Tribal societies emerged as humans transitioned from small band societies to larger groups organized around extended kinship networks and common descent. Property ownership and agriculture allowed for this growth. Tribal societies were segmented but not centralized, with social organization based on lineages and clans. Ancestor worship reinforced tribal structures by creating religious obligations to care for deceased family. Warfare between tribes was common, with chiefs mobilizing warriors but having limited authority. Justice was decentralized and dispute resolution relied on kinship obligations rather than formal legal systems. Private property originated in kin groups rather than individuals.

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 the 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

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.