Detribalization

Detribalization is the process by which persons who belong to a particular indigenous ethnic identity or community are detached from that identity or community through the deliberate efforts of colonizers and/or the larger effects of colonialism.
Detribalization was systematically executed by detaching members from communities outside the colony so that they could be "modernized", Westernized, and, in most circumstances, Christianized for the prosperity of the colonial state. Historical accounts illustrate several trends in detribalization, with the most prevalent being the role that Western colonial capitalists played in exploiting Indigenous people's labor, resources, and knowledge, the role that Christian missionaries and the colonial Christian mission system played in compelling Christian membership in place of Indigenous cultural and religious practices, instances of which were recorded in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and the systemic conditioning of Indigenous peoples to internalize their own purported inferiority through direct and indirect methods.
In the colonial worldview, "civilization" was exhibited through the development of permanent settlements, infrastructure, lines of communication, churches, and a built environment based on the extraction of natural resources. Detribalization was usually explained as an effort to raise people up from what colonizers perceived as inferior and "uncivilized" ways of living and enacted by detaching Indigenous persons from their traditional territories, cultural practices, and communal identities. This often resulted in a marginal position within colonial society and exploitation within capitalist industry.
De-Indianization has been used in scholarship as a variant of detribalization, particularly on work in the United States and Latin American contexts. The term detribalization is similarly used to refer to this process of colonial transformation on subsets of the historical and contemporary Indigenous population of the Americas. De-Indianization has been defined by anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla as a process which occurs "in the realm of ideology" or identity, and is fulfilled when "the pressures of the dominant society succeed in breaking the ethnic identity of the Indian community," even if "the lifeway may continue much as before." De-Indigenization or deindigenization have also been used as variants of detribalization in academic scholarship. For example, academic Patrisia Gonzales has argued how mestizaje operated as the "master narrative" constructed by colonizers "to de-Indigenize peoples" throughout Latin America.
While, according to James F. Eder, initial colonial detribalization most often occurred as a result of "land expropriation, habitat destruction, epidemic disease, or even genocide," contemporary cases may not involve such apparent or "readily identified external factors." In a postcolonial framework, "less visible forces associated with political economies of modern nation-states – market incentives, cultural pressures, new religious ideologies – permeate the fabric and ethos of tribal societies and motivate their members to think and behave in new ways."

Usage of term

Detribalize has been defined by Merriam-Webster as "to cause losing tribal identity," by Dictionary.com as "to cause losing tribal allegiances and customs, chiefly through contact with another culture," and by the Cambridge Dictionary as "to make members of a tribe stop following their traditional customs or social structure." Detribalization incorporates the word tribal, which has been recognized as an offensive and pejorative term when used in certain contexts. For this reason, detribalization is sometimes used in quotations when referring to the process being described as a signal to the reader of the term's potentially offensive subtext.
From its early uses to modern scholarship, detribalization has almost exclusively been applied in particular geographic, and therefore racialized, contexts. As the proceeding section on regional detribalized histories demonstrates, while historical discussion and academic research on "detribalization" and "detribalized" peoples can be found in the African, Asian, Oceanic, North American, and South American contexts, especially when referring to Indigenous histories of each of these regions, to locate instances in which the term has been applied to Europeans or in the European context is exceptionally rare. One of the few instances was by contemporary scholar Ronen Zeidel in a study on Iraqi Gypsies in 2014, who stated "whereas the Gypsies entered a detribalized Europe with a social organization that was different, contributing to their estrangement, that was not the case in Iraq. Iraqi society has never been detribalized."

