Tribes as the Governance Model for Collective Property
Discussion
Daniel Bitton:
"A band is a group of people who travel around together – like a music band! Membership in a band is determined by who’s present when you’re counting. If you’re not present, then you’re not part of the band. Most, but not all hunter gatherers are organized into bands, and the membership of those bands is usually pretty fluid. People are coming and going all the time, visiting friends and relatives, getting away from their enemies or their spouses, leaving one band and joining another. And as a result bands are most often made up of largely unrelated people, which has interesting evolutionary implications which we’ll talk about another time.
A tribe on the other hand is an entirely different shebang. A tribe is a descent group. You’re born into a tribe. If you go off and live somewhere else, you’re still part of your tribe.
A larger tribe is usually made up of clans which are made up of lineages, which are made up of nuclear families, which is why in more recent times anthropologists will refer to tribal societies as segmented lineage societies – because each unit is made up of larger segements, and also because the word tribe has a bit of a confused definition because colonial governments used to invent “tribes” in order to make it easier to govern and those tribes didn’t really have any organic existence.
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Now the whole reason that a traditional, tribal system exists is because it’s a way of dealing with collective property. If your subsistence depends on a particular fishing territory or farming territory or a herd of animals, then a descent group like a clan or tribe is a way to have clear ownership rules, and to have a group that can collectively defend the territory.
So if you see a tribal system of organization you know that this society has collective property to manage, whether it’s a hunting territory like the Mikmaq, a farming territory like the Huron a fishing territory like the Tlingit, or a herd of animals like the Nuer.
An anthropologist not knowing the difference between a tribe and band is like an architect not knowing the difference between a house and an apartment building."
(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/10-1xcript/)