Detribalization is the process by which persons who belong to a particular indigenous ethnic identity or community are detached from that identity or community through the deliberate efforts of colonizers and/or the larger effects of colonialism.
Detribalization was systematically executed by detaching members from communities outside the colony so that they could be "modernized", Westernized, and, in most circumstances, Christianized for the prosperity of the colonial state. Historical accounts illustrate several trends in detribalization, with the most prevalent being the role that Western colonial capitalists played in exploiting Indigenous people's labor, resources, and knowledge, the role that Christian missionaries and the colonial Christian mission system played in compelling Christian membership in place of Indigenous cultural and religious practices, instances of which were recorded in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and the systemic conditioning of Indigenous peoples to internalize their own purported inferiority through direct and indirect methods.Millet 2018, p. 75.Gonzalez 2012, p. 69.Schmink and Wood 1992, p. 37-39.Rodriguez 2014, p. 18.Stanner 2011, p. 158.
In the colonial worldview, "civilization" was exhibited through the development of permanent settlements, infrastructure, lines of communication, churches, and a built environment based on the extraction of natural resources. Detribalization was usually explained as an effort to raise people up from what colonizers perceived as inferior and "uncivilized" ways of living and enacted by detaching Indigenous persons from their traditional territories, cultural practices, and communal identities. This often resulted in a marginal position within colonial society and exploitation within capitalist industry.Millet 2018, p. 68.Hickel 2015, p. 91-94.
De-Indianization has been used in scholarship as a variant of detribalization, particularly on work in the United States and Latin American contexts. The term detribalization is similarly used to refer to this process of colonial transformation on subsets of the historical and contemporary Indigenous population of the Americas.Moraga 2011, p. 220. De-Indianization has been defined by anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla as a process which occurs "in the realm of ideology" or identity, and is fulfilled when "the pressures of the dominant society succeed in breaking the ethnic identity of the Indian community," even if "the lifeway may continue much as before."Bonfil Batalla 1996, p. 46. De-Indigenization or deindigenization have also been used as variants of detribalization in academic scholarship. For example, academic Patrisia Gonzales has argued how mestizaje operated as the "master narrative" constructed by colonizers "to de-Indigenize peoples" throughout Latin America.Gonzalez 2012, p. 213.
While, according to James F. Eder, initial colonial detribalization most often occurred as a result of "land expropriation, habitat destruction, epidemic disease, or even genocide," contemporary cases may not involve such apparent or "readily identified external factors." In a postcolonial framework, "less visible forces associated with political economies of modern nation-states – market incentives, cultural pressures, new religious ideologies – permeate the fabric and ethos of tribal societies and motivate their members to think and behave in new ways."Eder 1992, p. 5-6.
Usage of term Detribalize has been defined by Merriam-Webster as "to cause losing tribal identity," by Dictionary.com as "to cause losing tribal allegiances and customs, chiefly through contact with another culture," and by the Cambridge Dictionary as "to make members of a tribe (a social group of people with the same language, customs, and history, and often a recognized leader) stop following their traditional customs or social structure." Detribalization incorporates the word tribal, which has been recognized as an offensive and pejorative term when used in certain contexts.Mamdani 2018, p. 7. For this reason, detribalization is sometimes used in quotations when referring to the process being described as a signal to the reader of the term's potentially offensive subtext.
From its early uses to modern scholarship, detribalization has almost exclusively been applied in particular geographic, and therefore racialized, contexts. As the proceeding section on regional detribalized histories demonstrates, while historical discussion and academic research on "detribalization" and "detribalized" peoples can be found in the African, Asian, Oceanic, North American, and South American contexts, especially when referring to Indigenous histories of each of these regions, to locate instances in which the term has been applied to Europeans or in the European context is exceptionally rare. One of the few instances was by contemporary scholar Ronen Zeidel in a study on Iraqi Gypsies in 2014, who stated "whereas the Gypsies entered a detribalized Europe with a social organization that was different, contributing to their estrangement, that was not the case in Iraq. Iraqi society has never been detribalized."Parrs 2017, p. 65.