Misapplication

In the twentieth century, criticisms regarding the usage of detribalization emerged among scholars, particularly in the African context, who recognized its misapplication as a consequence of racism. South African anthropologist Meyer Fortes noted how the term was commonly used in the European sociological context as a "synonym for such words as 'pathological', 'disintegrated', 'demoralized', in a pejorative or deprecatory sense." Isaac Schapera recognized that the term was being misapplied by Europeans who assumed that urbanization in colonial society implied detribalization: "it is not correct to assume that all people who go to the Union from Bechuanaland tend to become 'detribalized'." H. M. Robertson states that "the urban native is classed as 'detribalized,' but this is not necessarily the case." Ellen Hellmann similarly described in her sociological work "that 'the process of detribalization has been exaggerated' among the urban African population, although 'the average European would unhesitatingly classify these Natives as detribalized'." In his sociological study, William Watson concludes that while "under urban conditions, Africans rapidly assimilate European dress, material culture, and outward forms of behaviour, this assimilation does not necessarily imply detribalization. On the contrary, many attempts to organize African industrial workers on a common basis of economic interest have encountered great difficulties because of African tribal solidarity and intertribal hostilities."
In Africa's International Relations: The Diplomacy of Dependency and Change, Kenyan academic Ali A Mazrui provides a nuanced discussion of the misapplication of detribalization, recognizing how "there was often an assumption among analysts of the African colonial scene that nationalism made its recruits from the ranks of the detribalized." Since the leaders of anti-colonial movements were, in the majority of instances, "Westernized or semi-Westernized," they were classed as "detribalized" by European colonial authorities. However, Mazrui notes that this employment of detribalization failed to differentiate between "tribalism as a way of life and tribalism as loyalty to an ethnic group," noting that colonial analysts had only recognized instances of a "weakening of cultural affiliation, though not necessarily of ethnic loyalty." In other words, "a person could adopt an entirely Western way of life but still retain great love and loyalty to the ethnic group from which he sprang." As a result, Mazrui proposes the term detraditionalized, recognizing that "the erosion of tradition not necessarily mean the diminution of ethnicity."

Regional detribalized histories

In Africa

From 1884 to 1885, European powers, along with the United States, convened at the Berlin Conference in order to settle colonial disputes throughout the African continent and protect the economic interests of their colonial empires. The conference was the primary occasion for partitioning, what Europeans commonly referred to as, "the dark continent", and came about as a result of conflicting territorial claims. The various European colonial powers wish to avoid conflict in their "Scramble for Africa", and as such drew clear lines over the continent. In 1898, Polish-British author Joseph Conrad remarked in Heart of Darkness on how Europeans used color swatches to denote their territorial claims over Africa, a common practice in the period:

There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done there, a deuce of a lot of blue , a little green , smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch , to show where the jolly pioneers drink the jolly lager beer. However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow . Dead in the center.

