, the growing influence of Durkheimian theory in social anthropology added weight to the Morganian vision of kinship society. Durkheim, who had himself been a student of the celebrated classicist Fustel de Coulanges, also saw the tribe as ‘an aggregate of hordes or clans’ (Durkheim 2013 [1893]: 204) and built it into his account of social evolution from ‘segmentary’ society based upon mechanical solidarity to the more advanced societies based upon organic solidarity. The emergent vision of ‘segmentary kinship society’, made up of families grouped together into successively larger units on the grounds of shared descent, became widely accepted as a sort of natural form for primitive society.^[7]

Tribe and social structure

In social anthropology the tribal concept was elaborated into a distinct model inspired, in particular, by Evans-Pritchard’s account of Nuer social structure. In their seminal 1940 work African political systems, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard proposed two categories of African polities.

One group, which we refer to as Group A, consists of those societies which have centralized authority, administrative machinery, and constituted judicial institutions – in short a government – and in which cleavages of wealth, privilege, and status correspond to the distribution of power and authority … Group B consists of those societies which lack centralized authority, administrative machinery, and constituted judicial institutions – in short which lack government – and in which there are no sharp distinctions of rank, status, or wealth … Those who consider that a state should be defined by the presence of governmental institutions will regard the first group as primitive states and the second group as stateless societies (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940: 5).

In these ‘stateless societies’, they argued, political relations were regulated by a ‘segmentary lineage system’ (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940: 6).^[8] This segmentary system was proposed as a general model for non-state tribal societies in which the branching segments of a unilineal genealogy formed political and territorial units, composed of the descendants of common ancestors. These grouped together on the basis of their genealogical distance to create successively larger political units.^[9] This typology was enormously influential and reflected the enduring influence of Morgan and evolutionist social theory.^[10] Although crude evolutionism had been criticised by the previous generation of anthropologists such as Malinowski, Stocking notes that by 1951 the structural-functionalism presented in authoritative works such as Notes and queries on anthropology had ‘in a peculiar way … re-evolutionized’ descriptions of political authority, so that they became ranged ‘in implicit evolutionary fashion’ (2001: 194).

Indeed, evolutionist thought remained central to both social and cultural anthropology and the tribe was widely thought of as an earlier stage of political evolution. As such the notion of ‘tribal society’ continued to act as the primitive counterpoint to self-descriptions of Euroamerican ‘civilisation’, narratives dominated by the discourse of class, kinship, territory, and function; and which reflected debates surrounding the ‘state of nature’ stretching back to Hobbes and Rousseau.

Tribes occupy a position in cultural evolution. They took over from simpler hunters; they gave way to more advanced cultures we call civilisations … the contrast between tribe and civilisation is between War and Peace. A civilisation is a society specially constituted to maintain ‘law and order’; the social complexity and cultural richness of civilisations depend on institutional guarantees of Peace. Lacking these institutional means and guarantees, tribesmen live in a condition of War, and War limits the scale, complexity, and all-round richness of their culture … Expressed another way, in the language of older philosophy, the U.S. is a state, the tribe a state of nature. Or, the U.S. is a civilisation, the tribe a primitive society (Sahlins 1968: 4-5, original emphasis).

The death of the concept

However, the second half of the twentieth century saw a steadily growing disquiet with both the term ‘tribal’ and the thinking that informed it. There were a number of reasons for this. The first was the incoherence of the category of tribe as a sociological term and the persistent difficulties of devising a definition. The word was applied to social categories so radically different as to stretch any notion of common criteria to breaking point; from groups of a few hundred ‘hunter-gatherers’ like the Araweté of the Amazon (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 49) to the millions of people in Nigeria and Benin identified as Yoruba, with a long history of rival city states (Arnett 1933: 401).

The second reason was an unhappiness with early evolutionist social theory and the teleological judgements it implied. Theories of social evolution were increasingly seen to be triumphalist Euroamerican narratives that justified colonial domination and claims of superiority. The concept of ‘primitive society’, for example, was found to be increasingly inapplicable and unhelpful for the study of contemporary societies. But the theoretical inertia of concepts that had been central to so much anthropological literature meant that a common reaction to these critiques was to change the vocabulary but retain much of the content of the older terms. So in his 1968 entry on ‘Tribal society’ in the International encyclopedia of the social sciences, for example, I.M. Lewis acknowledges the ‘unnecessary moralistic overtones’ of the term ‘tribe’ and its association with ‘a primitive or backward condition’, but he argues that these can be ‘avoided or minimized by the use of the expression “tribal society” which is to be preferred to such synonyms as “primitive society”’ (1968: 146). This reflected the reluctance of many in the discipline to dispense with the established conceptual frame for ethnography.

