Detribalization is the process by which persons who belong to a particular indigenous ethnic identity or community are detached from that identity or community through the deliberate efforts of colonizers and/or the larger effects of colonialism.
"Aldea des Tapuyos" or "Village of Tapuyos" ca. 1824. An image depicting a village of Indigenous people in Brazil referred to as "tapuyos," who have been described as a detribalized population.
Undated anonymous mural located in South Africa House, London, portraying the Nama presenting green copper-bearing rocks to the Dutch East India Company at the Cape, which initiated an expedition to extract the ore by the Dutch in 1685.
Zwelihle Township, in Hermanus, South Africa. ca. 2008
"Caboclo" by Jean-Baptiste Debret ca. 1834. "Caboclo" is a derogatory term[citation needed] meant to denote "civilized Indians" — a generic name that was given to detribalized baptized Indigenous people. It has also been used to mean "half-breed" or "of mixed blood."
Colonialism is the pursuing, establishing and maintaining of control and exploitation of people and of resources by a foreign group of people. Implemented through the establishment of coloniality and possibly colonies, this colonization keeps colonized territory and people socio-economically othered and subaltern to colonizers and their metropole. While frequently advanced as an imperialist regime, colonialism can also take the form of settler colonialism, whereby colonial settlers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace an existing society with that of the colonizers, possibly towards a genocide of native populations.
A factory entrepôt, a basic example of colonialism illustrating its different elements, hierarchies and impact on the land and people (the Dutch V.O.C. factory in Hugli-Chuchura, Bengal, in 1665)
The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, painted by Spiridione Roma for the boardroom of the British East India Company
Dutch family in Java, 1927
Harbour Street, Kingston, Jamaica, c. 1820