Making “Tribes” across the Indian Ocean and Beyond

Abstract Groups labeled “tribes” are at the core of anthropology's rethinking of its older ethnological avatars. This article examines the complex and evolving notion of “tribe,” uncovering successive layers of meaning and politics that have accreted over centuries. It traces an intellectual genealogy of the term, increasingly in vogue in Euro-American debates over the future of liberal democratic societies. The article locates the epicenter of tribalism in the Indian Ocean, where it has coexisted with a “thin liberalism” over the past two centuries, and where invocations of timeless “tribes” conceal all-too-modern social structures. While colonial anthropologists and administrators infused new meaning into preexisting ideas, colonial subjects were not passive victims but active partners in constructing and governing “tribes” in colonial and postcolonial territories. A comparative and historical analysis across the Old World of Afro-Eurasia thus highlights the significance of “distributed sovereignty” in shaping both continuities and changes into the present. Understanding the myriad pasts of “tribes” and the historical texture of ethnopolitics in the East and West is also important for thinking reflexively about our own roles as producers of social-scientific knowledge. Not only might we recognize trends and tropes of (re)making tribes, but we may also unshackle ourselves from the burdens imposed on us by shared, unacknowledged imperial pasts.