r/AskHistorians • u/Commustar Swahili Coast | Sudanic States | Ethiopia • Apr 06 '15
Feature Monday Methods- Definitions of Tribe
Hi everyone, and welcome to Monday Methods. As is customary, here is the list of past MM threads
We are back from our brief hiatus, and we have a special program today. We will be talking terminology today, specifically about the definition of the term "tribe".
I have already asked several of our flaired experts to consider these following questions, and write up their perspective.
Does your field use the term Tribe?
What meaning/definition does the term have in your specialty?
If your specialty has moved away from the term, when and why did this come about?
What words do you use in place of Tribe?
Of course, comments from the readership is welcomed. If your field of study uses the word Tribe, or has chosen not to use the word, feel free to add your perspective.
Also, if you have any follow up questions to add to the ones listed, we welcome those.
Next weeks question will be (serious this time)- How do you deal with elements of your study that attract disproportionate attention?
17
u/Aerandir Apr 06 '15
My use of 'tribe' has mostly to do with the Germanic peoples of the Roman and Early Medieval/Dark Ages. The distinction here is also from the Romans, but different from what Tiako described. The Latin word for these various peoples that we now call the Germanic tribes, so the Jutes, Batavians, Cimbrians etc., was 'natio', whereas they would have been part of the Germanic 'gens'. By the first century or so, the Latin meaning of these words is thus quite different from their original meaning, but which have something to do with 'native birth' or 'relations'. For Free Germany, it is thus different from a 'civitas', which is a Roman administrative unit; when Romans come into an area, they try to turn a 'natio' into a 'civitas'.
So the term 'tribe' is a means of political organisation. Conveniently, this is also how anthropologists used the term (as a developmental stage in power centralisation, or in other words, a description of an organisational structure). This has as an implication that according to (a simplistic reading of) Tacitus, or other Roman geographers (ethnographers), a 'tribe' is some sort of homogeneous political actor, roughly equivalent to a modern state. In this sense, scholars have seen it as a description for a 'proto-state' (something on the ladder towards state organisation). This use, while common just 20 or 10 years ago, is now totally outdated.
A more nuanced studying of social organisation in Germania both during and after the Romans actually shows that in many instances, the 'tribe' is not a primary political actor. Instead, you see groups of warriors who between tribes enter alliances or confederations, or who fight amongst themselves within what should be a homogeneous tribe. Similarly, a tribe does not have a single leader, but rather a 'class' of 'kings', seemingly aristocrats. However, it is unclear what the role of this class of rulers is in tribal organisation: do they really have power over a tribe (and limited to the tribe), or are they only concerned with certain aspects of society (warfare, defending against foreigners, perhaps guaranteeing traders, or simply giving the local youth something to do so they don't stir up trouble).
The old view, that tribal units in some way correspond to cultures (people with certain distinct habits, which should be visible in material culture, ie. archaeological artefacts), is still used by some, but in my opinion too flimsy to really hold water, once you look into the actual data that these people use to support their ideas.
So if it's not as simple as 'tribe=army', nor 'tribe=culture', then how can we distinguish the boundaries between the political entities within Germania? There are basically two ways. One is to look for natural boundaries between settled areas (in German called 'Siedlungskammern', or a settlement area). In some contexts, this can be very useful. The boundaries of the tribal units in Sweden, such as the Svear, are very nicely reflected by the edges of settled area surrounded by unsettled woodland. Similarly, the absence of settlement (and the inferred presence of woodland) has been used with some success in Southern Jutland to identify boundary areas. However, within Germany (and the rest of the North European lowland area) this is more difficult, as most of this area would have been settled in some way, without clear empty zones between settlements. Especially within Denmark, for example, no natural boundaries can be seen, as all arable land was in contiguous use (though there are differences between landscape types, so grazing-lands are different from arable land or coastal zone). Similarly, islands (such as the Danish islands, but also the insular marsh area of the Netherlands) have so many 'natural boundaries' that assuming they all are tribal boundaries is problematic.
A second way (and the one I use in my PhD project) to see boundaries between political units (which I here call 'tribes' in Tacitus' sense) is to look for who was employed in infrastructural works. The assumption here is that you don't work for something to which you don't have a motivation to use, that is, you won't build your neighbour's fences for him. So every politically independent unit would built its own fortresses and fortifications, possibly between or in an offensive location in relation to their 'enemies' (and hence the different tribe). Tacitus gives a good example of one of those when he describes that during Germanicus' punitive campaign, Arminius' confederation of the Cherusci retreats at a wall built between the Angrivarii and themselves. While this wall has not been found yet, there are a number of other 'walls' (linear earthworks, long barricades etc.) thoughout Northern Germany and Jutland, but also in Southern Sweden. Similar structures are also built by the Saxons in Britain, and they are still (or again) in use in the Medieval period as well. Offa's Dyke and Danevirke are two examples built in the early 9th and late 8th century respectively, and both explicitly built to separate one ethnic/political unit (the 'Danes' in the 10th century and the Mercians in the 9th) from another. It is remarkable that the Romans seem to adopt this habit of building long earthworks in the 2nd century in Scotland, where Hadrian's and later the Antonine walls are similar parallels.
However, the closer we study these earthworks, the more problematic it is to simply classify them as tribal boundaries. When we do apply the previously mentioned archaeological criteria for distinguishing tribes (contiguous settlement and differing material culture), these earthworks seem to be located right in the middle, not between, these tribal areas. Similarly, if you would expect these earthworks to be boundary defenses, they should be in relatively marginal areas, away from other things. Instead, we consistently find them barring busy traffic routes (roads, river crossings etc.), and also in landscapes with significant other prehistoric monuments (mostly bronze age burial mounds, because they were also built near roads continuously in use since that time). If we then take a look at how people like Offa or Hadrian or Antonius Pius used these walls, we get a different picture. Rather than being boundary/frontier markers, these structures are used by foreign occupiers to divide a tribal unit, and to control traffic (and communication) between allies within a political group.
In my own PhD project I try to look at other fortifications than the linear walls, such as hillforts, to see whether these have any relation to what we recognise as tribal areas.
So then what archaeological evidence do we really have left to identify tribes in Germania? Not much, so we should reevaluate what exactly is meant with this term. It seems that tribes are not really meaningful when talking about the division of the general population in the Germanic world, but rather only seem meaningful in certain context: primarily, when groups organise themselves for war. A tribe then collects around a particular leader (or a small group of leaders). This might be why so many of the tribal names, when we look at them etymologically, seem to refer to some warlike activity ('the smashers', 'the howlers', 'the spearmen'). The tribal unit seems to have been a term reserved for armies that could be activated when there is an opportunity for them, either in a situation of defense (when there are foreign invaders) or an opportunity for offense (when people go on a campaign). This is also an explanation for why tribal names seem so inconsistent over the centuries, or why tribes move around so much, or why sometimes names refer to different organisational scales: the tribal name seems to have been flexible, and can arise, disappear, slumber, or be invoked when there is a political opportunity.
As I said, the academic consensus about these things is changing, with old authorities like Ulf Näsman or Peter Heather being representations of the 'old' tribal definition, and Chris Wickham or Guy Halsall proponents of the 'new' idea.