TRIBE AND STATE IN ASIA THROUGH TWENTY-FIVE CENTURIES | By Sumit Guha

The “Asia Shorts” volume, Tribe and State in Asia through Twenty-five Centuries, admirably fulfils the purpose for which the series was established. Sumit Guha’s take on tribes is panoramic, covering the vast expanse of Asia, and traversing 25 centuries. Yet it is remarkably concise, marshalling just the right amount of evidence needed to sustain the theoretical argument. Guha’s erudition is stunning.

Guha’s central argument is that the label “tribe” has a history rather than denoting some fixed and anachronistic condition—a history that is embedded in the ebbs and flows of empires, and a history that is embedded in a changing landscape—as various groups have sought to occupy different ecological and political niches in response to pressures from more dominant groups and expanding states. Guha argues that the tribe was an unstable political formation, which appeared and disappeared in response to state weakness, or at the margins of expanding empires; the tribe could vary from a small scattered unit to a complex confederation. What distinguished these groupings from the settled states with which they interacted was their somewhat acephalous character and opposition to centralized hierarchies. As he puts it, tribes should be seen as “forms of weakly centralized (or widely diffused) power” (46).

In many ways, Guha’s argument draws on that of Morton Fried (cited), as well as anthropologists writing within a political economy framework like Eric Wolf (not cited). Morton Fried, writing in 1975, argued that there was no coherent content to the notion of tribes as pristine formations, and proposed instead that tribes should be seen as secondary tribes arising out of the contact (usually exploitative and colonizing) between pre-existing states and non-state groups, which creates an ideology of tribalism. Guha’s argument is a variation on Fried’s notion of “secondary tribalism” as a political move on the parts of the people affected to retain self-identity and gain resources, etc. as well as Barth’s notion of ethnicity which comes into action as a tool towards boundary maintenance. There is also a political economy tradition in anthropology which locates the categorization of tribes and their differentiation from other populations in changing occupational structures as a result of differential articulations into the world system. While Guha does not go down the world systems route, he does looks at tribes in terms of the niches they occupy in a changing political ecology. However, Guha brings in important new dimensions due to the chronological and territorial sweep of his argument.

The first chapter on Asian ideas of “Tribe” is a significant corrective to an overly Western dominated view. While there has been considerable work on the categories created by colonial administrations which needed to classify their various subject populations, Guha shows the salience of Asian categories of analysis, including that of many communities now characterized as tribes, for whom autonomy was a defining and positive value.

Chapter 2 looks at competing French and British ideas of tribes, the late appearance of the concept, and the manner in which imperial governance cast an epistemic shadow across their colonies. While continuing to refer to populations not fully within the core of colonial rule, the term also acquired a psychological connotation. As Guha, succinctly and sarcastically puts it: tribal psychology accommodated “the militant, meek and merely criminal’ (42).

Chapter 3 is an illustration of James Scott’s concept of Zomia, in which recalcitrant or refugee populations move beyond the control of state surveillance and modify their environments; centralizing and expanding states in turn undertake vast projects to control or exclude so-called ungovernable peoples. The emphasis in this chapter is on pastoralists and nomads, and to a lesser extent foragers, yet does not explain how some communities like the tribes of India who were settled cultivators fall within that label. What this chapter does brilliantly, though, is look at the formation of the Ottoman Empire. Guha manages within a few pages to capture what took the makers of the popular television serial Dirilis: Ertugrul several seasons to cover.

Chapter 4 illustrates the argument of the previous chapters with specific case studies drawn across Asia, including China, Mongolia, Russia, Myanmar, Turkey, Iran, and India (to use the modern country names). This chapter is extremely illuminating, albeit a bit repetitive, since some of the examples given have been used in earlier chapters.

What this otherwise brilliant monograph does not explain, however, is the genuine commonality in key features across communities who are now classified as Indigenous peoples. While some tribes have converted into empires and vice versa through history, and some communities cynically apply for the label in order to get associated benefits, there is also something stark about the way that many tribes/Indigenous people today face resource expropriation, cultural imperialism, and militarization. How does one explain the underlying core of sacred connections to the land, among other aspects, that the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People 2007, seek to capture? This too is located in history, perhaps not just one of state formation over centuries, but also a more recent one of capitalism as it was spread by colonialism across the globe, and resisted.                                                                                

Nandini Sundar

Delhi University, New Delhi