12 Jul Tribalism in the 21st Century

My morning started with reading Matthew Taylor’s blog post, An Ambition for Peace? I don’t do sports. Especially golf (really…?). But something struck me that i’ve been struggling with in both my academic life and in my personal life: issues of tribalism.

I peer into three worlds from where i stand – each one purporting to be trying to “change the world” in one way or another. In clinical work, it’s easy to see the success that comes from simply treating people with dignity and respect – with refusing to engage in bandying technologies of neoliberal subject formation that are so often touted as a “moral” frame of health care provision. The kinds of change that happen, sometimes only instantaneously, sometimes for a lifetime, are incredible. At the same time, it is also clear what happens when clinics become simply technologies of governance – cramming personal change down people’s throats while dangling mediocre services as reward. The us-them frame of service provision is detrimental not only to people’s physical health, but also to their mental and overall health – detrimental to people’s understanding of their place in the world.

Tribalism gets bandied about in multiple ways. On the one hand, it is used as a way to Other – flung about in news and media, political pontification, and by generally anyone wanting to point to “those people”…it’s the 21st century’s answer to “barbarism.” Barbarism isn’t used in polite circles anymore. We contain ourselves to quaint tropes that only carry the weight of the user, supposedly. But tribalism is also being used by those dreaming of an imaginary past – one that musters visions of quaint notions of “community,” “naturalness,” (for instance, these lovely flyers for a local club night – to their credit, they pulled the photo flyer after a complaint – but not after a massive uproar from the “community”) multiculturalism-as-oneness (see: Bennetton ads from the 1990’s for a glimpse into that one), and a whole range of imaginary time-space constructions of something that is, apparently, not right here and right now.

Either way, there is still a dis-ease settling around me with this word. Warning bells of what it means to claim someone else or yourself to be tribal, with all the weight of what that connotes hanging heavily in the balance of belonging and exile, inclusion and exclusion, modern and backward, us and them…