For starters, I know the categories I mention are at least in part modern day inventions, but bear with me. What I want to know it's if, say, a person living on a ''tribe'', would know they were living in a tribe ? Would a person living in a state, know thwy were living in a state ? If these two hypothetical persons interacted or exchanged places, would they know or notice that there is something fundamentally different between their polities ?
Hi There,
This is a very broad - but IMHO - good question. And of course that means there is not good answer to it.
Certain peoples certainly did understand that there were differences between their group's political structure(s) and those of others. The ancient Greeks are a great example of this. Within their philosophical zeitgeist, there were at least three basic types of political structures, each with two sub-types (one "good," one "bad"): monarchy/tyranny; aristocracy/oligarchy; polity/democracy. (Aristotle Politics 3.7) Although there is too much to go into here, even a cursory reading of Aristotle makes it seem as though Greeks (at least the elite) were acutely aware of the differences in political structure between one another's polities. And - from a rather blunt a priori approach - we should expect this. Humans are an observant species, so if one of us finds ourself living in a society radically different from that in which we were raised it is probable that we are aware of these differences.
However, I think your question is more rooted in the 19th-20th century obsession of anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists to describe certain pre-modern societies as "tribes," "early states, "states," etc. This is a much, much different question and one to which the answer is a very certain "no." The concepts and differences between them are products of a very specific strand of Western intellectual discourse that can be illustrated by certain well-known works.
Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation" (1918) provides a good introduction to the 19th century and early 20th century perspectives on "the state" (i.e. a political entity which has the exclusive right to use violence within its circumscribed territory). Robert Carneiro's "A theory of the Origin of the State" provides a mid-century look at what states are and how they developed (it also helped to set the scene for the evolutionary paradigm in which states are the "logical" development of human society given certain circumstances). Further developments of formal "state theory" when looking at early societies can be found in Claessen and Skalnik's The Early State, a collected volume with essays looking at so-called early states throughout the world. These are just some of the important pieces that have contributed to the discourse to which I believe you're referring.
Within this discussion of ancient "states" came a dichotomy with tribes, and then an evolutionary conceptualization that argued human societies go through a series of predictable, scholarly-identified steps until they reach "full" statehood. This led to the creation of some very interesting categories, such as the complex chiefdom. But, scholars - at least some - have come to realize that this formalistic construction is not very useful in understanding ancient societies. The reasons for this are myriad, though for me one of the most glaring problems is that there is no good definition of what a state is (for instance, see the criticism by Michael Mann already in 1984). If we - the modern scholarly community that created these categories - can't give a straightforward definition of "tribe" and "state," then we can't expect that peoples in the past would recognize them.
What does that mean for your question? It means that pre-modern people would not have known that they lived in a "tribe" while their neighbors lived in a "state."
More broadly, if you're interested in this aspect of ancient societies I would suggest thinking more in terms of social power networks than of formalistic constructs such as the "tribe" and the "state." A good criticism of the state as a construct can be found in chapter ten of Graeber and Wengrow's great - if not controversial - book, The Dawn of Everything. Here, they point out in more detail what I did above; the state has no real origin point. (This can be extrapolated to our other problematic modern constructs, as well.) I would also suggest reading volume one of Michael Mann's paradigmatic - if very underappreciated - magnum opus, The Sources of Social Power.
I think this gives a fairly broad response to your equally broad question, but I'm happy to write a follow-up if there is specific interest in any of this.
- Josh