Tribe

Three properties and each is structural rather than cultural. It is a first age nation, meaning one of the autonomous and complete societies of that age rather than a stage anything passes through. It is barely removed from a family structure, which places it at the small end of scale rather than at an early point in a sequence. And all relationships are direct, which is the substantial property, since directness rules out the intermediaries that interception depends on. Where every relationship is direct there are few interception points, and civilization in Marsh's definition is a vast network of them, so a tribe is close to the opposite of a civilization by construction rather than by being less developed than one. Little to no hierarchy or stratification follows from the same directness, since stratification is the creation of classes and formation of hierarchy based on roles, and roles are hard to install where everyone interacts with everyone. What the framework does not do is treat this as a destination. The fourth age of nations is proposed as more diverse, flexible and mutually supportive than the first tribal one, which explicitly rules out returning to it. Marsh's observation about strangers belongs here, since people with no recent negative experience causing xenophobia are usually excited to have company, and strangers bring the prospect of new food, ideas, stories, music and friends, so smallness in her account does not imply closure.

Tribe is a contested term in anthropology, with the band, tribe, chiefdom and state sequence from Elman Service widely criticized for implying inevitability and for the colonial history of the word, and many anthropologists now avoid it. Graeber and Wengrow argued that early societies were far more various and politically self-conscious than the sequence allows. In popular usage tribalism has become a term for group loyalty and polarization, which is a different sense entirely. Marsh's definition sidesteps the evolutionary sequence by keying to her own ages of nations, and the directness criterion gives it structural content the anthropological debate about the label lacks.