Tribalism... why is this concept suddenly so popular?

[Katy]

Did I miss a bestselling book or viral video or article or something?  Suddenly every vaguely intellectual conversation or facebook thread I'm involved in, someone uses the word tribalism.  I've heard the term three times in the past two days.  Is this pop culture trivia I missed?  Did some economist use it to describe the reasons Trump got the nomination?  Where did this suddenly come from?  Have the tribal prints on Lularoe leggings effected everyone's brains?

[Guest]

It's just another buzzword to explain a concept that has been around as long as people have. Most people saying it that I've seen are trying, however subtly, to denigrate those whom they feel inferior because the speaker/writer apparently resists the natural human inclination to associate most frequently with people similar to themselves. Usually all of this is done with much head nodding and tongue clucking by their own group, of course :p

Edited October 27, 2016 by Arctic Mama

[Guest]

"Herd mentality" got a humanistic facelift.

 

Though it has been around for a long time. I read a paper about it the other day that was published in 1971.

 

If I had to speculate, I'd say that everything is SO AMAZING now. We've got the internet and coffee, yanno? But people are still mean to each other. Too, the world is SO CONNECTED now. We have the internet and coffee, yanno? There's no understandable excuse to be ignorant of and about people that are different than you, now. BUT PPL ARE STILL SO MEAN.

 

So, folks want explanations. Tribalism is one that's trying real hard to be THEE answer. Gaining in popularity, not coincidentally imo, right around the same time as large swathes of ppl realized that we needed to do human animal things...that we can't eat synthetic vitamins in our corn sugar and thrive. We need people food. ...we can't raise our babies like they are miniature, Victorian era adults if we want them to thrive. We have to raise them like the little Hominid babies that they are.

 

So! We've realized that it's to our benefit to express our humanness biologically, and sociology went looking to see how we might express our humanness socially as well.

[hornblower]

tribalism as a concept is old but its entrance into the everyday North American political discourse really popped in the last 2-5 years. 

I think it's related to the concepts of balkanization & identity politics. 

 I think Norman Ornstein was probably the one to really bring it forward & popularize it. His 2012 book It's Even Worse than It Looks touches on this & IIRC uses the word. For sure he's published a number of pieces on the topic so if you google his name & tribalism you'll get a bit of background. 

For other interpretations, Robert Reich's short piece Tribalism & the Decline of the Nation State 

& from the opposite spectrum, Ben Shapiro's piece  

 

[Crimson Wife]

I can definitely remember it being used to describe conditions in certain regions (the Middle East, Africa, etc.) decades ago. But you're right that it seems to be a buzzword recently to describe the hyperpolarization here in the U.S.

[Kalmia]

E. O. Wilson, professor of biology at Harvard, has done a lot of work on the evolutionary role of tribalism. His conclusions are not accepted by the "selfish gene" tribe of biologists, but his work makes sense to me and will probably spur more research in the future.

 

And here he is in a popular magazine: http://www.newsweek.com/biologist-eo-wilson-why-humans-ants-need-tribe-64005

 

His book is much clearer than this short Newsweek article.

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Conquest-Earth-Edward-Wilson/dp/0871403633/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477619492&sr=1-1&keywords=the+social+conquest+of+earth

Edited October 28, 2016 by Kalmia

[Katy]

Thanks for the links.  this is exactly what I was looking for.  I'm too exhausted tonight but will dig into these this weekend.