From: Dwayne Monroe
I think what we're seeing in cases of classism, racism (color based and otherwise) and other types of group against group antagonism is old fashioned tribal conflict dressed up in modern clothes.
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CB: Or maybe "tribalism" is a myth that imperialism made up to rationalize colonialism and genocide. What evidence is there of "old fashion" tribalism as some inherent characteristic of pre-class and state groups to be in conflict with each other ? There is a lot of evidence that tribes had less conflict among themselves than capitalist nations.
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In the West, it's typical to describe the group affiliations of non-Western peoples as tribal and of Westerners as 'communities'. The idea is that Western societies, the touchstone we're told of modernity in thought, lifestyle and technique, have moved far beyond tribalism to a more flexible and 'advanced' level of social organization. Smarmy Salon.com or Time magazine writers may write about the 'skatepunk tribe' or the 'body piercing tribe' but they're merely trying to be clever and don't take the term seriously. Almost no one believes tribalism is a fact of Western life.
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CB: But maybe tribalism and "savagery" are Western projections of Western, dog-eat-dog culture onto other peoples.
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This is not entirely bullshit; there is indeed greater freedom of social movement in the US than in more homogenous societies. Or, so I'm told and generally believe.
I don't think however, that the tribal impulse - the human tendency to segregate into groups of 'people like us' - has died here or anywhere else on earth.
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CB: The claim for such a human tendency is problematic. It makes it seems like people in the "old fashion tribes" were all mixed together and then segregated themselves based on being "alike" , rather than that people lived in separate groups from early on. Or to the extent that people separated, it was "like people" separating from each other , long, long ago.
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In the past, you were born into the one and only group you'd belong to for life. Modernity's innovation has been the introduction of some degree of fluidity - I can segregate myself as a leftie on Tuesday, an Afro-Cuban on Wednesday, a techie on Thursday... American modernity's innovation has been the near total erasure of White tribes (Irish, Italian, etc) into the super-tribe of US-er Whiteness. This process was greased along by the presence of non-Whites as a point of comparison among other factors. The categories Black, Asian and Hispanic are similarly de-ethnicized super-groupings.
I believe a fundamental part of human behavior is at work when we segregate along color or income or belief or lifestyle lines. American anti-racists hope the end of color-based racism will mean an end to the most troubling sort of group against group conflict. I think our habits run too deep and, even if color-racism were to die, we'd simply find new, multi-culti ways to divide ourselves from one another.
There's already evidence this post-modern tribalism (possibly the dominant mode once the 21st century really gets going with its own vibe) is being born.
I understand the desire for new terms to describe what racism and its fellow travellers have become in the early 21st century. Still, I think a perfectly servicable old word exists: tribalism.
^^^^^^^^ CB: We could take a casual look at human history and say there is an opposite tendency: to unite in larger and larger groups. The modern nation is much larger than the ancient tribe because there has been so much uniting of different "tribes" over the centuries. It is with advent of civilzation that conflict really takes off, standing bodies of armed men are formed, etc.