Tribe is the term and concept that has been used in various ways and carries a lot of controversy. In the most widespread usage, tribe refers to any society that didn’t develop a centralized political system, i.e., that is on the level of political centralization below the state. Tribes vary in size from the smallest hunter and foraging groups with fewer than a hundred members, up to those with members in the millions, such as the Zulu empire in South Africa, the Luapula Kingdom of Kazembe in Central Africa, the Ashanti Confederacy in West Africa, and the Gond kingdoms of India, which are sometimes labeled as super-tribes. Throughout history, most tribes existed beyond the territorial boundaries of states, but in the 20th and 21st centuries, all tribes existed inside the territory of a state. In some states, such as India and the USA, tribes are legally recognized groups and enjoy a significant degree of state protection and autonomy. In some Middle Eastern and African countries, even though tribes don’t possess specific legal status, tribal affiliations and relations between tribes themselves and tribes and the state still play a large role in national politics, in the form of tribal politics.  

                                  Characteristics of Tribes

Tribe is politically or socially coherent and autonomous group sharing a common name, speaking a common language or dialect, sharing same culture, world view, and religious tradition, united through single political organization, and having a common economic interests and subsistence, occupying a particular common territory, with membership based on endogamy, descent and in-marriage (sometimes kinship is fictive and based on reinterpretation of the mythic descent). Many tribes never fully modernized, having economies based on hunting, foraging, pastoralism, swidden agriculture, or traditional crafts.

                         Tribe as an Evolutionary Stage

Most anthropologists today use the term tribe in a narrower sense, that is, as an evolutionary stage of development. In a classification that was introduced by Marshal Sahlins and Elman Service in the early 1960s, tribe is a stage in the evolutionary line: bands →tribes→ chiefdoms→states. In this classification, tribes lie between bands, on the one hand, and centralized political systems (chiefdoms), on the other.

The band is the lowest evolutionary stage. "Bands are small territorial groups of 20 to 50 people. They are undifferentiated; they consist of two types of social units: families and groups of related families. They are relatively unintegrated. There is a limit to social control over the economy, the relative economic and political autonomy of families, and for integration and management, there is no leadership above the "moral influence" exercised by the older and more skilled hunters. The band is the dominant type in the Paleolithic [Sahlins, 1961:324].

The tribal level also existed among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, but only those who lived in the most naturally rich conditions that allowed a larger number of them to live together. The Neolithic agricultural revolution nevertheless enabled the dominance of tribal type societies. A tribe is an association of kin groups that themselves consist of families. A tribe is a larger, more segmented society, which can be seen as the amalgamation of several multi-family groups at the group level [Sahlins, 1961:324].

A tribe is a segmental organization, which is composed of several equal and non-specialized multi-family groups that are structurally similar. The tribe thus represents a mixture of equal blocks of kin groups. "These segments are also the residential and (usually) proprietary units of the tribe, people who live or travel together in one sector of the tribal domain and who separately exploit a sector of strategic resources," [Sahlins, 1961:325]. A tribe can have several levels of segmentation, and the "primary tribal segment" is the smallest multi-family group that forms an economic and residential community during most of the year. It is often the case that segments live separately during the year and that the entire tribe meets only for a short time on the occasion of annual tribal ceremonies. Primary segments have from 50 to 250 members, and the entire tribe can have several thousand. Primary segments can be formed on different bases; they can be kinship lines, a non-linear group of common origin, weakly organized local kinship. These differences are the product of adaptive diversification, thus specific evolution.

Tribal segments are economically and politically autonomous; the tribe as a whole is usually not a political organization, but rather a socio-cultural-ethnic ethnicity. "It (the tribe) is held together primarily by similarity between segments (mechanical solidarity) and by means of pan-tribal institutions, such as the system of intermarrying clans, age classes, military and religious communities, which intersect and unite the primary segments [Sahlins, 1961:325]. The tribe lacks organic solidarity; the segments do not function as parts that primarily care for the welfare of the whole, but primarily care for their own interests.

The simple Neolithic way of production is the key to the fragmentary structure of the tribe. The Neolithic economy does not require greater cooperation, but, on the contrary, its extensive character (both agriculture and animal husbandry) forces the population to spread over a large area and limits the maximum size of the unit that jointly exploits a certain area.

The tribe is a very fragile community. The segments often have enmities with each other, but always unite in case of war with an external enemy. Therefore, the level of political unity of the tribe is more influenced by external than internal circumstances. Leadership that would be above the segment level is rare and often short-lived. But even at the level of segments, relations between people have more characteristics of personal relations than relations of submission. A man who nevertheless establishes leadership during war or similar situations, after the end of the circumstances that established him as a leader, he again becomes an ordinary member of the tribe.

In "The Early State and Its Analogues" (2004), Leonid Grinin introduces a typology of what he calls "analogues of the early state", that is, societies that were similar in demographic, technological, and economic characteristics to states, but lacked a political organization specific to early states. It introduces five types of analogues of the early state: 1) small autonomous communities that engaged in a trade or were religious centers, most often a city with its surroundings; 2) large tribal confederations with a supreme leader; 3) large tribal confederations without a supreme leader; 4) Super big nomadic amalgams - nomadic empires; 5) very large complex chiefdoms.

        Tribe as Contentious and Controversial Concept

In the second half of the 20th century term tribe became a contentious and controversial concept as it was associated with  Eurocentric prejudice that relegated all non-Western societies as living in a state of “primitivism” and “backwardness”, ‘inferior’ to Western industrialized and modern states. Tribe is also accused of being a tool of legitimization of colonialism. In fact, many tribes were actually created by colonial powers, with tribal leaders put in power by colonial forces, to facilitate control over tribal territory. Sociologist André Béteille and anthropologist Morton Fried contend that the concept of a tribe eludes any theoretical definition and functions as an anthropological imagination and a myth. Today, anthropologists prefer the term ethnic group over tribe.

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