In the post-colonial era, anthropologists became increasingly critical of the legacy of colonial ideology and its terminology. Historical examination quickly revealed the ways in which many ‘tribes’ had been constructed in the colonial era; often their names themselves were vague terms used by outsiders that later became institutionalised in administrative categories. As Southall notes with regard to the Nyamwezi and Sukuma ‘tribes’ of Tanganyika (Tanzania) and the Hausa of West Africa:

‘Hausa’ is not the proper name of this great conglomeration of medieval trading city-states, but just the Songhay term for ‘those of the East’. Exploring the East African interior in the 1850s, Richard F. Burton found three great ‘tribes’ called Sukuma, Nyamwezi and Takama, unaware that his interpreters were giving him the terms for ‘those to the North, West and South’ of wherever they happened to be; Nyamwezi and Sukuma remain, but Takama has disappeared. (Southall 1985: 569)

However they came about, however, such tribes frequently gained administrative reality under colonial rule. Ranger (1983), for example, takes John Iliffe’s description of the creation of tribes in colonial Tanganyika as typical:

The notion of the tribe lay at the heart of indirect rule in Tanganyika. Refining the racial thinking common in German times, administrators believed that every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation. The idea doubtless owed much to the Old Testament, to Tacitus and Caesar, to academic distinctions between tribal societies based on status and modern societies based on contract, and to the post-war anthropologists who preferred ‘tribal’ to the more pejorative word ‘savage’. Tribes were seen as cultural units ‘possessing common language, a single social system, and an established common law’. Their political and social systems rested on kinship. Tribal membership was hereditary. Different tribes were related genealogically … As unusually well-informed officials knew, this stereotype bore little relation to Tanganyika’s kaleidoscopic history, but it was the shifting sand on which Cameron and his disciples erected indirect rule by ‘taking the tribal unit’. They had the power and they created the political geography (Ranger 1983: 250).

Critical discussion of the tribe as an analytical concept began to emerge with increasing force in the 1960s. Treatments by Fried (1966) and Southall (1970) undermined the notion of the tribe as a pre-state stage in social evolution and pointed to the incoherence of the concept. But the term was too well established to be quickly abandoned.

As it had been widely thought of as a pre-state type of political organization, the notion of tribal society was still widely seen as applicable to polities that structural-functionalist treatments had characterised as less hierarchical, less centralised and smaller in scale than ‘the state’. The problem with this position was, however, that many of the best known ‘tribes’, such as the Zulu and Yoruba, had large-scale, hierarchical, and powerful polities that resembled the entities called 'states' rather closely. The solution was the use of the term ‘chiefdom’ as a sort of ‘missing link’ between the state and its tribal ancestor. This was done most explicitly by evolutionist anthropologists such as Sahlins and Service.^[11] This thinking has remained surprisingly influential among those working on state formation in cultural anthropology and archaeology (see, e.g., Carneiro 2003; Cobb 2003; Earle 1991). But, rooted as it is in the same colonial history and primitivist theory as the tribe, the term 'chiefdom' is open to many of the same critiques.

The notion of the tribe in contradistinction to the state became increasingly problematic among anthropologists concerned with contemporary societies, partly because the characterization proposed could not be made to match the use of the term ‘tribe’ in general use. The essential distinction between tribe and state had never been entirely accepted within the discipline. Malinowski, for example, saw the two as compatible and used the term ‘tribe-state’ to describe the Trobriands (Malinowski 1944: 166).^[12]

By the 1980s it had become increasingly clear that, because the use of the word tribe was the result of colonial logic, it only reliably indicated people not considered fully civilised in that era. Elizabeth Colson notes the double standards of this ‘tribalizing’ discourse.

In terms of territory, population, wealth, bureaucratic development, social stratification, and the centralization of power, the Hausa state of Kano far surpassed many of the kingdoms of Medieval Europe. Yet most of those who referred to the Hausa as a tribe were not being facetious in the fashion of Weatherford when he wrote of the tribes of Washington … Too many social scientists, as well as the general public, use [tribe] to maintain a false distinction between us and them, those people who used to be called primitive because they did not originate within the European tradition. Tribe, then, signals something about political domination but says nothing about the social complexity or political organization, now or formerly, of those to whom it is applied who may or may not have formed a polity in the past or present. In the 17th century when English-speaking explorers and settlers dealt with Native Americans as politically independent societies, they commonly referred to them as nations, placing them thus on a par with European nations … As it became possible to ignore and inexpedient to recognize the full sovereignty of Native American rivals with whom the English settlements competed for land and political dominion, ‘nation’ gave way to ‘tribe’ which carried implications of lesser political status. Tribe thereafter became the term commonly used to distinguish among the populations being incorporated into colonial empires as these were created during the 19th century (Colson 1986: 5-6).

