ethnic identity, history, and “tribe” in the Middle Zambezi Valley1

In rural Africa, as in American cities, numerous competing ethnic identities may be found sheltered together under the dominant structural umbrella provided by political hierarchy and centralization; individual ethnic factions may play important but, in most cases, secondary roles in the over‐all life of the polity. In non‐centralized African polities a common sense of overriding ethnic identity may assume the dominant structural role in place of permanent political centrality, symbolizing the people's collective world view, sense of relevant history, and relations with the world around them. As all these factors are likely to change through time, the collective identity holding sway in stateless areas is likely to be as evanescent, subject to reinterpretation, and as indeterminant around the edges as the loosely organized, weakly bounded sociopolitical (or tribal) field it represents. A diachronic approach, illustrated here, enables us to make these general suggestions about the role and nature of ethnic identity or tribal label in stateless societies. The local view of the past is obviously an essential cultural matrix we need to appreciate in order to enrich our understanding of the ethnographic situation.