2-TRIBAL SOCIETIES.pptx

Tribal societies explain about the social development

1. Second Evolutionary Stage: TRIBAL SOCIETIES, PROPERTY, war and JUSTICE Dr. Mehmood Hussain Assistant professor of ir AJKU, Muzaffarabad

2. Introduction In pre-modern times, humans were living in small band societies, which later transformed into tribes. In another words, band level society was a social group of peoples composed of blood relatives residing in a close affinity and was segregated from others. Band level societies were highly egalitarian, and leadership was invested in individuals based on qualities like strength, intelligence, and trustworthiness , and there was no coercion for submission to leader, and leaderships tends to migrate from one individual to another. Yet, the invention of agriculture and subsequent property ownership not only transformed the human thinking, meanwhile it altered the social organization. A wave of transformation and modernity was seen in human society, when they started to settle along the areas rich for agriculture, which gave birth to tribalism.

3. A tribe is a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader . Human beings were now in contact with one another on a much broader scale, and this required a very different form of social organization . The terms "tribes:· "clans:· " kindreds ;· and "lineages" are all used to describe the next stage of social organization above the band . Their common characteristic is that they are first, segmentary, and second, based on a principle of common descent. The sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term "segmentary" to refer to societies based on the replication of identical small-scale social units, much like the segments in an earthworm. Such a society could grow by adding segments, but it had no overall centralized political structure, and was not subject to a modern division of labor and what he characterized as " organic" solidarity . Mostly segmentary societies are self sufficient in food, clothing, and defense itself.

4. Role of Religion In Tribal Society The evolution of social organization took hold across tribal societies was due to religious belief, that is the worship of dead ancestors. One of the most famous descriptions of ancestor worship was provided by the nineteenth century French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges . Numa Denis pointed out that Romans and Greeks believe that the souls of the dead did not move into a celestial realm but continued to reside underneath the ground where they were buried, for this reason they buried the dead man with objects he had needed; like clothing, utensils, and arms. The Indo-Aryans , like the Greeks and Romans, maintained a sacred fire in the household that represented the family and was never supposed to be extinguished unless the family line itself was extinguished. Religion and kinship are closely connected in tribal societies. Ancestor worship is particularistic: there are no gods worshipped by the whole community . You have duties only to your ancestors, not those of your neighbors or your chief . Each individual has a strong interest in having male descendants, since it is only who will be able to look after one's soul after one's death. As a result, there is a strong imperative to marry and have male children

5. Tribal societies are far more powerful militarily than band-level ones, since they can mobilize hundreds or thousands of kinsmen on a moment's notice. Was tribal organization a consequence of previously formulated religious beliefs, or were the religious beliefs somehow added later to reinforce a preexisting form of social organization ? Marx was famous for believing that religion was the "opiate of the masses:· a fairy tale invented by elites to solidify their class privileges . It is important to note, that tribal societies are not "natural" or default forms of social organization to which all societies revert if higher-level organization breaks down. They were preceded by family- or band-level forms of organization, and flourished only under specific environmental conditions .

6. Tribal societies, property, social injustice, war, and justice One of the biggest issues separating Right and Left since the French Revolution has been that of private property. Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality traced the origins of injustice to the first man who fenced off land and declared it his own. Karl Marx set a political agenda of abolishing private property; one of the first things that all Communist regimes inspired by him did was to nationalize the "means of production," not least land . By contrast, the American Founding Father James Madison asserted in Federalist No. 10 that one of the most important functions of governments was to protect individuals' unequal ability to acquire property . Modern neoclassical economists have seen strong private property rights as the source of long-term economic growth ; in the words of Douglass North , "Growth will simply not occur unless the existing economic organization is efficient;' which "entails the establishment of institutional arrangements and property rights.

7. A good deal of theorizing about the importance of private property rights concerns what is called the tragedy of the commons. Grazing fields in traditional English villages were collectively owned by the village's inhabitants; since no one could be excluded from access to these fields, whose resources were depletable, they were overused and made worthless. The solution to the risk of depletion was to turn the commons into private property , whose owners would then have a strong incentive to invest in its upkeep and exploit its resources on a long-term, sustainable basis . In many contemporary ahistorical discussions of property rights, one often gets the impression that in the absence of modern individual property rights , human beings always faced some version of the tragedy of the commons in which communal ownership undermined incentives to use property efficiently . The emergence of modern property rights was then postulated to be a matter of economic rationality, but t he way customary property rights yielded to modern ones was much more violent, and power and deceit played a large role.

