On the Discussion of the Concepts of ‘Chiefdom’ and ‘Tribe’ in Current Political Anthropology and History of Primitive Society
Journal: Social Evolution & History. Volume 24, Number 2 / September 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30884/seh/2025.02.10
Vladimir A. Popov
Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia; Pushkin Leningrad State University, Russia
The paper is dedicated to different interpretations of the concepts of ‘chiefdom (вождество)’ and ‘tribe (племя)’. The author concludes that modern science does not provide a clear answer to the question of what ‘a tribe’ is. In contemporary political anthropology, the ‘tribe’ is defined as a segmentary political structure in which each segment (com-munity, lineage) is economically independent and leadership is personal and does not involve any formal positions.
In evolutionary schemes, the tribe is usually placed between the primitive community and the chiefdom (Elman Service, Marshall Sahlins), despite Elman Service's exclusion of the tribe as an obligatory stage of evolution from his scheme of levels of political integration (under the influence of Morton Fried). Some researchers have defined the tribe based on the absence of certain features characteristic of chiefdoms or early states, emphasizing egalitarism and acephality. There are some very simple and obscure formulations like ‘more family, but less nation, bound by ties of kinship and obligation’ (H. Prins).
In Soviet ethnology/ethnography and history of primitive society, the Morgan's view of the Iroquoian tribes was dominant as interpreted by Friedrich Engels. In other words, social and ethnic constructivism flourished, extrapolating a speculative model of the Marxist theory of primitive society into the past. The ‘tribe’ was declared a primitive ethno-potestarian (ethno-social) institute combining the primary form of an ethnic community (within the framework of the famous triad ‘tribe – nationality – nation’) and a potestarian organization.
There is no single or more or less coordinated point of view on the genesis, development, typology, and especially the ratio of ethnic and potestial in a tribe, although some authors distinguish between primary tribes (initial, early, pre-tribe) and classical ones (late tribes, potestarian tribes), or tribes themselves. As a rule, they are associated with various life support systems. The primary tribes (among hunters and gatherers) are a kind of proto-ethnos or ethnicos (ethnos in its pure form), according to Yuri V. Bromley's definition, in which there are no strong potestarian functions and unified rulers or controlling institutions, but there is unity in territory, economy, language (dialects), and awareness of a common origin reflected in self-identity and self-naming.
Socially, the primary tribe is usually treated as either an over-community level of social organization (mainly endogamous) that unites several interrelated clan communities, or as a set of epigamous clans, usually two, characterizing the initial (embryonic) tribe as a dual-generic organization. In other words, the tribe allows for two ways of dividing into its main components: along the line of clans and along the line of communal institutions that overlapped each other. The reproduction of the tribe occurred in the form of continuity of socially organized generations.
The classical tribe is characterized by a high degree of ethno-cultural and social-potestarian design. The integrity of this type of tribe was provided by kinship (real or fictitional) and potestial institutions led by the chief, which also stipulated a greater degree of ethno-cultural unification, i.e. the classical tribe is an ethno-potestarian organism. Clans within one tribe could grow, mature, form phratries, and there were specific tribes with dual or triple-phratrian organizations. Classical tribes are characteristic of farmers and pastoralists from the late pre-historic era. During this era, early political (military-political) associations (unions, leagues, federations, confederations), of related and neighboring tribes were also characteristic. These associations were often hierarchically organized according to the principle of inequality (incompleteness) between separate tribes (‘younger’, ‘adopted’, etc.) and formed the basis for the formation of chiefdoms or early state structures (or their analogues), such as the so-called barbarian kingdoms of the ancient Germans and the first principalities of the Slavs.
There were also secondary tribes formed in synpolitean primitive societies under conditions of inter-formation interaction with more developed neighbours and especially under the influence of European bourgeois societies during the Great Geographical Discoveries and the Modern Age. Such secondary tribes were usually transformed into parapolitean societies, unstable formations that reproduced the forms of European political structures.
However, by the end of the twentieth century, terminological ambiguity in the concept of ‘tribe’ was realized. In fact, the concept of ‘tribe’ has lost its former conceptuality. Modern Russian ethnologists have abandoned the use of the ‘tribe’ concept and other familiar ethnological terms of Soviet science, such as ‘nationality’ and ‘nation’. Most researchers avoid referring to specific ethnic communities' tribes, nationalities, or nations and instead use more neutral concepts like ‘people’ or ‘ethnos’ and its derivatives (‘ethnic communities’, ‘ethnic groups’, etc.), especially the terms ‘ethnic group’ and ‘people’ that do not have a stadial meaning and do not evoke associations with primitivity.
Thus, with the concept of ‘tribe’ there is what always happens when one term refers to different phenomena – namely the loss of terminological uniqueness and conversion into a phantom. At the same time, the concept of ‘tribe’ is still popular among Russian historians-medievalists and archeologists, who identify archeological cultures with tribes, most often bearing in mind ethnic communities. In the same sense, the term ‘tribe’ is used by many Africanists and Americanists, who study peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa and American Indians (Native American).
Modern Russian political anthropologists replace the term ‘tribe (potestarian tribe)’ with the term ‘chiefdom’ or its analogues. At the same time, the concept of ‘chiefdom’ is not so unambiguous and heuristic. In fact, the chiefdom is an intermediate form of socio-political organization (between the community and the early state) with centralized administration, a hereditary hierarchy of chiefs and nobles, and social and property inequality. Yet, there is no formal or even less legal repressive apparatus. The chieftaincy power system is characterized by chiefs – institutionalized hereditary leaders who become leaders in the economic, socio-potestarian, military, and ideological spheres of life. From an economic point of view, the role of the chiefdom is to accumulate and distribute basic material wealth.
According to the degree of structural complexity, it is customary to distinguish between simple, complex (compound), and supercomplex (maximum) chiefdoms. Simple chiefdoms (e.g., Trobriand chiefdoms) consist of a number of village communities, totaling up to several thousand people, united under the authority of a chief who resides in a central settlement. A complex chiefdom, such as Hawaiian chiefdoms), is a two-level (or more) group of simple chiefdoms that are subordinated to the administration of a supreme chief. Typically, the potestarian apparatus of the chief is exempt from direct participation in production. The population can reach 30,000 people. Three-tier (or more) supercomplex chiefdoms (e.g., the Turkic Khaganate or the Bamum ‘kingdom’ in the forest zone of Cameroon) may have ethnically heterogeneous populations, and can number up to several tens of thousands of people.
Most researchers consider chiefdom to be a universal stage in the evolution of political organizations (although chiefdoms are not typically found in ethnic communities of Melanesia), which often leads to ‘fitting’ and ‘adaptation’ of a specific material to a ‘fashionable’ (or ‘trendy’?) concept. In other words, chiefdoms, or their analogues, began to define any early political formations with signs of social hierarchy and the presence of some kind of potestarian apparatus.
It should be noted that the term ‘tribe’ is used in the English-language scientific literature and journalism to designate large ethnic communities, numbering tens of millions of people, primarily African (e.g., Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulbe, Zulus, Bakongo, etc.). They are very far from being primitive tribes and are analogues to large nations. The use of the term ‘tribe’ contributed to the emergence of the concept of tribalism. Tribalism is one of the most complex and acute problems in the internal political development of most African and other developing countries. It can be interpreted in two ways: as a kind of nationalism and separatism, and adherence to cultural, cults and socio-poli-tical separateness, including the desire to preserve the attributes of primitive customs, traditional beliefs, clan organizations, large families, the structure of community self-government, etc. As for social anthropology, the ‘tribe’ acts as a synonym for primitive society (cf. with the stable in the past phrase ‘tribal system’).