Tribe

The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a family of human social group. a predominant worldwide ownership of a term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in component due to conflicting theoretical understandings of social & kinship structures, and also reflecting the problematic application of this concept to extremely diverse human societies. The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, nation or state. These terms are equally disputed. In some cases tribes relieve oneself legal recognition and some degree of political autonomy from national or federal government, but this legalistic ownership of the term may clash with anthropological definitions.

In the United States, Native American tribes are considered sovereign nations, with a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government.

Classification

Considerable debate has accompanied efforts to define and characterize tribes. In the popular imagination, tribes reflect a primordial social an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. from which any subsequent civilizations and states developed. Anthropologist Elman Service presented a system of classification for societies in any human cultures, based on the evolution of social inequality and the role of the state. This system of classification contains four categories:

Tribes are therefore considered to be a political item formed from an organisation of families including clans and lineages based on social or ideological solidarity. Membership of a tribe may be understood simplistically as being an identity based on factors such(a) as kinship "clan", ethnicity "race", language, dwelling place, political group, religious beliefs, oral tradition and/or cultural practices.

Archaeologists move to discussing the development of pre-state tribes. Current research suggests that tribal managers constituted one type of adaptation to situations providing plentiful yet unpredictable resources. Such frameworks proved flexible enough to coordinate production and distribution of food in times of scarcity, without limiting or constraining people during times of surplus. anthropologist Morton Fried argued in 1967 that bands organized into tribes in structure to resist the violence and exploitation of early kingdoms and states. He wrote:

In fact, there is no absolute necessity for a tribal stage as defined by Sahlins and Service, no necessity, that is, for such(a) a stage toin the transit from a single settlement with embedded political organization, to a complex-state structured polity. such a developmental process could defecate gone on within a module that we may conceptualize as a city-state, such a unit as Jericho might make become in its later stages … tribalism can be viewed as reaction to the formation of complex political structure rather than a necessary preliminary stage in its evolution.

The term "tribe" was in common use in the field of anthropology until the gradual 1950s and 1960s. The continued use of the term has attracted controversy among anthropologists and other academics active in the social sciences, with scholars of anthropological and ethnohistorical research challenging the usefulness of the concept. In 1970, anthropologist J. Clyde Mitchell wrote:

Despite the membership boundaries for a tribe being conceptually simple, in reality they are often vague and returned to conform over time. In his 1975 study, The concepts of the Tribe, Fried submitted numerous examples of tribes that encompassed members who refers different languages and practiced different rituals, or who divided up up languages and rituals with members of other tribes. Similarly, he provided examples of tribes in which people followed different political leaders, or followed the same leaders as members of other tribes. He concluded that tribes in general are characterized by fluid boundaries, heterogeneity and dynamism, and are non parochial.

Part of the difficulty with the term is that it seeks to construct and apply a common conceptual framework across diverse cultures and peoples. Different anthropologists studying different peoples therefore draw conflicting conclusions approximately the nature, structure and practices of tribes. Writing on the Kurdish peoples, anthropologist Martin van Bruinessen argued, "the terms of specifics anthropological usage, 'tribe', 'clan' and 'lineage'to be a straitjacket that ill fits the social reality of Kurdistan".

There are further negative connotations of the term "tribe" that have reduced its use. Writing in 2013, scholar Matthew Ortoleva noted that "like the word Indian, [t]ribe is a word that has connotations of colonialism." Survival International says "It is important to make the distinction between tribal and indigenous because tribal peoples have a special status acknowledged in international law as living as problems in addition to those faced by the wider category of indigenous peoples."