Comments on: Talking about “Tribe”

By: Seth Sanders

Seth Sanders — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:43:01 +0000

Hmm–that makes sense and is interesting. What specifically bugged your students about the formulations?

By: dp

dp — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:59:51 +0000

I have several Dinka students in my classes and when they read and commented on Southall, Fried & K\R. Kelly’s views of tribes they all had this interesting nostalgia and repulsion to any concrete formulations of tribes.

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:50:21 +0000

Yeah one thing that recent flurry of high-table theory on Sovereignty and The State has never connected with is any state formation before 1948 (or, to be _very_ charitable, 1648). Or the earlier Marx n’ Archaeology literature on the state. See my paper here, Seth:

http://manao.manoa.hawaii.edu/92/

What we really need here is a concrete, comparative anthropology of these interactions, exactly as Kerim points out. Otherwise we will lapse back to generalities like, say, Jared Diamond does:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18045599

Ironically, as the footnotes from GGS indicate, it was exactly that Marx n’ Archaeology moment which Diamond read up to. All the work done sense then doesn’t really come up in his work — at least not the work I’ve read.

By: Seth Sanders

Seth Sanders — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:52:44 +0000

There is a double-edged problem here, of which the concept of tribe and its critiques are both symptoms: the circularity of the modern colonial contact situation, well expressed in the statement that “Tribes Make States and States Make Tribes” (from the SAR War in the Tribal Zone volume).

What if we encountered a tribe-like polity not as a tool of empire but the other way around? Well guess what? That’s exactly what we do find around 1800 BCE, when Zimri-Lim, of the beni Sim’al, takes over the Old Babylonian city-state of Mari. Here we see tribal (or “tribal”) political categories used to organize a state.

http://www.amazon.com/Democracys-Ancient-Ancestors-Collective-Governance/dp/0521828856/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200354444&sr=8-1

One of the things that I, and I think Rex, find appealing about the ancient Near Eastern archive is getting outside the box of modernity.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:25:03 +0000

If I were teaching a course on the subject I’d use Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (there is both the book and the CSSH article), but I liked the blog-like readability of this piece.

By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:13:54 +0000

Anyone interested might want to consult the old chestnut

THE ILLUSION OF TRIBE by Aidan Southall
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9hNKkzt1ovEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA38&dq=illusion+of+tribe&ots=HK796dapla&sig=E5nDRpGusamp_3csSuG9dcNk5xU

And it is time once again to site Fried’s work on “The Concept of Tribe”

Southall’s political position will be unfamiliar to us today, but it is still a nice rundown.