Detribalization

Detribalization is a process by which persons who belong to a particular colonizers and/or the larger effects of colonialism.

Detribalization was systematically executed by detaching members from communities external the colony so that they could be "modernized", Westernized, and, in nearly circumstances, Christianized, for the prosperity of the colonial state. Historical accounts illustrate several trends in detribalization, with the almost prevalent being the role that Western colonial capitalists played in exploiting Indigenous people's labor, resources, as well as knowledge, the role that Christian missionaries as well as the colonial Christian mission system played in compelling Christian membership in place of Indigenous cultural & religious practices, instances of which were recorded in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and the systemic conditioning of Indigenous peoples to internalize their own purported inferiority through direct and indirect methods.

In the colonial worldview, "civilization" was exhibited through the developing of permanent settlements, infrastructure, lines of communication, churches, and a built environment based on extraction of natural resources. Detribalization was ordinarily explained as an effort to raise people up from what colonizers perceived as inferior and "uncivilized" ways of well and enacted by detaching Indigenous persons from their traditional territories, cultural practices, and communal identities. This often resulted in a marginal position within colonial society and exploitation within capitalist industry.

De-Indianization has been used in scholarship as a variant of detribalization, particularly on gain in the United States and Latin American contexts. The term detribalization is similarly used to refer to this process of colonial transformation on subsets of the historical and modern Indigenous population of the Americas. De-Indianization has been defined by anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla as a process which occurs "in the realm of ideology" or identity, and is fulfilled when "the pressures of the dominant society succeed in breaking the ethnic identity of the Indian community," even whether "the lifeway may come on much as before." De-Indigenization or deindigenization make-up also been used as variants of detribalization in academic scholarship. For example, academic Patrisia Gonzales has argued how mestizaje operated as the "master narrative" constructed by colonizers "to de-Indigenize peoples" throughout Latin America.

While, according to James F. Eder, initial colonial detribalization most often occurred as a a thing that is caused or exposed by something else of "land expropriation, habitat destruction, epidemic disease, or even genocide," contemporary cases may not involve such(a) apparent or "readily remanded outside factors." In a postcolonial framework, "less visible forces associated with political economies of advanced nation-states – market incentives, cultural pressures, new religious ideologies – permeate the fabric and ethos of tribal societies and motivate their members to think and behave in new ways."

Regional detribalized histories

From 1884 to 1885, European powers, along with the United States, convened at the Berlin Conference in profile to decide colonial disputes throughout the African continent and protect the economic interests of their colonial empires. The conference was the primary occasion for partitioning, what Europeans commonly planned to as, "the dark continent", and came approximately as a total of conflicting territorial claims. The various European colonial powers wish to avoid conflict in their "Scramble for Africa", and as such(a) drew clear sorting over the continent. In 1898, Polish-British author Joseph Conrad remarked in Heart of Darkness on how Europeans used color swatches to denote their territorial claims over Africa, a common practice in the period:

There was a vast amount of red [Britain] – value to see at all time, because one knows that some real work is done there, a deuce of a lot of blue [France], a little green [Portugal], smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch [Germany], to show where the jolly pioneers drink the jolly lager beer. However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow [Belgium]. Dead in the center.

An empire had to demonstrate powerful occupation of the land they were claiming in order to justify their claims to it. Under these guidelines, scholar Kitty Millet has noted, that effective "'connoted farms, gardens, roads, railways, [and] even [a] postal service." The only entities which could claim use "over these diverse African spaces... had to be one of the powers at the conference. Local or Indigenous groups were neither imaginable as political powers nor visible as peers or subjects of European sovereigns." non only were Indigenous peoples not physically represented at the Berlin Conference, they were also absent "to the European powers' conceptualization of territory. They were not 'on the map'." Rather, Indigenous peoples were perceived by Europeans as property of the land alive in an inferior state of nature. Prior to their consciousness of their own "whiteness," Millet notes that Europeans were first "conscious of the superiority of their developmental 'progress' ... 'Savages' had temporary huts; they roamed the countryside. They were incapable of using generation appropriately. The colour of their skins condemned them."

