I think it’s a shame that these days for many people the primary connotation of the word “tribe” is connected to culture wars. In fact, our decision to use this term was in part motivated by wanting to re-appropriate the term to something less politically loaded.
As you can read in our post (see “What is a tribe?”), we mean something particular. As any collective of human beings, it can in principle be subject to excessive in-group/out-group dynamics but that’s by far not the only, nor the most interesting part of it.
I did actually read that. I admit that I didn’t read all the detailed advice about how to make one work, since I have no intention of doing so… but I did read the definition and the introductory part.
It wouldn’t have mattered what word you’d used. Your groups are actually smaller than most things called tribes anyway. I am reacting to the substance.
I doubt that humans are , in a practical way, capable of tightening up their in-groups like that without at the same time increasing hostility to out-groups (or at least people who are out-of-the-group). Not in principle, but in practice.
If nothing else, you have to start by giving some kind of preference to members of the tribe. And, since it’s about mutual aid with certain costs, you have to enforce its boundaries. And set up norms about what you can and can’t do and still be “in” (which will not all be formally considered, will not all be under organized control, and yet will involve enough people that they can’t easily be changed, challenged, or made too complicated).
I suspect that the specific scale of “up to the limit of the number of people who can all personally know each other” is a particularly dangerous scale. For one thing, that means that at the edges of the group, you will often know, and have some special duty toward, the person or people on one side of some brewing conflict… but you will NOT know or feel any special duty toward the person or people on the other side. For another, it’s probably the scale at which people most often had occasion to attack each other in the “evolutionary environment”. For a third, it means you’re always at the risk of growing to the point of having to split the group, with no obvious way to handle that without generating acrimony. You may address that last one in your detailed material; I don’t know.
It’s true, though, that the word “tribe” is kind of attached to that kind of concern. And there must be a reason why the word got a bad name, as well as a reason you feel connected enough to the word to want to reclaim it.
I think it’s a shame that these days for many people the primary connotation of the word “tribe” is connected to culture wars. In fact, our decision to use this term was in part motivated by wanting to re-appropriate the term to something less politically loaded.
As you can read in our post (see “What is a tribe?”), we mean something particular. As any collective of human beings, it can in principle be subject to excessive in-group/out-group dynamics but that’s by far not the only, nor the most interesting part of it.
I did actually read that. I admit that I didn’t read all the detailed advice about how to make one work, since I have no intention of doing so… but I did read the definition and the introductory part.
It wouldn’t have mattered what word you’d used. Your groups are actually smaller than most things called tribes anyway. I am reacting to the substance.
I doubt that humans are , in a practical way, capable of tightening up their in-groups like that without at the same time increasing hostility to out-groups (or at least people who are out-of-the-group). Not in principle, but in practice.
If nothing else, you have to start by giving some kind of preference to members of the tribe. And, since it’s about mutual aid with certain costs, you have to enforce its boundaries. And set up norms about what you can and can’t do and still be “in” (which will not all be formally considered, will not all be under organized control, and yet will involve enough people that they can’t easily be changed, challenged, or made too complicated).
I suspect that the specific scale of “up to the limit of the number of people who can all personally know each other” is a particularly dangerous scale. For one thing, that means that at the edges of the group, you will often know, and have some special duty toward, the person or people on one side of some brewing conflict… but you will NOT know or feel any special duty toward the person or people on the other side. For another, it’s probably the scale at which people most often had occasion to attack each other in the “evolutionary environment”. For a third, it means you’re always at the risk of growing to the point of having to split the group, with no obvious way to handle that without generating acrimony. You may address that last one in your detailed material; I don’t know.
It’s true, though, that the word “tribe” is kind of attached to that kind of concern. And there must be a reason why the word got a bad name, as well as a reason you feel connected enough to the word to want to reclaim it.