but what I know about the study of social organization in general might throw some light on the initial posters’ query. Elman Service codified the traditional neo-evolutionary band –> tribe –> chiefdom –> state sequence in 1962. The inclusion of tribe within the model was critiqued by otherwise sympathetic scholars due to the lack of a unified definition for the term (Fried 1966; Hymes 1968). In 1985 Joan Townsend proposed ‘autonomous village’ as an alternative (see Carneiro 1987:760–61).

The band/tribe/chiefdom/state typology is still commonly trotted out in Anthro 101 lectures and introductory level textbooks but I personally find the substitution of autonomous village for tribe to be a vast refinement for the following reason: the terms autonomous village, band, and state are consistently used to refer to institutions that have governance as their primary function while the referents of the term tribe typically do not. There certainly do exist tribes which are about the doing of politics. Historical research of such an institution will typically reveal that it emerged out of colonial administrators’ need to have a formally delimited and vetted group with whom to transact business. Such is the case with those tribes recognized by the BIA as well as with the Montagnards (for which, see Salemink 1991). Correct me if I am wrong, but don’t the Tribal Areas of Pakistan have an analogous history?

All of that to allow me to say that if you are a representative and/or policy maker from a foreign land looking for parties with whom to negotiate, tribes—excepting of course those you know to be of the sort built to interface with colonial administrators—are probably not the best place to look.



Carneiro, Robert L. 1987. “Cross-currents in the theory of state formation.” American Ethnologist 14 (4): 756–70. doi:10.1525/ae.1987.14.4.02a00110.

Fried, Morton H. 1966. “On the concepts of ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal society.’” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, ser. 2 28 (4): 527–40.

Hymes, Dell H. 1968. Linguistic problems in defining the concept of ‘tribe.’ In Essays on the problem of tribe, ed. June Helm, 23–48. Proceedings of the 1967 Annual Meeting, American Ethnological Society. Seattle: American Ethnological Society and University of Washington Press. Reprint, Language in use: readings in sociolinguistics, ed. John Baugh and Joel Sherzer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984, 7–27.

Salemink, Oscar. 1991. Mois and Maquis: the invention and appropriation of Vietnam’s Montagnards from Sabatier to the CIA. In Colonial situations: essays on the contextualization of ethnographic knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking, 243–84. Vol. 7 in History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Service, Elman. 1962. Primitive social organization. An evolutionary perspective. Random House Studies in Anthropology, AS3. New York.