askchapo

Depends on the anthropologist, era, and what culture/society they are talking about. Some societies don't have strictly distinct relationships between family/extendedfamily/tribe, and some have vert strict hierarchies within extended families that create the traditional idea of 'clans'.

Early structuralists were very keen on creating the distinction between 'kin-groups and tribes', but it stopped being in vogue around the 1960's. Still important work, but not considered as 'essential to understanding the development of civilization from the Platonic model'.

The issue is that it can get messy pretty quickly, because the whole idea of strictly genetic family relations comes mostly out of herding cultures, whereas other cultures, especially hunter-gatherers, had traditions like, "When you are with us, your name is Jon, who was my grandfather, which means you are my grandfather and that you have the obligation/privilege to take care of my family if something happens to me". Which means that when the anthropologist comes around you call that dude "Jon, my grandfather" even though he is clearly the same age or even younger than you, and maybe married/sleeping with your daughter and the anthropologist has to care enough to figure out what is actually going on.

Check out "War in the Tribal Zone". It's a collection of papers from the 90s that partially address this question. The central thesis that ties them together is that the "tribe" is an organizational structure that people who don't have much formal hierarchy tend to adopt when confronted with organized imperialistic states. For instance, if the state wants to trade, the state tends to expect one representative who speaks for many people. This position might not exist in a society, but often they'll create that position, or someone will opportunistically claim it, to trade in desirable goods.

In another case a society might have to resist and imperial power militarily and find it necessary to have more structured military, political, and logistical organizations in order to conduct war and diplomacy.

In this framework a tribe is an organizational system that arises in societies that have little formal hierarchy, government, or differentied social and political roles in order to better interact with highly structured and hierarchical states on their borders.

I thought clan implied genetic/familial relation whereas tribe implied purely social relation but that's just me, who is not an anthropologist.

Now, an anthropologist is likely to dedicate some paragraphs of his work to just talk about the history of the terms and how they are applied and then choose, either arbitrarily or in accordance to what their teachers do, what meaning they want to ascribe to it. Which means it, funnily enough, kinda depends on where you're from.

Some traditions/places will claim that both clans (families) and tribes are tied to a common ancestry (which is either real or invented). The difference there being a matter of clans being sub divisions of tribes.

Other places will claim tribes as a cultural subgroup, somewhat similar to the older european notions of 'nation', while clan is what's driven by common ancestry.

If this sound arbitrary it is because it is. These words - tribe, clan, ethnicity, nation, etc - are arbitrarily translated between languages and cultures. Tribal belonging for the native tribes in the United States is a concept of their own, which exists for their own needs. Tribal belonging for an arab levantine in a modern nation state is, likewise, different from tribal belonging in the valleys of Afghanistan. Notions of cultural ties, commonalities and ancestry are essentially in a spectrum and they affect which word is used. And then there's what we used to have in industrial and post industrial societies, 'cultural tribes' forming around aesthetics and fandoms.