An empire had to demonstrate effective occupation of the land they were claiming in order to justify their claims to it. Under these guidelines, scholar Kitty Millet has noted, that effective "'connoted farms, gardens, roads, railways, even postal service." The only entities which could claim ownership "over these diverse African spaces... had to be one of the powers at the conference. Local or Indigenous groups were neither imaginable as political powers nor visible as peers or subjects of European sovereigns." Not only were Indigenous peoples not physically represented at the Berlin Conference, they were also absent "to the European powers' conceptualization of territory. They were not 'on the map'." Rather, Indigenous peoples were perceived by Europeans as property of the land living in an inferior state of nature. Prior to their consciousness of their own "whiteness," Millet notes that Europeans were first "conscious of the superiority of their developmental 'progress'... 'Savages' had temporary huts; they roamed the countryside. They were incapable of using nature appropriately. The colour of their skins condemned them."
Because Indigenous nations were deemed to be "uncivilized," European powers declared the territorial sovereignty of Africa as openly available, which initiated the Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. With the continent of Africa conceptualized as effectively "ownerless" territory, Europeans positioned themselves as its redeemers and rightful colonial rulers. In the European colonial mindset, Africans were inferior and incapable of being "civilized" because they had failed to properly manage or exploit the natural resources available to them. As a result, they were deemed to be obstacles to capitalist investment, extraction, and production of natural resources in the construction of a new colonial empire and built environment. The immense diversity of the indigenous peoples of Africa was flattened by this colonial perception, which labeled them instead as an "unrepresentable nomadic horde of apprehensions that ran across European territories."
European colonial authorities, who policed and controlled the majority of territory in Africa by the early twentieth century, were notably ambivalent towards "modernizing" African people. Donald Cameron, the governor of the colony of Tanganyika as well as, later, of Nigeria, said in 1925: "It is our duty to do everything in our power to develop the native on lines which will not Westernize him and turn him into a bad imitation of a European." Instead, Cameron argued that "the task of 'native administration' was to make him into a 'good African.'" While the French openly professed that their involvement in Africa was a "civilizing mission," scholar Peter A. Blitstein notes that in practice they rejected African "assimilation into French culture," excluded them "from French citizenship," and emphasized "how different Africans were from French, and how important it was to keep the two races separate." Mahmood Mamdani has contended that rather than a "civilizing mission," as was often claimed by European powers to be the rationale for colonization, colonial policy instead sought to "'stabilize racial domination by 'ground it in a politically enforced system of ethnic pluralism.'"
In the twentieth century, colonial authorities in Africa intentionally and actively worked to prevent the emergence of nationalist and working-class movements which could ultimately threaten their authority and colonial rule. They sought to prevent "detribalization," which Europeans interpreted as occurring through the urbanization, liberal education, and proletarianization of African people, regardless of whether they were detached from their ethnic identity or community or not. European powers adopted a policy of indirect rule, which relied on the use of "traditional" African leadership to maintain order, which was also understood by Europeans, according to historian Leroy Vail, to be "markedly less expensive than the employment of expensive European officials," and was rooted in the belief that "Africans were naturally 'tribal' people." As a result, "detribalization was the ghost which haunted the system" of indirect rule by threatening to undermine colonial capitalist hegemony in Africa. European perspectives of Africans were thoroughly infused with racism, which, according to John E. Flint, "served to justify European power over the 'native' and to keep western-educated Africans from contaminating the rest". Additionally, Alice Conklin has found that, in the post-World War I period, some officials in French West Africa may have "discovered in 'primitive' Africa an idealized premodern and patriarchal world reminiscent of the one they had lost at Verdun", a paternalistic position which nonetheless may have served as a rationale for fears over detribalization and the "consequences of modernity."
Under indirect rule, universal primary and secondary education were not adopted in European colonies in Africa in order to avoid creating a class of "unemployable and politically dangerous, 'pseudo-Europeanized' natives." A curriculum that instead directed Africans towards fulfilling subservient roles which Europeans perceived them as "destined" to play, commonly as members of the colonial peasantry and exploited laborers, was alternatively adopted. European fears over detribalization were also demonstrated via their attitudes toward the notion of African wage labor and proletarianization. For this reason, African wage labor was only determined necessary when it aided the advancement or progress of the colonial capitalist state, such as via the African colonial mining industry. According to Peter A. Blitstein, not a single European colonial power were "able to see wage workers as anything but 'detribalized' and, therefore, dangerous." As a result, the ideal model for African colonial society was one in which small-scale producers could be provided with temporary migrant labor as needed, since "to recognize Africans as workers would ultimately equate them to Europeans, and, perhaps, require the kinds of welfare-state provisions that European workers were beginning to enjoy – trade union membership, insurance, a family wage."
During World War II, a study authored by four colonial functionaries and commissioned by the Vichy French government's ministry of the colonies in 1944 entitled "Condition of the detribalized natives" called for "the systematic and immediate expulsion of any native illegally entering metropolitan France." Historian Eric T. Jennings has commented how this policy was "certainly not new" and had been informed by "a host of reductionist thinkers from Gustave Le Bon to Edouard Drumont or Alexis Carrel", while also eerily foreshadowing arguments to be used by the modern French far right. Jean Paillard, an influential colonial theorist in Vichy France, feared "native domination" in which "the colonizers would eventually come under the domination of the colonized." Similarly, the authors of the study maintained that "the detribalized native becomes an immoral creature as soon as he reaches the city," reiterating European colonial viewpoints in the twentieth century by emphasizing that "detribalization" must be avoided above all measures. However, when detribalization becomes "unavoidable", it must "be accompanied by a strict regimen" of control. According to the study, when "left to their own devices," the "detribalized" persons become drunken failures in European society due to their innate inferiority. Jennings argues that this study attempted to invent a "retribalization" effort for the "detribalized" person and was hinged upon the larger "apocalyptic fears of a world dominated by unruly and debauched 'natives,' uprooted from their 'natural environments.'" This study reflected much of the European theoretical perception of detribalized peoples of the period, as further exemplified in Maurice Barrès's Uprooted.
Following the end of the Second World War, colonial policy began to shift from preventing "detribalization" to more widely promoting devices for economic and cultural development in African colonial societies. In the case of European colonial governments, they began to promote self-government as a means of obtaining independence. European colonial empires in Africa increasingly opted for nationalization rather than previous policies of indirect rule and forced contracted or temporary labor. However, according to historian Peter A. Blitstein, the ultimate objectives of the European colonial powers for Westernizing colonized and "detribalized" Africans remained unclear by the mid-twentieth century, as colonizers struggled to articulate how Africans could be brought into congruence with their visions of "modernity."
Throughout post-independence Africa, two different types of African states emerged, according to scholar Mahmood Mamdani, which he terms as "the conservative and the radical" African states. While the conservative African state adopted a decentralized form of despotic authority that "tended to bridge the urban-rural divide through a clientelism whose effect was to exacerbate ethnic divisions," the radical African state adopted a centralized form of despotic authority that contributed to detribalization by tightening control over local authorities. Mamdani theorizes that "if the two-pronged division that the colonial state enforced on the colonized – between town and country, and between ethnicities – was its dual legacy at independence, each of the two versions of the postcolonial state tended to soften one part of the legacy while exacerbating the other."