Tribe: social unit, organization, history and modern relevance

The term "tribe" as an organized association within a people appears prominently in the Twelve Tribes of Israel in Exodus 2. The overarching unity of the "people" is used here in a limited way as a historical myth in the sense of a tribal association with a common ancestry for all members. By developing a common language and culture within a closed settlement area, the Israelite tribes developed their own sense of belonging that was distinct from the outside world. Here the notion of a "progenitor" took root. The subsequent historical process by which a group of people set themselves apart from others and came together to form a people is known as ethnogenesis.

Linguistically and figuratively, "descent" is connected with the tree trunk, which has grown branches from its origin (from the seed). Here it proverbially comes to the branching initially of a single line (compare linear kinship). This double meaning is also contained in the Latin stirps, which botanically denotes the "root" or "trunk" as well as the "descendants" of a family or line of origin, for example that of Aeneas.

The word "tribe" formed in the corresponding meaning via the Middle High German stam from the Old High German liutstam. The English word tribe and the French tribu begin with the syllable tri ("three") from the Latin word tribus, which meant a division of the population of ancient Rome into 3 sections. In the course of the Christianization of Britain - also imported by the Roman occupying power - the English tribe also referred to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The notion of these tribes entered directly into the travel descriptions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in addition, ethnologists of the time began to apply the term tribe in the sense of a classification or division of peoples in the foreign lands visited. The evolutionist approach included here was in part still strongly influenced by the biblical accounts, but authors of classical Greece also provided a fixed point. Among other things, they described the structure of their own society as being divided into trittyes ("thirds") and thus distinguished it from the communities of the presumably more disorganized barbarians.

The post-Roman Germanic population groups in Central Europe, such as the Alamanni and the Lombards, are referred to as tribes because of their low degree of state organization. In the Middle Ages in Germany, on the way to nation building, there were tribal demarcations between the Frisians, Saxons, Thuringians, Franks, Swabians and Bavarians, among others.

In the course of the 19th century, "tribe" acquired for contemporary societies the general meaning of a simply and originally organized subgroup of a preferably non-European society (compare tribal society). Accordingly, a 1965 dictionary entry defines tribe as "an ethnic unit, especially prominent among primitive peoples, which unites people of the same language and culture into an autonomous territorial association." The word kinship does not appear in this text.

Fundamental to anthropological theorizing in the 19th century was the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. In ancient Greece, the phyle (tribe, people) was an organizational subunit of the state. Genos (pl. genē) denoted a kinship group. Phratry formed a superior unit that referred to a mythical ancestor. A social classification includes genos (gender, family group), phratry, trittys as a subdivision of phyle, and ethnos (people). The genē were endogamous, so the marriage community did not include the entire tribe. Originally, however, the division into genē was probably limited to the aristocracy. This division also underlay the military organization. In the Iliad (2, 101) Nestor recommends, "Arrange the men according to tribes and according to phratries, that the phratry may assist the phratry and the tribe the tribe." In Attica there were four tribes of three phratries each and thirty genē. These tribes derived their descent from an eponymous heros, but are artificially created political and administrative units. To the Athenian council of 400 each tribe sent 100 members. Consequently, anyone who was not a member of a tribe had no political rights. Since the reform of Kleisthenes, the tribe no longer played a role in the political organization; he divided Attica into municipal districts (demes), which henceforth formed the basic political unit. Ten of these demes were combined into one tribe, which was now defined by place of residence and not by actual or assumed ancestry. The tribe elected the phylarch (tribal leader), strategos, and taxiarchos (brigadier), provided five warships for the fleet, and elected 50 members to the council. These tribes were also assigned an eponymous heros for whose cult they were responsible.

In Rome, too, gentes (Sg. gens) were united into a tribe (tribus). According to legend, Rome was founded by a Latin tribe, a Sabellian tribe, and a "mixed" tribe, all of which consisted of one hundred gentes each. Ten gentes each formed a curia (pl. curiae), usually equated with the Greek phratry. The senate was composed of the heads of these 300 gentes. In the reform of Servius Tullius new gentes were formed; here it is clear that these were political units, but still based on kinship. In both cases, Kleisthenes' phyla reform and the formation of the curia, the tribal society was transformed into a state entity through reorganization.