SUMMARY:

Sergei Abashin identifies two major incongruities in the argument of David Sneath. First, there is a problem with nondifferentiation between the criticism of the notion of “tribe” as a category of analysis adopted by social scientists, and as a category of practice employed by colonial administrators or nationalist elites. While the former criticism should aspire to a more nuanced and substantiated application of the term “tribe,” the latter focuses on political practices, regardless of the applicability of the concept in a particular historical setting. Using Kazakh history as an example, Abashin argues that Sneath too easily dismisses the analytical value of “tribe” in describing the social fabric of Kazakh society, while one-sidedly overestimating the role of the concept in Russian imperial policies toward the Kazakhs in the nineteenth century. The second aberration in Sneath’s article is the explicit equation of the social evolutionary theory with the hypothetical unified “Soviet anthropology/ethnography” and “western structural functionalism.” Together with the virtual (unjustified) identification of “tribe” with “ethnos,” these incongruities result in a vulnerability of Sneath’s argument and one-sidedness of his otherwise useful criticism.