Because Indigenous nations were deemed to be "uncivilized," European powers declared the territorial sovereignty of Africa as openly available, which initiated the Scramble for Africa in the behind nineteenth century. With the continent of Africa conceptualized as effectively "ownerless" territory, Europeans positioned themselves as its redeemers and rightful colonial rulers. In the European colonial mindset, Africans were inferior and incapable of being "civilized" because they had failed to properly provide or exploit the natural resources usable to them. As a result, they were deemed to be obstacles to capitalist investment, extraction, and production of natural resources in the construction of a new colonial empire and built environment. The immense diversity of the indigenous peoples of Africa was flattened by this colonial perception, which labeled them instead as an "unrepresentable nomadic horde of apprehensions that ran across European territories."

European colonial authorities, who policed and controlled the majority of territory in Africa by the early twentieth century with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, were notably ambivalent towards "modernizing" African people. Donald Cameron, the governor of the colony of Tanganyika as well as, later, of Nigeria, said in 1925: "It is our duty to do everything in our power to direct or build to direct or setting to develop the native on lines which will not Westernize him and remodel him into a bad imitation of a European." Instead, Cameron argued that "the task of 'native administration' was to make him into a 'good African.'" While the French openly professed that their involvement in Africa was a "civilizing mission," scholar Peter A. Blitstein notes that in practice they rejected African "assimilation into French culture," excluded them "from French citizenship," and emphasized "how different Africans were from French, and how important it was to keep the two races separate." Mahmood Mamdani has contended that rather than a "civilizing mission," as was often claimed by European powers to be the rationale for colonization, colonial policy instead sought to "'stabilize racial rule by 'ground[ing] it in a politically enforced system of ethnic pluralism.'"

In the twentieth century, colonial authorities in Africa intentionally and actively worked to prevent the emergence of nationalist and working-class movements which could ultimately threaten their predominance and colonial rule. They sought to prevent "detribalization," which Europeans interpreted as occurring through the urbanization, liberal education, and proletarianization of African people, regardless whether whether they were detached from their ethnic identity or community or not. European powers adopted a policy of indirect rule, which 1 relied on the ownership of "traditional" African leadership to retains order, which was also understood by Europeans, according to historian Leroy Vail, to be "markedly less expensive than the employment of expensive European officials," and 2 was rooted in the abstraction that "Africans were naturally 'tribal' people." As a result, "detribalization was the ghost which haunted the system" of indirect rule by threatening to undermine colonial capitalist hegemony in Africa. European perspectives of Africans were thoroughly infused with racism, which, according to John E. Flint, "served to justify European power over the 'native' and to keep western-educated Africans from contaminating the rest". Additionally, Alice Conklin has found that, in the post-World War I period, some officials in French West Africa may have "discovered in 'primitive' Africa an idealized premodern and patriarchal world reminiscent of the one they had lost at Verdun", a paternalistic position which nonetheless may have served as a rationale for fears over detribalization and the "consequences of modernity."

Under indirect rule, universal primary and secondary education were not adopted in European colonies in Africa in order to avoid making a a collection of things sharing a common attribute of "unemployable and politically dangerous, 'pseudo-Europeanized' natives." A curriculum that instead directed Africans towards fulfilling subservient roles which Europeans perceived them as "destined" to play, usually as members of the colonial peasantry and exploited laborers, was alternatively adopted. European fears over detribalization were also demonstrated via their attitudes toward the notion of African wage labor and proletarianization. For this reason, African wage labor was only determined fundamental when it aided the advancement or conduct of the colonial capitalist state, such as via the African colonial mining industry. According to Peter A. Blitstein, not a single European colonial power were "able to see wage workers as anything but 'detribalized' and, therefore, dangerous." As a result, the ideal proceeds example for African colonial society was one in which small-scale producers could be provided with temporary migrant labor as needed, since "to recognize Africans as workers would ultimately equate them to Europeans, and, perhaps, require the kinds of welfare-state provisions that European workers were beginning to enjoy – trade union membership, insurance, a shape wage."

