ABSTRACT
When all is said and done a tribe is one of the quintessential forms of a community, a group of people held together by tangible expressions of recurrent rituals, shared language, patterned conduct, recognized norms, and intangible feelings of belonging, identity, memories and aspirations. However difficult to define, however much exploited by alien, imperialist masters or calculating chiefs and headmen for their own ends, however tenuous their existence in a changing world of ideological and technological innovation, tribes are a reality – no less than states or empires, no less than ethnic or religious communities, no less than voluntary associations or trans-national corporations, no less than urban municipalities or regional unions. They are worthy of note and they are worthy of study. Their customs may be analyzed within a legal framework, their specific structures as part of political science, and their overall community life through the use of standard sociological procedures; and in fact the accumulated data of ethnograhic researches by anthropologists is in urgent need of the broader analyses of these sister disciplines.
