ABSTRACT
Numerous commenters describe the contemporary state of American politics and culture as a retreat to the tribal. Their characterization of the tribal includes pugnacious territoriality, antipathy to rivals, and reliance on emotion over reason. This image of the tribal, it is suggested, is not only fallacious as regard actual tribes but a stereotype that works great harm to them. Indeed, for non-tribesmen it is a self-image that holds the threat of becoming self-fulfilling. By demonstrating what actual tribes are like – how they are not simply way-stations on the road to greater evolutionary development or rigidified forms that overwhelm individuality and change – it becomes possible to supplant this source of political legitimacy with a more accurate and useful sense of the tribal in human history.
