Sunday, June 16, 2013

Tribalism

I recently came across the word tribalism. That was not the first time I'd ever seen the word; but coming across it this time struck me and made me think.

I checked out the entry for tribalism on Wikipedia. The article is interesting but I don't think it treats the word in the sense in which I'd understand it.

The concept of tribalism explains and connects at least two things I have blogged about. First, the idea of "we vs. they," which has loomed large in my mind for a long time as I think it explains a lot of human behavior, especially all manner of conflict and less-than-noble human behavior.


But tribalism—and this I owe to the Wikipedia article—also sheds a lot of light on and even explains another phenomenon I have blogged about: that of the fan. By this I mean the way in which people identify with sports teams and even sometimes attack fans of an opposing team.

Some examples of how people like to proclaim their tribal identity: Where I live it's pretty common for people to proclaim an ethic identity (e.g., Irish flag decals on their cars, Polish flags in front of their  houses on Polish Constitution Day*, Puerto Rican flags on their cars on Puerto Rico Day; sports team banners on their cars or Chicago Cubs flags in front of their homes or even, in the case of my next-door neighbors, a Chicago White Sox banner in the window of their home).

Having given examples and thus a deictic definition, how should we understand more about the nature of tribalism? It has to do with identity and group membership. The tribe is a unit or level of organization of humans. At the lowest level there is the family (whether  you want to understand it in the modern sense, which is usually that of the "nuclear" family, or in a more traditional sense of the "extended family," which might include more than one generation, cousins, uncles and aunts, etc.).

The tribe might be the next level up. It evidently is not truly well defined. But it doesn't have to be. Suffice it that the tribe is whatever one identifies with, between the family and the nation. (Nations or countries can be artificial, to a greater or lesser degree. Some examples: In Africa, countries were carved out rather arbitrarily by the colonial powers and included diverse tribes within the borders of one country, often tribes which were hostile to one another, with the result that we saw, in Rwanda, genocidal conflict between Tutsi and Hutu. Or Yugoslavia, a country that had been held together by the force of the dictator Tito, and, once he was gone, fell apart. And what could be a more artificial country than America, which--unlike any other country--is constituted of so many different constituencies--so many different tribes--thrown together?)

The tribe can be a religious sect, as in Iraq or Northern Ireland--both countries which have seen a tragic amount of what now is so commonly termed "sectarian violence"; an ethnic group, as in Yugoslavia; a tribe qua tribe, as in Rwanda; or a sports team, as I have said. Sometimes it's your high school or your kids' high school. It's whatever group, above family, that is the primary source of people's identity and to which they feel loyalty. It's the "we," for many purposes, as opposed to some other tribe which is "they."

It's "we vs. they" in the realm of religion that leads to a  lot of intolerance, hatred, and even religious war. Here, it's the combination of tribal identity with the sense of the correctness and superiority of one's own belief, with there also being perhaps--and this seems to be the other side of the coin--a conviction regarding the error and even evil of those who believe differently, sometimes including the idea that it is right to wage war on those who believe differently.

And there is without a doubt a strong and ineluctable human impulse to categorize people as "we"—that is, belonging to our group—or "they"--of course all others. Jew and gentile, Mormon and gentile (odd how the meaning of gentile is relative to who is using the term). As someone who is trained in linguistics and anthropology, I have seen this pattern over and over again across the face of the earth: here is one group and, just beyond the hill or across the river, is another group—very often a kindred group, at least linguistically. So the two groups appear to be cousins. (A well-known example: Jews and Arabs.) And—ya know what?—they hate one another.
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*Note: If you display the flag of another country--and you are not an embassy of that country--the Flag Code, having the force of law, dictates that the non-American flag be displayed in subordinate position to the American flag.

Updated, June 23, 2013, July 11, 2013

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