Tribal society

What Do We Mean by “Tribal Society”?

“Tribe” has a tangled history. In mid-20th-century anthropology, Elman Service’s influential typology arranged human societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states; “tribes” were acephalous (headless) polities knit by kinship and age grades, typically horticultural or pastoral, and relatively egalitarian compared to chiefdoms and states. Morton Fried (and later Aidan Southall) argued that “the tribe” was less a natural kind and more a political fiction—often consolidated through colonial administration or ethnographic oversimplification. Adam Kuper pushed the critique further, showing how the idea of “primitive society” was invented and reified. Today many scholars avoid “tribe” except in locally meaningful contexts (e.g., India’s constitutionally recognized “Scheduled Tribes,” or groups that self-identify as tribes), preferring “Indigenous peoples,” “ethnic polities,” or simply the names groups use for themselves.

Classic Portraits of Tribal Political Systems

The most famous early portraits came from British social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Nuer described a “segmentary lineage” system: nested descent groups that expand or contract politically depending on the level of conflict. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s edited volume African Political Systems contrasted such acephalous orders with centralized kingdoms, showing that law and order needn’t hinge on a state or monarch. These studies became touchstones for understanding how kinship, feud, mediation, and ritual specialists could stabilize large populations without bureaucracies. Recent econometric work has even probed segmentary lineage effects on conflict, showing how nested allegiances can make mobilization easier in some settings—updating those classic insights with contemporary data.

Kinship, Marriage, and Personhood

In many small-scale societies, kinship remains the primary architecture of social life, but “kinship” isn’t just blood: it’s nurturance, adoption, co-residence, and shared labor, too. Rules of descent (matrilineal, patrilineal, bilateral), marriage (exogamy/endogamy, bridewealth/brideservice), and age-sets/age-grades organize rights to land, inheritance, and political voice. These institutions shift as people move to towns or interface with state law, but the underlying logic of relatedness as mutual obligation persists, often coexisting with newer identities (religious, occupational, party-political) without simply “disappearing.”

Subsistence, Exchange, and Moral Economies

Economic life in many tribal/Indigenous communities has long been characterized by foraging, shifting cultivation, pastoralism, and mixed horticulture—often blended today with wage work, remittances, and small enterprise. The substantivist tradition (Karl Polanyi) insisted that economic practices are “embedded” in social relations; Marcel Mauss’s The Gift showed how reciprocity and obligation, not market profit, can organize circulation. Marshall Sahlins later mapped “generalized,” “balanced,” and “negative” reciprocity, illuminating how exchange sustains equality, diffuses risk, and expresses kinship. These lenses remain powerful for reading contemporary realities: from community seed exchanges and bridewealth negotiations to debates over commodifying land and labor.

Authority, Law, and Leadership

Without formal states, leadership often flows through “big men,” headmen, age-set leaders, and councils of elders. Authority rests on persuasion, generosity, ritual knowledge, and dispute mediation rather than coercive force. While structural-functionalists emphasized equilibrium, later work stressed contestation—how factions form, how younger men and women leverage external allies (NGOs, courts), and how ritual offices can be reinterpreted in the light of schooling, migration, or party politics. Even where elected village councils exist, customary forums may remain decisive in land and marital disp

Cosmology, Ritual, and the Social Fabric

Rituals—initiations, first-fruits, healing dances—do political work: they authorize leaders, repair social rifts, and anchor people to place and ancestors. Durkheim’s classic claim that ritual creates social solidarity finds an ethnographic complement in Victor Turner’s analysis of liminality and communitas—the powerful egalitarian feeling forged in rites of passage. In many places today, Christian or Islamic practices have been adopted and indigenized, sitting alongside older ritual repertoires in ways that sustain continuity as well as change.

Ecology, Territory, and the Politics of Place

For many Indigenous communities, territory isn’t just “property”; it’s a living nexus of ancestors, spirits, and non-human kin. That’s one reason land loss—through logging, dams, mining, or conservation that excludes locals—has social as well as material costs. Globally, the IPBES assessments and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework now explicitly recognize the key role of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in stewarding biodiversity, and call for conservation that respects their rights and knowledge (including “30x30” targets with equity and participation built in). These are not just technical policies; they reframe “tribal” territories as cornerstone landscapes for a planetary future—when implemented with consent and shared governance

Resistance, Refusal, and Living Beside the State

James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed proposed that many highland societies of Southeast Asia built their lifeways around strategic distance from states: mobility, crop choices, and oral traditions that frustrate enumeration and taxation. In Seeing Like a State, he showed how state schemes often fail when they flatten local knowledge. These ideas resonate with Indigenous strategies elsewhere—sometimes as overt resistance, sometimes as quiet “refusal” (Audra Simpson) to be fully folded into settler sovereignties, and sometimes as pragmatic engagement on Indigenous terms. Tania Murray Li, working in Indonesia, details how projects designed “to improve” often remake people and landscapes to fit administrative logics, raising the stakes of who defines “development.”

Knowledge, Data, and Indigenous Sovereignty

A major “latest” front concerns Indigenous data sovereignty: who controls data about lands, cultures, and genomes; who benefits from digitization and AI; and how to align research with community priorities. The Global Indigenous Data Alliance articulates the CARE Principles—Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics—as a complement to FAIR data standards. CARE centers people and power, not just interoperability, and is increasingly referenced by universities, archives, and biodiversity platforms.

Law, Rights, and Global Standards

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007) affirms self-determination, Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and rights to lands, resources, languages, and institutions. ILO Convention 169 (1989) is legally binding for ratifying states, mandating consultation and protection for Indigenous and tribal peoples; many countries have not ratified it, but it sets a powerful benchmark. These instruments increasingly shape court rulings, conservation design, and development finance—especially where Indigenous governance and consent are foregrounded.