Misapplication In the twentieth century, criticisms regarding the usage of detribalization emerged among scholars, particularly in the African context, who recognized its misapplication as a consequence of racism. South African anthropologist Meyer Fortes noted how the term was commonly used in the European sociological context as a "synonym for such words as 'pathological', 'disintegrated', 'demoralized', in a pejorative or deprecatory sense." Isaac Schapera recognized that the term was being misapplied by Europeans who assumed that urbanization in colonial society implied detribalization: "it is not correct to assume that all people who go to the Union [of South Africa] from Bechuanaland tend to become 'detribalized'."Bovenkerk 1975, p. 27. H. M. Robertson states that "the urban native is classed as 'detribalized,' but this is not necessarily the case."Robertson 2015, p. 143. Ellen Hellmann similarly described in her sociological work "that 'the process of detribalization has been exaggerated' among the urban African population, although 'the average European would unhesitatingly classify these Natives as detribalized'." In his sociological study, William Watson concludes that while "under urban conditions, Africans rapidly assimilate European dress, material culture, and outward forms of behaviour, this assimilation does not necessarily imply detribalization. On the contrary, many attempts to organize African industrial workers on a common basis of economic interest have encountered great difficulties because of African tribal solidarity and intertribal hostilities."Watson 1958, p. 4-6.
In Africa's International Relations: The Diplomacy of Dependency and Change (1978), Kenyan academic Ali A Mazrui provides a nuanced discussion of the misapplication of detribalization, recognizing how "there was often an assumption among analysts of the African colonial scene that nationalism made its recruits from the ranks of the detribalized." Since the leaders of anti-colonial movements were, in the majority of instances, "Westernized or semi-Westernized," they were classed as "detribalized" by European colonial authorities. However, Mazrui notes that this employment of detribalization failed to differentiate between "tribalism as a way of life and tribalism as loyalty to an ethnic group," noting that colonial analysts had only recognized instances of a "weakening of cultural affiliation, though not necessarily of ethnic loyalty." In other words, "a person could adopt an entirely Western way of life but still retain great love and loyalty to the ethnic group from which he sprang." As a result, Mazrui proposes the term detraditionalized, recognizing that "the erosion of tradition [does] not necessarily mean the diminution of ethnicity."Mazrui 1978, p. 239-240.
Regional detribalized histories
In Africa
From 1884 to 1885, European powers, along with the United States, convened at the Berlin Conference in order to settle colonial disputes throughout the African continent and protect the economic interests of their colonial empires. The conference was the primary occasion for partitioning, what Europeans commonly referred to as, "the dark continent", and came about as a result of conflicting territorial claims. The various European colonial powers wish to avoid conflict in their "Scramble for Africa", and as such drew clear lines over the continent.Harlow 2003, p. 1. In 1898, Polish-British author Joseph Conrad remarked in Heart of Darkness on how Europeans used color swatches to denote their territorial claims over Africa, a common practice in the period:There was a vast amount of red [Britain] – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done there, a deuce of a lot of blue [France], a little green [Portugal], smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch [Germany], to show where the jolly pioneers drink the jolly lager beer. However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow [Belgium]. Dead in the center.Conrad 1990, p. 7.An empire had to demonstrate effective occupation of the land they were claiming in order to justify their claims to it. Under these guidelines, scholar Kitty Millet has noted, that effective "'connoted farms, gardens, roads, railways, [and] even [a] postal service." The only entities which could claim ownership "over these diverse African spaces... had to be one of the powers at the conference. Local or Indigenous groups were neither imaginable as political powers nor visible as peers or subjects of European sovereigns." Not only were Indigenous peoples not physically represented at the Berlin Conference, they were also absent "to the European powers' conceptualization of territory. They were not 'on the map'."Millet 2018, p. 80-81. Rather, Indigenous peoples were perceived by Europeans as property of the land living in an inferior state of nature. Prior to their consciousness of their own "whiteness," Millet notes that Europeans were first "conscious of the superiority of their developmental 'progress' ... 'Savages' had temporary huts; they roamed the countryside. They were incapable of using nature appropriately. The colour of their skins condemned them."
Because Indigenous nations were deemed to be "uncivilized," European powers declared the territorial sovereignty of Africa as openly available, which initiated the Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. With the continent of Africa conceptualized as effectively "ownerless" territory, Europeans positioned themselves as its redeemers and rightful colonial rulers. In the European colonial mindset, Africans were inferior and incapable of being "civilized" because they had failed to properly manage or exploit the natural resources available to them. As a result, they were deemed to be obstacles to capitalist investment, extraction, and production of natural resources in the construction of a new colonial empire and built environment. The immense diversity of the indigenous peoples of Africa was flattened by this colonial perception, which labeled them instead as an "unrepresentable nomadic horde of apprehensions that ran across European territories."Millet 2018, p. 82-84.