The other notion that had been attached to the tribe, that it was a group sharing descent from a common ancestor, proved equally problematic. Firstly, many ethnographers had failed to find an ideology of shared descent among the people they studied. In his ethnography of the Andaman Islanders, for example, Radcliffe-Brown noted ‘the tribe is fundamentally a linguistic group’ rather than a kinship unit, and describes it as ‘of very little importance in regulating the social life’ (1922: 23). Furthermore, such ‘tribes’ did not resemble Morganian kinship society because ‘[i]n the Andamans there are no clans’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 53). Interestingly, however, Radcliffe-Brown assumed that the Andamans were exceptional in this regard and that something like Morgan’s kinship organization must exist among ‘the vast majority of primitive peoples’ (1922: 52).^[13] Only later did generations of scholars begin to doubt the apparently authoritative theories of kinship society.

However, even Evans-Pritchard’s own account of Nuer society failed to match the notion of a group defined strictly by common descent, as ‘persons of Dinka descent form probably at least half the population of most tribes’ (1940: 221). So the kinship-society model survived by recasting its central feature; rather than actual common descent, the members of these societies used the idiom of common descent to describe political relations. Although the segmentary lineage structure Evans-Pritchard described for the Nuer only strictly speaking applied to a small minority,^[14] it could still be seen as the central principle of social organization as all members of the society were attached to members of the dominant lineages, and so, the argument went, were part of a system of common kinship and descent in some sense.

If the structural-functionalists’ loosely Weberian political typologies had internalised the colonial notion of tribe as a political segment, Marxian evolutionary perspectives were rooted in the Morganian vision of tribal kinship society. Gluckman, for example, dismissed what he termed the ‘crude kind of social evolutionism’ (1965: 84) of the previous generation of scholars, but described the Marxian evolutionism of Leslie White and others in positive tones, based as it was on ‘far better data on the tribal peoples’ (1965: 84). Although aware of ethnography that contradicted the nineteenth century evolutionary narrative, Gluckman nevertheless retained the old paradigm, assuming that it was sound ideologically, if not literally. So when Schapera’s ethnography showed that hunter-gatherer bands were not kinship groups, thus contradicting Maine’s theory that in primitive society ‘kinship in blood is the sole possible ground for community in political functions’ (1861: 106), Gluckman defends the theorist rather than the ethnographer; stressing that the insights from Ancient Greece remained valid. He writes:

Maine’s statement is undoubtedly misleading. But he makes it clear elsewhere in the book that in classical Greece ‘strangers’ could join a political state … The alteration [from tribe to state] comes when a kinship idiom to express political association is no longer demanded: as we have already seen, the kinship idiom of tribal society in practice covers relationships directed towards various purposes (Gluckman 1965: 86).

In retrospect, however, the existence of kinship idioms that can be applied to political relations seems an unconvincing basis for a distinctive social type. Three major world religions claim universal descent from Adam and all sorts of political and religious institutions use kinship idioms for their members, including nation-states (Hobsbawm 1990: 53-4). The critique of the old tribal paradigm continued to gather pace. Fried’s (1975) monograph The notion of tribe argued that the model of pre-state tribal society was entirely fallacious and that the entities called tribes were constructed by states. Godelier saw the concept of tribe as a product of the wider problems of outdated theories of kinship society and called for a more thoroughgoing rethinking of the paradigm:

It is not enough, like Swartz or Turner, to ignore the concept of tribe by referring no longer to it; to appeal to prudence, like Steward; or to criticise its scandalous imprecision (Neiva), its theoretical sterility and fallacies (Fried) its ideological manipulation as a tool in the hands of colonial powers (Colson, Southall, Valakazi). The evil does not spring from an isolated concept but has roots in a problem which will necessarily produce similar theoretical effects as dictated by the scientific work put into it (Godelier 1977: 90).^[15]

In the 1980s classical kinship theory as a whole began to unravel in the face of critiques led by Schneider (1984), who pointed to the distorting effects of treating kinship as a privileged analytical category, and Kuper (1988) who explored the pervasive influence of primitivism in anthropology. Parts of the Morganian scheme had been in doubt for some time. The ethnographic evidence for the segmentary kinship model had always been rather slight, and this began to fade away in the light of more critical later studies (Gough 1971; Southall 1988; Verdon 1983). As Kuper pointed out, the actual local categories used to designate groups of people did not resemble those of descent theory (1988: 190-209; also see Gottlieb 1992: 46-71; Jackson 1989: 10-1). As he concludes, ‘there do not appear to be any societies in which vital political or economic activities are organized by a repetitive series of descent groups’ (Kuper 2004: 93). The structure that had been thought to typify ‘tribal society’ appears to have been a mirage.

