The word tribe may come from an ancient division into three
Tribe descends from the Latin tribus, which linguists trace to a very old root meaning split into three. Anthropologists once used the word confidently for a stage of human society. Since the 1960s many have questioned whether it describes anything clear at all, and the debate reveals how slippery social categories can be.
The English word came through Middle English tribu, and it is unclear whether it arrived via Old French or straight from Latin. Behind tribus lies a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European compound meaning a tripartite division, with relatives in Umbrian trifu and Sanskrit trídha, threefold.
In anthropology a tribe usually sits between a clan or lineage and larger units such as a chiefdom or state, a political grouping of families bound by social or ideological solidarity. Membership might rest on kinship, language, place, religion or shared customs. Elman Service built a well-known ladder of societies: egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, tribes with limited rank, stratified chiefdoms, and finally civilisations with institutional government. Archaeologists suggest tribal structures suited environments where resources were plentiful but unpredictable, flexible enough to share food in lean times without restricting people in good ones.
Morton Fried challenged the ladder. In 1967 he argued there was no need for a tribal stage between village and state; tribes might instead have formed as a reaction to the rise of early kingdoms, a way for bands to resist exploitation. In his 1975 study The Notion of the Tribe, he gave examples of tribes whose members spoke different languages and followed different leaders, and of groups sharing rituals across tribal lines. Boundaries, he concluded, were fluid, mixed and changeable.
By 1970 J. Clyde Mitchell noted that doubts about the concept had grown as even remote peoples were drawn into economic and political ties with industrial nations. Legal definitions add another layer. In the United States, Native American tribes are recognised as domestic dependent nations, dealing with the federal government on a government-to-government basis, a usage that may not match any anthropologist's definition.
Source: Tribe
