A tribe is a people with a common language, religion, culture and bloodline who are seen as being uncivilized (not living in cities) or newly civilized. The civilized counterpart is called an ethnic group. Both lack their own standing army. “Tribal” is the adjective, a loaded, Eurocentric way of saying non-white and backward at the same time.
Tribes are found in Africa, Arabia, Siberia, India, South East Asia, Australia, the Pacific and the Americas.
The word comes from Latin. The “tri” probably means three because the word was first applied to the three tribes of the Roman state: the Latins, Sabines and Etruscans. Thus the idea of tribes being less than a country, nation or state.
Tribe comes to English by way of French by way of the Latin Bible, which speaks of the 12 tribes of Israel. Each tribe came from one of the 12 sons of Jacob. Thus the idea of tribes having a common bloodline or ancestor.
The idea of tribes being backward comes from the Romans. In the days of the Empire they fought against the Germans, whom they saw as being made up of barbarian tribes led by chiefs. But they were not as backward as commonly supposed in imperial propaganda: some of these “chiefs” lived in palaces, like they were kings or something.
When the “Germanic tribes” took over the western part of the Empire, the chiefs and tribes became, suddenly, kings and kingdoms. They were no longer seen as ranging about like wild animals beyond the outer reaches of the Empire. Some of these kingdoms became what we call England.
The change, though, seems to be not so much one of social evolution but of power, particularly the power of writing one’s own history. When they appear in Roman history they are tribes. In their own history they are kingdoms. The Germanic “tribes” had had kings for at least a thousand years before the fall of Rome.
In the 1600s and 1700s Anglos saw Native Americans mainly as “nations”, not “tribes”. “Nation” is the term the Bible uses for a foreign people, it is where the word “ethnic” comes from by way of Greek. You still see this use in the “First Nations” of Canada and the “Five Nations” of the Iroquois.
Anglos at first saw Native Americans as having governments and kings. Thus Pocahontas is a “princess”. Nor was it merely a “primitive” form of government: Iroquois government was a model for American government.
In the 1800s, as Anglos took over most of North America, “nation” gave way to the “tribe” and “chief” of Roman imperialism, downgrading Native Americans. The trouble with “nations” and “governments” is that they have fixed lands and sovereign power that you are bound to respect short of war. Tribes and chiefs do not suffer from that inconvenience.
Special parallel vocabulary:
- hut, not house
- chief, not leader, king, etc
- medicine man or healer, not doctor
- warrior, not soldier
- tribal lands, not land or country
- tribal knowledge, not science
- village, not town
See also:
- ethnic group
- race
- style guide: Eurocentric words
- tribal nudity – National Geographic style
- human zoos
- Native Americans
- A Guide to Germanics
Reblogged this on oogenhand and commented:
Your white tormentors being the original Noble Savages. Twisted irony and then some.
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I am not sure if the concept is purely Eurocentric. Chinese has a term “bu luo” which is very similar in meaning to “tribe”.
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i’d have never known that anglos used to call natives “nations” & “governments”. as usual brilliantly written.
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To Abagond:
Could it be that it is a matter of scale?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_Assembly
As far as I know, the large scale organizations of the Aztecs and Inca were and still are referred to as empires.
As for the use of king, I thought it was much more common for native leaders to be elected or at least achieve their position as a will of the people as opposed to inheriting the position as was generally the case of European kings. Although as I looked up Pocahontas I see that her father would have fallen into the concept of European notion of king and having royal blood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas#Title_and_status
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@ Uncle Milton
I think more important than scale is state power, statehood, especially having a standing, regular army or something very much like it. If a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, as one commenter put it, then a state is a tribe or ethnic group with one.
Of course once you have an army you can conquer others, giving rise to empires, ethnic groups and all the rest.
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Excellent commentary Abagond !!! I have learned much from it. @ Peanut, I too have never heard of any ethnic white group referred to as a “tribe”. We must study the words that the Racist Supremacy use because that is a huge part of how they have hoodwinked us, cause massive confusion to our detriment and continue to rule us. Keep up the good work Abagond of enlightening us in a most constructive manner…
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Er…
Have you ever been to Europe ?
… Aren’t you falling in the trap here ?
I know a few tribes there… Some of them even “still” endogamous… I had students who had never left their village (except to go to school, basically) and could speak only a very poor type of French. Which is not the case of many so-called tribes all over the world, where incest and endogamy is strictly forbidden. And where people often speak several dialects, those of the neighboring “tribes”.
Some of those students thought we would be flying to a lake/field trip that was just a few miles away from their home. That’s how they view the world.
Sure, the tribes of Europe don’t go around naked, and this is one of the “criteria” Euros use to tell others that *they” are not “tribal” people.
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@Cornelia, I don’t think your example is that of a tribe. That would br more akin to white rural mountain folk in the Appalachian foothills of eastern kentucky, or to a han chinese who grew up in a remote area in Guizhou province. They are not “tribal” in their respective areas despite their limited cultural exposure. Now, if they practised a totally different culture, language customs, religion. & do this without intimate contact with outsiders. Even the Amish in America would not quite fit the definition of tribe, but more closer to like ethnic group. Now, I do think we “could” consider the Amish to be a tribe if they were a little bit less disconnected.
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The question is, as far as I am concerned, because I have never come across the same: what is the exact definition of what a tribe is, and who decides on the definition… To me it seems more like a convenient tool to “down-grade” people according to pre-established criteria of who is “civilized”.
A little like the way one’s “ancestry” is established when you do a DNA test: geneticians do not look for one’s actual ancestors, but compare your DNA (part of it) to the data bank of “tribes”, “clans”, “peoples”, “civilizations”, “races”, “ethnic groups” they have at disposal which were pre-determined by the work of mostly western anthropologists, ethnologists and geneticians. There are so many levels of “approximation” that it really doesn’t reflect who/what one is compared with what they pre-decided one might be…
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jefe, if the people I described are not actually “tribal”, is there a pre-defined word to describe them ? Or are they simply viewed as a branch of a main “civilization”.
Because, you know, considering the same type of human groups elsewhere than Europe, few would hesitate to designate them as “tribes” or “clans”.
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@ Cornlia
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Oops, typo. No blockquotes beginning at “Precisely”.
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“Tribal beauty: Photographer gives snapshot of vanishing way of life”
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/21/world/africa/tribal-beauty-photographer-vanishing/index.html
–> How CNN depicts Africa
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I am genuinely confused. While I know that tribe and tribal often have a offensive and degrading connotation in the US, I also have friends from Botswana and also other parts of Africa that use the word tribe with an immense amount of pride. Is your definition referring to a racist and colonizing use of the word? Do you think it can have another use? I guess I have always thought that “tribe” has been misappropriated by colonizers and misused and turned into something that it doesn’t mean.
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