Anthropology, history and ‘tribes’

In the mid-twentieth century, social scientists of all persuasions expected tribal and ethnic minorities within contemporary nation-states to succumb sooner or later to policies of modernization and national integration, and many were confident that class would replace ethnicity as the major dimension of social identity. Many anthropologists began to regard the study of their traditional subject-matter – tribal peoples – as an antiquarian irrelevance, turning instead to the newly fashionable subdisciplines of urban anthropology and the anthropology of the state.

These expectations and trends have been confounded towards the end of the century by the persistence or creative revival of ethnic minority identities in virtually all countries of the world, and by increasing academic and popular perception of violent inter-community conflicts as ethnic in nature. Sociologists, political scientists, historians, geographers and others have shown renewed interest in the study of ethnic and tribal minorities of the ‘Fourth World’ – no longer the sole preserve of anthropologists. There has been a particular convergence between anthropologists and historians; the former ‘do history’, adding depth to their accounts of social and cultural change by scouring archives and chronicles, while the latter, not content with the often meagre ‘facts’ about tribal peoples to be established from such sources, enrich their interpretations with ethnographic, theoretical and comparative insights from anthropology.