Build your own tribe

[Iason Ouabache]

In Prometheus Rising, Wilson likens the various religious groups to 'tribes'. 'The Catholic Tribe', 'The Mormon Tribe' etc.

I think those would meet most of the requirements set:
*check* Story telling.  Shared histories and historical narratives.   
*check* Rites of passage.  Rituals of membership.  Membership is earned, not given due to the geographic location of birth or residence.
*check* Obligations.   Rules of conduct and honor.  The ultimate penalty being expulsion.
*no check* Egalitarian and often leaderless organization.  Sharing is prized.   
*depends* Multi-skilled.  Segmental organization (lots of redundancy among parts).
*depends* Two-way loyalty.  The tribe protects the members and the members protect the tribe.

I think a rise of non religious tribes would be very interesting.

I just posted something on my blog a week ago about how organized religions have replaced the old tribal ways (I realized it at a church thanksgiving dinner 2 years ago).  Kinda weird how these ideas all seem to crop up at the same time.

[OPTIMUS PINECONE]

     Build your own tribe? Sounds like a lot of work. I'm currently embarking on the task of a chicken coop for a flock of four.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That's one hen more than the legal limit.

[OPTIMUS PINECONE]

That's one hen more than the legal limit.

     Caging the descendants of flesh eating raptors is hardly paradise. Don't you have like, 42 known pets, including an iguana and turtles?! Yes, four is one more than legally allowed, SO KILL ME!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

My fish died  so I only have fifteen. Fuck you and your four chickens in the FACE. Where's my fucking pie safe?

And I saw what you did with my herb garden.

I'm picking  up my chicks on Sunday. For the record, I'm a law-abiding citizen so I'm only  getting THREE.

[OPTIMUS PINECONE]

My fish died  so I only have fifteen. Fuck you and your four chickens in the FACE. Where's my fucking pie safe?

And I saw what you did with my herb garden.

     The herb garden just got expanded/ relocated (just like your people!). I'm still working on pie safe layout, I need a fucking printer.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

My fish died  so I only have fifteen. Fuck you and your four chickens in the FACE. Where's my fucking pie safe?

And I saw what you did with my herb garden.

     The herb garden just got expanded/ relocated (just like your people!). I'm still working on pie safe layout, I need a fucking printer.

Are you talking about the Welsh?

[Requia ☣]

It occurs to me if all the weirdos of the country united into one big tribe we'd outnumber the Ivy league spags, by a lot.

[Richter]

Numbers, yes, but how to organize? 
Even if it's weirdos, freaks, anarchists of the UK or whoever "uniting", we'd still only have people.  Same problems, personality clashes, and conflicts would apply. 

Smaller, self forming tribes / cliques would have more inherent stability, but getting them to work together would require a Persia to their Helenic city states.

[Jenne]

Via John Robb:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/03/manufacturing-fictive-kinship-.html

If you are like most people in the 'developed world,' you don't have any experience in a true tribal organization.  Tribal organizations were crushed in the last couple of Centuries due to pressures from the nation-state that saw them as competitors and the marketplace that saw them as impediments.  All we have now it is a moderately strong nuclear family (weakened via modern economics that forces familial diasporas), a weak extended family, a loose collection of friends (a social circle), a tenuous corporate affiliation, and a tangential relationship with a remote nation-state.  That, for many of us, is proving to be insufficient as a means of withstanding the pressures of the chaotic and harsh modern environment (D2 in particular).

The solution to this problem is to build a tribe.  A group of people that you are loyal to you and you are loyal in return.  In short, the need for a primary loyalty to a group that really cares about your survival and future success. 

So how do you build a tribe?  A strong tribe, in this post-industrial environment*, isn't built from the top down.  Instead it is built organically from the bottom up.  A simple tribe starts with cementing ties to your extended family, a connection of blood.  The second step is to extend that network to include other families and worthy  individuals.  A key part of that is to build fictive kinship, a sense of connectedness that leads to the creation of loyalty to the group.  That kinship is built through (see Ronfeldt's paper for some background on this):

[b]Story telling.  Shared histories and historical narratives.   
Rites of passage.  Rituals of membership.  Membership is earned, not given due to the geographic location of birth or residence.
Obligations.   Rules of conduct and honor.  The ultimate penalty being expulsion.
Egalitarian and often leaderless organization.  Sharing is prized.   
Multi-skilled.  Segmental organization (lots of redundancy among parts). 
Two-way loyalty.  The tribe protects the members and the members protect the tribe.   If this isn't implemented, you don't have a tribe, you have a Kiwanis club.  [/b]

The development of fictive kinship will likely be key to the development of resilient communities (as it is already for global guerrillas).  We can already see this process at work in the UK's Transition Towns movement with their story telling, honoring elders, re-skilling, and leaderless approach (see the 12 steps).


*Nationalism is a form of fictive kinship manufactured/bent to serve the needs of the state during our industrial phase of economic organization.

In studying the gangs of South Central LA, this concept seemed to fit well.  The replacement of the nuclear family for a tribal construct seemed the best fit to explain the cultural phenomena coming from this social paradigm.  When we studied them as a linguistic community, they were described thusly.  The transfer of the tribal culture into mass media was actually our eventual focus, however.  It became generalized into what they called "youth culture" or "urban youth culture," and that's when the transfer of the covert prestige from using tribal practices, language, and style of dress and living went to the overt prestige presaged by popularity of the music coming from those same gangs.

Fascinating shit, that.

[Template]

In Prometheus Rising, Wilson likens the various religious groups to 'tribes'. 'The Catholic Tribe', 'The Mormon Tribe' etc.

I'd shift the designation for those groups up to "nation" or "peoples" when we're talking about the tribes specified in OP.

Or rename "tribe" as in OP to one-to-five "house(hold)s" or something similar.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

OK, Pinecone, what kind of chickens are you getting? I'm getting an Rhode Island Red, an Araucana, and a Barred Rock.