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Tribe

David Sneath · 2023

About this source

The 2023 Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology facsimile of Sneath’s 2016 Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology entry.

CLAIM CONNECTIONS / 3

Where this source is used

  • Kahnawà:ke’s law-making process is evidence about named institutions under specific colonial, legal, and community conditions; it does not establish a universal tribal, clan, council, confederacy, or stateless form of government.

    • supports · abstract; ‘Problems with tribe’, paragraphs 1–6

  • Sneath traces the modern analytical use of tribe to colonial classification and evolutionary accounts that treated non-European societies as earlier stages of political development.

    • supports · ‘Origins’, paragraphs 1–8; ‘Problems with tribe’, paragraphs 2–6

  • Sneath reports that social and cultural anthropologists have largely abandoned tribe as a general sociological category because it does not reliably identify a society’s political organization or complexity.

    • supports · abstract; ‘Tribe and social structure’; ‘Problems with tribe’, paragraphs 1–6