The process or result of breaking down tribal structures, identities, or ways of life, especially in colonial or modernization contexts.
From de- (reversal) + tribalization (noun from tribalize). A 20th-century term that emerged in anthropology and colonial studies to describe the displacement of indigenous tribal systems.
Detribalization became an academic term to describe what colonialism did to indigenous peoples—the forced breaking apart of tribal communities—revealing how language can encode historical injustices in neutral-sounding scholarly vocabulary.
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