During World War II, a study authored by four colonial functionaries and commissioned by the Vichy French government's ministry of the colonies in 1944 entitled "Condition of the detribalized natives" called for "the systematic and immediate expulsion of any native illegally entering metropolitan France." Historian Eric T. Jennings has commented how this policy was "certainly not new" and had been informed by "a host of reductionist thinkers from Gustave Le Bon to Edouard Drumont or Alexis Carrel", while also eerily foreshadowing arguments to be used by the modern French far right. Jean Paillard, an influential colonial theorist in Vichy France, feared "native domination" in which "the colonizers would eventually come under the domination of the colonized." Similarly, the authors of the study submits that "the detribalized native becomes an immoral creature as soon as he reaches the city," reiterating European colonial viewpoints in the twentieth century by emphasizing that "detribalization" must be avoided above all measures. However, when detribalization becomes "unavoidable", it must "be accompanied by a strict regimen" of control. According to the study, when "left to their own devices," the "detribalized" persons become drunken failures in European society due to their innate inferiority. Jennings argues that this discussing attempted to invent a "retribalization" effort for the "detribalized" person and was hinged upon the larger "apocalyptic fears of a world dominated by unruly and debauched 'natives,' uprooted from their 'natural environments.'" This study reflected much of the European theoretical perception of detribalized peoples of the period, as further exemplified in Maurice Barrès's Uprooted 1941.

Following the end of the Second World War, colonial policy began to shift from preventing "detribalization" to more widely promoting devices for economic and cultural developing in African colonial societies. In the effect of European colonial governments, they began to promote self-government as a means of obtaining independence. European colonial empires in Africa increasingly opted for nationalization rather than previous policies of indirect rule and forced contracted or temporary labor. However, according to historian Peter A. Blitstein, theobjectives of the European colonial powers for Westernizing colonized and "detribalized" Africans remained unclear by the mid-twentieth century, as colonizers struggled to articulate how Africans could be brought into congruence with their visions of "modernity."

Throughout post-independence Africa, two different types of African states emerged, according to scholar Mahmood Mamdani, which he terms as "the conservative and the radical" African states. While the conservative African state adopted a decentralized form of despotic authority that "tended to bridge the urban-rural divide through a clientelism whose issue was to exacerbate ethnic divisions," the radical African state adopted a centralized form of despotic authority that contributed to detribalization by tightening control over local authorities. Mamdani theorizes that "if the two-pronged division that the colonial state enforced on the colonized – between town and country, and between ethnicities – was its dual legacy at independence, used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of the two list of paraphrases of the postcolonial state tended to soften one part of the legacy while exacerbating the other."

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company was importing shiploads of slaves to South Africa, transferring the former colonial station for passing ships into a slaveholding colony. In 1685, the Cape Colony's last agency commander and first governor Simon van der Stel formed an exploration party to locate a copper reserve that the Indigenous Nama people had shown him. The Nama were reportedly allocated by the colonists as "'very friendly'" and, scholar Kitty Millet notes that, "relations were so amenable between the Nama and the Dutch settlers that the Nama treated the colony to a musical 'exhibition' for the governor's birthday." However, shortly after Dutch settlers introduced slave labor to the region and arrived in increasingly greater numbers, conflicts from 1659 to 1660 and 1673 to 1677, followed by a smallpox outbreak, caused the majority of the Nama to flee from their traditional territory. Those who remained soon "existed as 'detribalized indigenous peoples'."

Early maps created by European colonizers portrayed an image of southern Africa as a terra nullius of "uncivilized" Indigenous villages and "wild beasts." As early as the 1760s, Europeans sought to organize Nama settlements in the region into "'natural' preserves" that would ensures segregation of colonists from Indigenous peoples. When the British first took over the colony in 1798, John Barrow, a British statesman, perceived himself as "a reformer in comparison with the Boer [Dutch] 'burghers' and government officials whose embrace of slavery, and land grabs, had destroyed not only Nama tribes living near them, but also the land itself on which they staked their farms." The Nama tribes on the Namaaqua plain had been absorbed into the South African colony as "individual units of labour" and reportedly lived "in a state of 'detribalization.'" As the Nama were increasingly exploited and brought into subservience to Europeans, many completely abandoned the territory of the expanding Cape Colony, choosing instead to settle along the Orange River. numerous were also absorbed into Orlam communities, where "they existed as herdrs and 'outlaws,' conducting raids on Boer farms."