In the mid-1980s Aidan Southall noted that ‘few Anglo-Saxon anthropologists with relevant field experience have defended the concept of tribe in the last twenty-five years’ (1985: 568). Works such as Vail’s The creation of tribalism in Southern Africa (1989) helped establish the view that tribalism was a product of colonial classification and administration, and should be approached as an ideological construct dating from that era.

Survival beyond anthropology

But outside of anthropology the term tribe continued to be widely used. In history, particularly that of the Middle East, the concept lived on in something like its original Morganian form.^[16] So Khoury and Kostiner write that ‘as ideal types, tribes represent large kin groups organized and regulated according to ties of blood or family lineage; states, by contrast, are structures that exercise the ultimate monopoly of power in a given territory’ (1990: 4). Noting that this distinction was generally far from clear in practice, they make use of another old anthropological concept to bridge the gap – the chiefdom. ‘Chiefdoms may be viewed as one type of intermediate political formation between tribes and states, incorporating some features and institutions of both’ (Khoury & Kostiner 1990: 8). However, even Khoury and Kostiner follow Tapper in conceding that some ‘tribes’ never subscribed to the ideology of common descent, and they admit that a definition of tribe is ‘virtually impossible to produce’ (1990: 5). It was not just the kinship content of the unit that was problematic; it could not be treated as an essentially non-state form since ‘there are elements of state within every tribe and of tribe within every state’ (Tapper 1990: 68).

Since that time most anthropologists have moved further away from the notion of tribal society, even as the sort of abstract conceptual model or ideal-type that Tapper and Khoury and Kostiner were left with. Aidan Southall, in his 1996 entry ‘Tribe’ in the Encyclopedia of cultural anthropology, wrote: ‘Tribe is a self-fulfilling Orientalist prophesy in which vague notions of outsiders are essentialized’ (1996: 1331). ‘Heroic attempts are made at salvaging and sanitizing the concept’, he adds, but in the end the term ‘has little precise meaning and so many different divergent definitions that a realistic conclusion would be … to accept the use of a term like ‘people’, which matches the indeterminacy of the phenomenon itself’ (Southall 1996: 1334-5).

The tribe, however, continues to survive. In some strands of evolutionist cultural anthropology, less concerned perhaps with the legacy of colonialism, the concept of the tribe has been retained with all the characteristics expected of it by evolutionist kinship theory. In his Dictionary of concepts in cultural anthropology, Winthrop, for example, defines ‘tribe’ in the following way: ‘A culturally homogenous, nonstratified society possessing a common territory, without centralized political or legal institutions, whose members are linked by extended kinship ties, ritual obligations, and mutual responsibility for the resolution of disputes’ (1991: 307). In a similar way, John H. Bodley’s textbook Cultural anthropology: tribes, states, and the global system, reprinted for the fifth time in 2011, divides all known societies into three categories of increasing complexity: tribal, imperial, and commercial ‘worlds’. Of the tribal he writes:

Most of human existence has been in the tribal world. With small societies living in an uncrowded world and a minimum of social inequality except for natural differences of age and gender, tribal people could enjoy a maximum of human freedom … there was no need for government … Everyone shared natural resources and the goods that they produced, while at the same time maintaining clear property rights (Bodley 2011: 1).

This theoretically possible, but entirely speculative, vision of the distant past exemplifies the longevity of the mythology of primitive society so thoroughly critiqued by Kuper (1988).

Despite its survival in some schools of thought, however, the tribe has become a term of largely historical interest within most of social and cultural anthropology, seen as an artefact of older theories.^[17] In his 1996 article ‘Tribe’ in The social sciences encyclopedia, John Sharp, for example, writes a suitable memorial to the heyday of the tribe as an analytical concept:

Early ethnographers … speculated that ‘primitive’ groups were recruited by ascription, on the basis of status. Evidence that kinship played some part in constituting these social groups led them to conclude that tribes were ascriptive groups based solely on kinship. This was patently untrue, but it allowed people in the west to believe that primitive and civilized worlds were fundamentally different (Sharp 1996: 883).