Tribal Societies in India: History and Policy Debates

India is distinctive because “tribe” (Scheduled Tribe, ST) is a constitutional category tied to affirmative action, political representation, and targeted welfare. The classic debate between sociologist G. S. Ghurye (who favored assimilation with the “Hindu mainstream”) and anthropologist Verrier Elwin (who advocated protective isolation and cultural autonomy for hill peoples) framed mid-century policy arguments. Later, Virginius Xaxa and others argued for recognizing Adivasis as Indigenous in global terms, stressing dispossession through colonial and postcolonial extraction. K. S. Singh’s People of India project documented the staggering internal diversity of India’s communities, showing just how misleading any single label can be.
Two legal landmarks reshaped the ground in India: the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA, 1996), which extends self-governance to Adivasi gram sabhas in designated areas, including control over minor forest produce and local resource decisions; and the Forest Rights Act (FRA, 2006), which recognizes individual and community forest rights, including Community Forest Resource (CFR) governance. Together, they offer one of the world’s strongest frameworks for local control—where implemented in good faith.

Development, Dispossession, and Protection

From the highlands of Southeast Asia to central India, the core dilemmas repeat: mineral leases, hydropower, industrial agriculture, and fortress conservation encroach on territories; communities mobilize across legal and moral registers—customary law, national courts, global advocacy—to defend land and livelihood. In central India’s forests, scholarship by Nandini Sundar traces how counterinsurgency, vigilante movements, and corporate concessions entangle Adivasi life, while the Xaxa Committee’s wide-ranging 2014 report documented deficits in health, education, and land security and recommended stronger recognition, implementation, and accountability.

Gender, Generation, and Everyday Inequality

Romantic images of “egalitarian tribes” often obscure internal inequalities. Women’s access to inheritance, land, and customary councils varies widely; in some places women lead ritual healing or marketing yet face exclusion from political fora, in others matrilineal descent and uxorilocal residence distribute power differently. Youth out-migration, schooling, and social media are re-drawing generational contracts—sometimes eroding elder authority, sometimes opening new routes of leadership (e.g., forest patrolling, community mapping, cooperative enterprises). “Tribal society” is neither timeless nor uniformly egalitarian; it is a living field of negotiation.

Health, Education, and Cultural Continuity

Health burdens (malaria, undernutrition, TB) and barriers to schooling have been chronic issues for many Adivasi/Indigenous communities. But health systems that disregard language and cosmology often fail uptake. Culturally grounded primary care, mother-tongue education in early grades, and community-run schools can improve outcomes while sustaining identity. Where Indigenous languages are strong, intergenerational transmission of ecological knowledge and land stewardship is stronger—a point increasingly recognized in biodiversity and climate policy.

Migration, Markets, and Mixed Livelihoods

Few communities live wholly outside markets today. Seasonal wage labor, forest produce trade, and urban migration are part of most livelihoods. Polanyi’s “embeddedness” remains relevant: people don’t simply become “homo economicus” as they sell lac, tendu leaves, or artisanal crafts; they slot market work into kin obligations, ritual calendars, and moral economies. The risk is that debt relations, middle-man control, and land alienation can disembed livelihoods from community governance; the opportunity is for cooperatives and CFR-based enterprises to re-embed markets within local decision-making.

Media, Mapping, and Territorial Intelligence

New tools—GPS/GIS mapping, smartphone video, participatory land records, and community radio—are transforming how communities defend territory and narrate identity. Indigenous data sovereignty advocates press for protocols so that maps and archives don’t become new instruments of dispossession; the CARE principles offer a widely cited compass for researchers and NGOs partnering with communities.

Conservation Partnerships and the “30×30” Debate

The 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) set ambitious conservation targets (e.g., protecting 30% of lands/seas by 2030) with explicit commitments to respect IPLC rights and customary territories. IPBES has underscored that territories managed by Indigenous peoples often show equal or better conservation outcomes than strict protected areas. The frontier now is implementation: ensuring FPIC, co-governance, benefit-sharing, and monitoring frameworks that actually measure equity, not just hectares. Recent analyses and guidance from CBD bodies, IUCN, and civil-society coalitions have made it clear that conservation success and Indigenous justice are intertwined, not competing goals.

Beyond the “Tribe”: Global Interdependence

Eric Wolf famously reminded us that no people are “without history.” Trading circuits, missionization, colonial conquest, and labor migration have linked villages to world-systems for centuries. Today, climate change, biodiversity finance, carbon markets, and critical-minerals demand (lithium, cobalt, rare earths) intensify those linkages. That makes the political anthropology of tribal/Indigenous society—a field born in small places—central to big-picture debates about democracy, development, and planetary stability

Rethinking Method: From Being Studied to Setting the Terms

The discipline itself is changing. Indigenous scholars and communities are no longer only subjects of research but also theorists, archivists, and co-governors of knowledge. Ideas like “refusal” (Audra Simpson) press researchers and states to accept that the right to say “no” is political reason, not obstruction. “Recognition” (Glen Coulthard) is critiqued as insufficient when it leaves extractive relations intact; instead, land-back, restitution, and self-determination are on the table. Biodiversity science is adapting, too, with formal spaces for Indigenous and Local Knowledge within assessments and monitoring.

References

1. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940). The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Clarendon.
2. Fortes, M., & Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (Eds.). (1940). African Political Systems.Oxford University Press.
3. Mauss, M. (1925/1954). The Gift.
4. Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation
5. Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics.
6. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press.