[Air-L] Electronic Tribes

[Alex Golub]

For the record, Mathieu, the the exact outmoded anthropological concept you
were looking for there was 'band', not 'tribe' :)

Seriously, thought, it would be interesting to trace exactly how this
primitivist discourse grew and fell into disuse at the end of the last
century. Americans have always ambivalently appropriated Indians culture
(the attack helicopters were called 'Apaches' but Osama Bin Laden was
called 'Geronimo') from James Fenimore Cooper to Avatar. Apparently in
Australia there is a similar dynamic. These have largely been about martial
valor, autonomy, and resistance to imperialism. The other discourse of the
primitive other as the original 'honnete homme' goes back to Diderot (and
Tahiti) and before that Rousseau. This Franco-Gallic stream of thought is
ultimately what produced (an extremely uncatholic but very French)
Clastres. For more on this stream of thought in Clastres see:

Dean, B. "Critical Re-vision: Clastres' Chronicle and the Optic of
Primitivism."* Anthropology today *15, no. 2 (1999): 9-11.


Given how central this fascination with the colonized is in settler
societies, I wouldn't be surprised if this notion of 'tribe' periodically
bubbles to the top of our cultural configuration as people lay they hands
on it and repurpose it for whatever their current interest is.


-A


P.S. Apparently I blogged about this in 2009 (
http://savageminds.org/2009/04/03/the-invention-of-tribe-again/ ).




On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 12:09 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil at anu.edu.au>wrote:

> 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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-- 
-A

-------
Alex Golub
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
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