8. Kinship and private property The earliest forms of private property were held not by individuals but by lineages or other kin groups, and much of their motivation was not simply economic but religious and social as well . Property needed to be private. these early forms of private property lacked a critical characteristic of what we regard today as modern property: rights were generally usufructuary (that is, they conveyed the right to use land but not to own it), making it impossible for individuals to sell or otherwise alienate it . The owner is not an individual landlord, but a community of living and dead kin . Property and kinship thus become intimately connected: property enables you to take care of not only preceding and succeeding generations of relatives, but of yourself as well through your ancestors and descendants, who can affect your well-being. In tribal societies, property was sometimes communally owned by the tribe, and property owners have certain social obligations towards their kin. Your strip of land lies next to your cousin's, and you cooperate at harvest time; it is unthinkable to sell your strip to a stranger. If you die without male heirs your land reverts to the kin group. Tribes often had the power to reassign property rights .

9. Law and justice in tribal system Tribal societies have weak centralized sources of authority-the Big Man or chief-and therefore much less ability than states to coerce individuals. They have no system of third-party enforcement of rules that we associate with a modem legal system. Justice in a tribal society is a bit like justice between states in contemporary international relations : it is a matter of self-help and negotiation between decentralized units that constitute effectively sovereign decision makers. Disputes are mediated by the leopard-skin chief, but he has no authority to enforce a judgment, any more than international mediators like the United Nations have the power to enforce judgments between modern states. And as in the case of international relations, power makes a difference; it is harder for a weak lineage to obtain redress from a strong one. To the extent justice is served, it is based on calculations of self-interest on the part of the disputing parties not to see a feud escalate and become more damaging .

10. Virtually all tribal societies have comparable institutions for seeking justice : obligations on kinsmen to seek revenge or restitution for wrongs committed ; a nonbinding system of arbitration for helping to settle disputes peacefully ; and a customary schedule of payments for wrongs committed. Third-party enforcement of judicial decisions had to await the emergence of states. But tribal societies did develop increasingly complex institutions for rendering judgments in civil and criminal disputes. Tribal law was usually not written; it nonetheless needed custodians for the sake of applying precedents and establishing wergelds . Popular assemblies originated in the need to adjudicate tribal disputes. The Iliad's account of the shield of Achilles describes a dispute over the blood price for a slain man, argued before a crowd in a marketplace, and a final verdict being read out by the tribe's elders . On a local level, the Salk Law was administered by a Teutonic institution known as the Court of the Hundred , consisting of assemblies of local villagers or moots. The Court of the Hundred met in the open air, and its judges were all local freemen living within the Hundred's jurisdiction. The president of the Hundred, the Thingman, was elected , and he presided over what was essentially a court of arbitration . Their great function was to give hot blood time to cool, to prevent men from redressing their own wrongs, and to take into their own hands and regulate the method of redress. The earliest penalty for disobedience to the Court was probably outlawry.

11. Warfare and military organization The development of settled agricultural societies meant that human groups were now living in much closer proximity. They could generate surpluses well above the minimum required for survival and thus had more real goods and chattels to protect or steal. Tribal societies were organized on a far larger scale than band-level ones and thus could overwhelm the latter based on sheer numbers . It is only with tribal societies, however, that we see the emergence of a separate caste of warriors, along with what became the most basic and enduring unit of political organization, a leader and his band of armed retainers. Such organizations became virtually universal in subsequent human history , and continue to exist today in the form of warlords and their followers, militias , drug cartels, and street gangs . Getting rich was obviously a motive for making war in tribal societies . Although warriors may be greedy for silver and gold, they also display courage in battle not so much for the sake of resources, but for honor.

12. A leader and his retinue in a tribal society are not the same as a general with his army in a state-level society, because the nature of leadership and authority is very different . Among the Nuer , the leopard-skin chief is primarily an arbitrator and assumes no power of command, nor is his authority hereditary . The same is true for the Big Man in contemporary Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands, who is traditionally chosen by his kinsmen as leader but who can by the same token lose his leadership position . Except few instances, cohesion of tribal societies had weakness and strength. If tribe is homogenous and closely settled, it is easy for tribal leader to mobilize the warriors to fight against enemy. But, if tribe is stretches on a large chunk of land, then it is hard for leader to mobilize a large number of young men to fight against invaders. In a nutshell, tribal societies have their weaknesses and strengths and paved the way for modern day nation state. Though, the present day state is more centralized and instutionalized, but it still has various forms of tribalism. In various parts of modern states, kinsmen are operating, staging violence and challenging the state.