Tribal Identities

Tribal identities are a type of collective identity that has been dominant in traditional societies and that persists in new forms in the global age. Tribal identities describe either individual membership in [Page 1682]a particular type of social organization (i.e., the tribe) or the peculiarities of such groupings. The quality of sameness, which associates individuals into tribes or which distinguishes one tribal association from another, is real or imputed consanguinity (blood relation): descent from a common ancestor. Being a Sioux, a Zulu, or a Hutu is a tribal identification.

Common descent may be expressed or recognized by other concomitant affinities that have been used to distinguish one human group from another, such as a particular anthropological type (particular physical traits); a collective name; a religious cult; myths, tales, and legends; a language or dialect; artifacts; symbols (e.g., totems, flags, coats of arms); ways of life; and behavioral traits, including some forms of concerted action. At the same time, and apart from physical traits, such cultural affinities may not be due to blood affinity but rather to acculturation, forced or voluntary. Furthermore, it is difficult to establish what kind of joint activities are to be expected on the basis of blood affinity. These ambiguities make the concept of blood affinity a particularly subjective sociological category, in both its empirical characteristics and its practical implications. Although it might be possible to establish actual “blood” (i.e., genetic) affinity, by means of DNA examination, perceptions of blood affinity tend to be more powerful than objective facts in determining personal and collective self-consciousness as well as collective action, however variable this action may be.

Blood affinity has been used as a socially binding human characteristic that goes back into the mists of time. Indeed, it has been described as a primordial principle of human association that springs from the objective, “natural,” biological affinities and bonds between parent and child. As a traditional principle of social organization, blood affinity has given rise to a variety of blood communities that include the tribe, such as the family, the band, the clan, the ethnic group, and the nation. It has also been used for the construction of a variety of social institutions, for example, matrilineal or patrilineal inheritance, marriage, and power structures, as well as types of traditional social stratification, such as hereditary rule, feudalism, and the caste system. Finally, the fact of being born into a particular community has, again traditionally, implied for individuals a relatively fixed and stable social identity—that is, a repertoire of social roles (rights and obligations) that is socially given (and thus learned), hallowed by tradition, and that binds the individual organically and permanently to the community of birth.

With the advent of modernity, the “givenness,” continuity, and certainty that traditional identities, including tribal identities, had involved have been broken in favor of a more malleable view of both individual selfhood and social belonging. Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism and some strands of Counter-Enlightenment Romanticism have favored the concept of the self-made man and woman freed from inherited or attributed characteristics and capable of creating and recreating himself or herself. This current of thought and the social transformations that it has brought about have caused tribal identities, and the tribe, as a primitive form of social organization, to be considered retrogressive and consigned to the dustbin of history.

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