[Air-L] Electronic Tribes

[Mathieu ONeil]

The tribal metaphor has been popular since the counter-culture of the 1960s as a reaction against technocracy / industrial society. 

Re online tribes, I was inspired by "pomo" sociologist Michel Maffesoli and his concept of neo-tribalism on the one hand and by 1970s radical anthropologist Pierre Clastres and his ideas around non-leadership in amazonian tribes (?) on the other to use the term - a bit later than Jeremy says though ;-)

First in a collection edited by Ty Adams, Electronic Tribes (U of Texas Press) I wrote about people who actually want to return to their understanding of a "tribal", non-industrial way of life, i.e. primitivists, yet they have websites etc.


Then I wrote a book about leadership/authority in anti-authoritarian online environments such as FLOSS, blogs, wikis called Cyberchiefs (Pluto Press). Tribes as stateless and anti-authoritarian forms of collective organisation. 


However I have found that the term is ambiguous and evokes very strong reactions from anthropologists for a variety of reasons so I now only use sociological / org science terminology to analyse online forms of organisation.


hth,
cheers


Mathieu

On 01/10/13, Jeremy hunsinger  <jhunsinger at wlu.ca> wrote:
> I've used the sociological literature by Zymunt Bauman and others to
> talk about tribes and neo-tribes in online environments in a
> forthcoming book, but that is a very specific argument about
> governance that I'm making, but I think both tribes and neo-tribes
> were fairly well known concepts to be applied in cyberculture in the
> mid '90s to early 2000's then they fell out of favor.
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