The Trouble with Tribalism

by Dr. NICHOLAS MIZER

Tribal tattoos. Tribal rhythms. Tribal religions. Tribalism. The modern West has developed a muddled set of ideas about “tribes,” the label we apply wholesale to groups in other parts of the world. There’s a problem, though: the groups we call “tribes” are so diverse that aside from their size, and the fact that they are “other” from a modern Western perspective, they actually have very little in common. They don’t think about family in uniform ways, and they don’t share common symbols, music, or beliefs.

As an anthropologist, I feel compelled to apologize on behalf of my discipline for the confusion. In our early years especially, we fell prey to the temptation to put everyone in neat, hermetically sealed boxes. This has done violence to the people that anthropologists talked about, often behind their backs, and it has done violence to the diverse expression of the Divine image that exists in the variety of how His people live.

To add insult to injury, early anthropologists came to believe that non-European peoples were a window through which we could look back in time and learn the “primitive” nature of humanity. We, of course, consider ourselves the pinnacle of human cultural development, so those who lived differently must simply be a few millennia behind the curve. Combining the error of reducing a dazzling array of human adaptation to the monolithic “tribe” with the hubris of considering everyone different from you as less human gives rise to the idea that “tribalism,” or unthinking hostility towards people other than you, is a deep-seated state of nature for human life. That we developed this idea of “primitive” humans incessantly warring against those outside their culture at a time when the West reflexively subjugated nearly every culture they met is among the great demonstrations of the human capacity for projecting our failings onto others. Conversely, in the ability of today’s anthropologists to look past the self-centeredness of cultural evolutionism and attempt to understand the wide variety of human cultures in their own terms, we can see the human capacity for understanding of the other, the “outsider.”

Ideas are stubborn things, however. The concept of “tribalism” is deeply embedded into our popular discourse, even though anthropologists have long known that it does not refer to any specifically identifiable set of cultural traits. Instead, when people speak of “tribalism,” they usually mean that a deep-seated aspect of human nature is unthinking loyalty to our own group, however defined, and reflexive hostility towards outgroups. Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal calls this view “Veneer Theory.” People who hold a Veneer Theory view of humanity would say that aggression, especially towards outsiders, is natural to humanity. Civilization is a thin coat of paint covering up our true, hostile selves. You can see this view in Thomas Hobbes’ description of the life of primitive humans as “nasty, brutish, and short” or in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The question of whether these portrayals accurately describe early humans or the cultures of 19thcentury Congo can be answered easily and empirically: they don’t. But if we speak of our need to “move beyond tribalism,” we concede the point that hostility towards out-groups is part of what it means to be human.

The opposing view, that our “civilized” morality flows naturally from a sociality contiguous with the sociality of other animals, is supported by empirical evidence from ethology, primatology, and neuroscience. I would also contend that this view—that sociality and cooperation is more essential to human nature—is more easily reconcilable with a Christian view of humanity than Veneer Theory, which holds that socalled tribalism is our true form. We are made in the image of a God who exists eternally in what Metropolitan John Zizioulas calls the simultaneous communion and otherness of the Trinity. In this view, he writes, “The Person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness.” When we fear and fight the other, we do so in our fallenness, not out of our true nature. If there is a veneer on humanity, it is a veneer of animosity towards the other, covering up our God-given sociality.

In fact, one of the defining features of humanity is our ability to form broad, flexible social networks. This capacity for reimagining social boundaries to include or cooperate with the other has even been posited as one reason that Homo sapiens was more successful than Homo neandertalensis. Neanderthals appear to have lived in the small, isolated social groups once believed to be the primitive stave of humanity. Instead, we find that adaptive and variable social organization extends as far back in the human record as we can see in the ethnographic record. To be fair, we also find inequality and oppression as far back as we can see in the human record, but this too is consistent with an understanding of human fallenness. We fail to live up to the divine potential of sociality given to us.

The false premise of tribalism and Veneer theory does not mean that we do not often act in ways that keep us from experiencing communion in otherness. We need only glance around us, and perhaps to glance within, to see examples of humans aggressively defending rigid boundaries between in-groups and out-groups, even when doing so threatens to destroy both. The irrationality of this behavior can be seen in the work of psychologist Henri Tajfel. In the early 1970s, Tajfel and colleagues began conducting experiments in which they would ask strangers to distribute a valuable resource between other participants. Before the distribution, however, they would divide the participants into two groups. Inevitably, participants would demonstrate in-group favoritism rather than fairness in how they distributed the goods. This is perhaps unsurprising. The really interesting thing, though, is that people would show this favoritism whether the group division was based on something potentially meaningful or completely arbitrary, like a coin toss. Even more than the out-group hostility that we see in politics, religion, or culture, this discrimination of “Team Heads” vs. “Team Tails” lays bare the banality of our tendency towards “tribalism.”

And yet, as Christians we know that this banal evil is not our end. In Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” As we work towards more fully experiencing and living out that unity, we should remind ourselves that we are moving closer to the true nature of humanity, not “evolving” beyond the phantom image of “primitive tribalism.” We express the divine image stamped on us when we embrace the wide, flexible social bonds God has built into our nature. It's even more imperative that we do so now, in an age when the energy of so many around us is relentlessly devoted to tearing those bonds asunder. The words of Zizioulas ring truer now than when he wrote them in 1993:

Dr. Nicholas Mizer is an independent scholar with a PhD in anthropology fromTexas A&M University.