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Note on contributor

Dr. David Sneath is Reader in the Anthropology of Political Economy at the Division of Social Anthropology and Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, Cambridge University. He is an editor of the Brill journal Inner Asia and a Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Dr David Sneath, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ds114@cam.ac.uk

[1] Evans-Pritchard, for example, writes ‘Social Anthropology can therefore be regarded as a branch of sociological studies, that branch which chiefly devotes itself to primitive societies’ (1951: 11), and Radcliffe-Brown describes the subject as ‘the study of what are called primitive or backward peoples’ (1952: 2).

[2] As Cornell notes, there is no evidence that Roman tribes were kinship units (1995: 116). They were ‘artificial units deliberately instituted for administrative and political purposes’ (Cornell 1995: 117).

[3] Gauls and Germans were commonly described using the terms civitas (‘state’), natio (‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘people’) and gens – the term translated as ‘clan’ by Morgan but that has been subject to debate and its precise meaning remains unclear (Rives 1999: 119-53; Smith 2006: 1-14; Wolfram 1988: 6).

[4] See, for example, Lewin (1938).

[5] See Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911, Vol. 27: 262). It is worth noting that the entry describes the ‘ethnological meaning’ of the term separately because, as an administrative unit, the original Roman tribe bore little resemblance to the understanding of the term used by anthropologists or colonial administrators.

[6] See, for example, MacMichael, who wrote ‘[t]he word tribe as commonly used generally implies among other things a closely homogeneous collection of families or individuals living together under a hereditary or elective sheikhship, and largely distinct by race from other such communities’ (1910: 215).

[7] Morgan described these kinship structures and their units as natural phenomena (1964 [1877]: 302-4).

[8] See Kuper for a discussion of these models (1988: 190-209). See also Sneath (2007: 40-9, 132-4).

[9] In his textbook Tribesmen, for example, Sahlins wrote: ‘The tribe presents itself as a pyramid of social groups, technically speaking as a “segmentary hierarchy” … The smallest units, such as households, are segments of more inclusive units such as lineages, the lineages in turn segments of larger groups, and so on’ (1968: 15).

[10] The Group A and Group B distinctions are reminiscent of Morgan’s position that ‘all forms of government are reducible to two general plans … The first, in the order of time, is founded upon persons, and upon relations purely personal, and may be distinguished as a society (societas). The gens [clan] is the unit of organisation … The second is founded upon territory and upon property, and may be distinguished as a state (civitas)’ (Morgan 1964 [1877]: 13-14).

[11] Sahlins writes ‘[t]ribes present a notable range of evolutionary developments … in its most developed expression, the chiefdom, tribal culture anticipates statehood in its complexities. Here are regional political regimes organised under powerful chiefs and primitive nobilities’ (1968: 20). The distinguishing feature of ‘primitive nobilities’ was, needless to say, the circular notion that they existed in chiefdoms or ‘primitive states’. As an evolutionist concept, the chiefdom had to conform with the theory of change from egalitarian kinship society towards impersonal class society. It was said to be made up of descent groups that were simultaneously communities, and therefore could not be fully stratified, as that was thought to be a characteristic of a later stage.

[12] He described the Trobriands as having a ‘tribe-state’, which he thought of as the ‘executive committee’ of the wider society, with political organisation, a military class, and arms as instruments of power (Malinowski 1944: 166).

[13] Even in cases where ethnographers described the descent groups they encountered as clans, they might not share a common ancestor. The Trobriand kumila ‘clans’ and dala ‘sub-clans’ described by Malinowski, for example, each had different female ancestors. See Malinowski (1932 [1922]: 63).

[14] As Howell explains, ‘[w]ithin each tribe only a small proportion of the people has the genuine right to claim direct descent from the original ancestor from whom the tribal name is derived. The majority are descended from later immigrants from other parts of Nuerland, or from Dinka accretions absorbed by the fiction of adoption into Nuer society. Genuine descendants are termed diel’ (1954: 18). Evans-Pritchard notes: ‘[t]he diel are an aristocratic clan, numerically swamped in the tribe by strangers and Dinka, but providing a lineage structure on which the tribal organization is built up’ (1940: 220).

[15] He adds ‘[t]he most surprising thing in the history of this concept is that it has varied little in basic meaning since Lewis H. Morgan (1877). The innumerable discoveries in the field since have only aggravated and accentuated the imprecision and difficulties without leading to any radical critique, still less to its expulsion from the field of anthropology’ (Godelier 1977: 89-90).

[16] More recent scholarship, however, has questioned the evidential basis for the application of the tribal model to historical societies in Anatolia, for example (Paul 2011; Peacock 2013).

[17] As Gingrich writes in his 2001 entry on ‘Tribe’ in the International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences, ‘[m]ost scholars … would agree that the concept [of tribe] is obsolete as a general comparative category outside particular areas’ (Gingrich 2001: 15908).