Complex questions, simple answers • Martha Macintyre

Complex questions, simple answers • Martha Macintyre

What is a tribe? Anthropologists use the term very cautiously, for it has lost its earlier meanings of ethnicity and bounded social groups and taken on connotations of primitivity or blind adherence to custom. “Tribalism” has thus come to viewed as an undesirable and divisive force. Loyalty to one’s social group — its language, ideologies, religious beliefs or cultural values — can be a source of hostility, even violence, towards other social gr…