re: #311 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

I’m not playing any sort of game at all. If you’re studying the subject, if you want to think about tribalism, I don’t get why you don’t want to have a conversation about what we might define as tribalism or problems with those definitions. That’s part of ‘study’.

Also, if we are at the stage where we can’t even define what the word means, then it seems really odd to use it in discussion as though it does have an understood meaning.

I think it’s very important and interesting to study the way that group affiliations work, the way that identity works in socialization and politics. That’s a large chunk of sociology, is the sociology of groups. The concept of thinking about this isn’t a problem for me, it’s the bit where we use ‘tribalist’ as though it’s supposed to convey meaning. I don’t know what you, or anyone else, actually means when they say tribalist.

Well, I’m certainly not the only person thinking about it, although I wouldn’t put myself in the same league as the former Secy of Labor. He may not be looking at it through a sociological lens, per se, but he wouldn’t be the first to express it this way. People usually don’t think linearly, but in parts of a whole, so we have to consider economics, politics, even psychology when we approach this subject, not just as a sociological study.

sfgate.com

One of the reasons I mentioned Mormons, for instance, is because of the recent Romney run, and the historical beginnings of Mormonism itself, their final early settling in Utah, and their subsequent behavior as a group which, because of its religious, economic and political views, set itself apart from the rest of the country, until recently. As it was, they did, in certain ways, take good care of their own, esp when it came to money and power within their own realm.

But I think the last time “tribalism” took so great a leap in the US was the Civil War. The entire subject of race as it pertained to Black and White was not much more than tribalism, IMHO, over a united nation. And in Germany, it was wrought by the Nazis who attempted to annihilate an entire race/religion and its defenders, along with other elements that did not fit with the “Aryan” image.