Read Time: 3:02
I may be an example of a liberal arts degree gone useless, but my skin starts to itch whenever I hear people talk about “finding your tribe.” The saying has metastasized through American culture, having crept its way onto statement t-shirts, bumperstickers and throw pillows on the sofas of yoga moms everywhere.
I’d love to get an anthropologist’s take on a lot of modern things, but especially the fascination with “finding one’s tribe,” the purpose of which seems to be: to reinforce one’s sense of self in terms of ‘belonging,’ to codify success, and to surround oneself with like-minded people who help manifest emotional buoyancy and resilience.
I think about the way anthropologists used to talk about finding tribes when anthropology was a burgeoning field. As a study of human societies and cultures and their development, finding tribes literally meant that you had a new subject to study both in terms of physical evolution and cultural understanding.
Comparatively, “finding one’s tribe” nowadays doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the understanding of another, at all, and can appear solipsistic at worst and self-absorbed at best.
What’s more, the the complication of the older, more warring connotation of the word ‘tribe’ lodges itself in my head. Tribes are historically understood as groups of people bound together by politics, language and/or geography. I think of the likes of the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Our more modern understanding of tribes, say, at Burning Man or with self-proclaimed nationalists, are also understood as people bound together by politics, language and/or geography, though I would also include income or tax bracket as another basis of belonging.
Photo Blair Guild Washington Post
And I’m here to tell you: the conflation of the colloquial use of “finding one’s tribe” with the ancient understanding of an exclusive political or cultural group isn’t helpful. And people who believe that they they are forward-thinking or woke AF in “finding their tribe” seem to overlook that in doing so, they create inclusion for themselves by creating exclusion for others. If it’s not wholly antithetical to seek belonging by creating exclusion, it’s at least hypocritical.
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I check the dictionary to make sure I’m understanding the now-version of “tribalism” correctly.
Yep. Seems so.
I think we’ve got to get back to a time of editing what we say and how we say it—not for political correctness—but for accuracy. There’s no need for further advertisement or amplification of modes of thinking that divide us as a nation or human family. Our government is doing enough of that.
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It just so happens that this week’s wonderful Humans of New York is covering stories from survivors of the Rwandan genocide (1994). In this country, tribes are more than just the Red Lightning Camp who has the water.
The Rwandan genocide is a recent international disaster of tribalism become paramount; familial, friendship and faith bonds meant nothing. There was no respect for the bonds of one’s chosen tribe (a husband or wife) against the social order of the ethnic (genetic or geographic) tribe.
In characterizing the genocide of more than a million people between two warring tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi, the BBC recounts, “Neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives, saying they would be killed if they refused.”
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Until we recognize the effects we create (exclusion, persecution) by “finding our tribe,” and until we have felt the gravity of our collective world history as one giant seething and sick organism borne of guns, germs and steel; until we are able to remain as curious and as excited to preserve cultures like olde anthropologists, and until we have mourned those histories which are lost, which we destroyed or murdered, or which we prohibited from ever coming to light—we will only fail further as humankind.
In an effort (I deleted “best effort”) to end on a more positive note, let’s all self-reflect on the implications of the language we use, and have a little more respect for the lessons history has taught us and here are some cute dogs to help distract you from everything I just said.
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