Tribe, Tribe, Tribe

(To the tune of "Dream, Dream, Dream"...)

I have a slight problem with my chosen life's work. It does not hold up very well; in fact, it posits itself as rather frail. I fear my rallying cries falling prey to grave misinterpretation (since I myself get lost in strange loopholes--more like strangleholds!--of extreme conservatism with it often enough). I also feel queasy about the assumptions written into the basic vocabulary itself, held together by nearly interminable threads in the etymologies stretching back thousands of years. Not to mention queasiness over the proliferation of interpretations and co-opt-ings of such a critical, central word as "tribe"!

Last month, I finished reading the intriguing sociological creative nonfiction called Urban Tribes, written several years ago by Ethan Watters (Check out the Urban Tribes website!). I quite enjoyed the two-hundred page work, but there were some rather unsettling aspects to the text, as well. I felt disappointed that Watters did not go further with the tribal metaphor he drew. I thought he did an exceptional job illustrating how groups of relatively well-to-do young urbanites are banding together and marrying later than ever before (what he calls the demographic of the "never-marrieds," apparently an official U.S. Census Bureau term). Why would they put off marriage; what's so great about singlehood? (I think I'll get into this later since there is just so much to say about Watters's work.) Anyway, Watters has a very specific picture of what he means by urban tribe. For several years before I'd even heard of the book's existence, I had been advocating for urban tribes, dating back to 2006, when I moved back home with very pressing intentions of pursuing neo-tribalism in a city environment (more on these visions later, too!). Watters's urban tribes, however, are very constricted. They span the post-college years into the early-forties but sometimes longer, depending on the eventual marrying age of certain late-blooming individuals. And then they're done. For perhaps a twenty-year interval of their lives, these tribes coalesce, and then, just as quickly as they came together, they disband and disintegrate, fall apart, dissolve back into the nuclear family, or at least married couple, units that are the American norm. This, then, is not a true tribe, the sort of unit that is supposed to last, to support itself in perpetuity for generations.

Afterwards, I finally got around to watching one of Seth Godin's TED talks, entitled, "Why Tribes, Not Money or Factories, Will Change the World" (Great title; apparently misleading!). He uses tribe in a very loose way, as a stringy image of group structuring to inspire leadership by massive social networks of strongly and not-so-strongly connected individuals, tribes in this sense being the main force behind mass movements and social change, even programmatic activism, precisely the kind of thing to which changed vision in Quinn's work stands in stark contrast.

As I just stated (somewhat prematurely, according to my intended outline, it seems!), Daniel Quinn's use of the tribe concept, under the banner of Neo-Tribalism, is rather different. It follows more closely what most students educated in public school systems and elsewhere in the information-saturated "omniverse" have encountered about famous tribes such as the Navajo, the Iroquois, the Kung!-san, the Aborigines, the Bedouin, etc., etc.. It mimics in meaning the same perpetuation pattern and unique cultural elements that people tend to expect the term "tribe" to carry. One problem, however -- these days, Neo-Tribalism, seemingly embedded with
the component of "tribalism," tends to get confused with the very contrasting and contested realms of that movement. See this article on "The African Paradox: The Tribalist Implications of the Colonial Legacy" for some of the key themes in this strange ideology, pitting tribal sovereignty against the struggle to industrialize and turn human-scale cultures into just more satellites of an already monstrous mega-culture, using a spiky distancing-from-the-legacy-of-colonialism strategy for inspiring a virulent strain of African nationalism(s).

Beyond this, the etymology of tribe, compliments of the Oxford English Dictionary, is absolutely wrapped up in agriculture-based cosmopolitanism. See below:

"[In earliest form, ME. tribu, a. OF. tribu, Sp., Pg. tribu, It. tribù, tribo, a. L. tribus (u-stem); but as the OF. has not been found in the sing. before 14th c. the ME. tribuz of 1250 may directly represent L. tribs pl. The later tribe may have been f. L. tribus on the usual pattern of derivatives from L. ns. in -us.

L. tribus is usually explained from tri- three and the verbal root bhu, bu, fu to be. It is thought by some to be cognate with Welsh tref town or inhabited place.

The earliest known application of tribus was to the three divisions of the early people of Rome (attributed by some to the separate Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan elements); thence it was transferred to render the Greek , and so to the Greek application of the latter to the tribes of Israel. This, from its biblical use, was the earliest use in English, the original Roman use not appearing till the 16th c.]"

As such, I wonder if it would really be so strange a development if I had to craft a new vocabulary to represent the aims of the Neo-Tribalist movement? I have some scribblings, as well as some suggestions on new thinking routes or thoroughfares from my thesis advisor, on how this might be done. I fear it will be impossible to accomplish, as just about every potential word that presents itself is also intricately linked to our culture's Cyclop-tic history by way of etymology. Meh. Thoughts?

P.S.: Dear reader, yes, I intend to return with a vengeance. End-of-summer, beginning-of-school-year lull has faded, and I want to be blogging every day. Also, my good friend pointed me to this spectacular blog post about ending the year with a bang, which challenge I very much intend to embrace with the slightly-less-than-a-third-of-a-year remaining. Would you care to join me? :D