110 Part II: Outsiders
attempt to define and describe a particular kind of social formation, the tribe.
What he meant by that was that the tribe is a simpler system than the state,
which has centralized political control and a presumed monopoly on the use of
force, yet the tribe is more complex than simple hunter-gatherer bands. The
World Bank identified the following set of characteristics of tribal societies:- geographically isolated or semi-isolated;
- unacculturated or only party acculturated into the societal norms of
the dominant society; - nonmonetized, or only partly monetized, production largely for subsis-
tence, and independent of the national economic system; - ethnically distinct from the national society;
- nonliterate and without a written language;
- linguistically distinct from the wider society;
- identifying closely with one particular territory;
- having an economic lifestyle largely dependent on the specific natural
environment; - possessing indigenous political leadership, but little or no national rep-
resentation, and few, if any, political rights as individuals or collectively,
partly because they do not participate in the political process; and - having loose tenure over their traditional lands, which for the most part
is not accepted by the dominant society nor accommodated by its
courts, and having weak enforcement capabilities against encroachers,
even when tribal areas have been delineated. (World Bank Operational
Manual Statement, OMS 2.34, cited in Davis 1993; Kingsbury 1995)
Many of these groups are still trying to keep their distance from the state,
while the state attempts to create a new national identity that everyone accepts,
trying to suppress consciousness of ethnic difference. The nation-state seeks a
patriotic, nationalist buy-in to identities like “Indian,” “Chinese,” “Singaporean,”
“Indonesian” while having to monitor and placate so-called primordial identities
like Han, Tibetan, Hmong, Iban, Dayak, and Chin. Special privileges benefit
some identities over others; for example, Muslim Malays and other bumiputera
(“sons of the soil”) in Malaysia are privileged over ethnic Chinese and Indians.
Other nations, intent on clarifying once and for all exactly who is from
what tribe or ethnic group in an effort to rationalize government and to admin-
ister “civilizing” or “uplifting” programs, have overclarified to the point of cre-
ating identities that never exactly existed before. China, in a concerted effort of
social scientific bureaucratic research, has determined there are exactly 56 eth-
nic groups (minzu), no more and no less, including the Han, who are 91.5 per-
cent of the population, or 1.16 billion people. Different rules apply to these
minority minzu than to the Han; the one-child policy, for example, did not
apply to the Miao and they were granted a form of regional autonomy under
the 1984 Law on Regional Autonomy for Minority Nationalities.^1