Tribal Customs

I was recently introduced to the concept of family as tribe, and I can't stop thinking about it. The idea is that your immediate family, your family of origin, is your tribe, and that most people feel an intense, often unconscious pull or connection to their tribe and will defend a member of the tribe if he or she is attacked. I guess the idea is that if you marry or start a family of your own, you build a new tribe but still remain connected to your original tribe.

I liked this idea when it was presented to me. Or maybe it was that it made sense to me. It seems to allow for the fact that you may not have anything in common with or even like every member of your tribe but there is still this bond: You are tribe mates. The more I think about it, in fact, the more complex and beautiful the idea becomes to me, in the way a proof is beautiful, or a solution, or a machine.

I definitely feel a tribal connection to my immediate family as well as my extended family: my blood relations, my tribe. This is not to say that these are the people I feel closest to, necessarily, or love the most, or feel I am most like. That is not what a tribe is. And there are members of my tribe who, for example, think Mitt Romney would be a great president (only one I know about, but still), take comfort in the idea of the resurrection, gamble, hate dogs. These are not things I can relate to, not qualities I would seek out in a close friend, but they are irrelevant in terms of our tribal connection. The Romney supporter, for example, does not share my politics, but I would take a bullet for him. He helped teach me long division. I love him fiercely although we are no longer part of each other's daily lives. He is my tribe.

But I started in on the complexity of the notion, which I find so compelling, and that is more about the tribes we make and join of our own volition. I of course now have my own new family: a foursome, a fragile, fledgling tribe that grows stronger every day and will, I believe, one day grow its own branches, expand, as tribes do. And I belong to so many other tribes: my building, the parents at Lily's school, my high school friends, people from my home town, fans of the Boston Celtics, Scrabulous players, regular patrons of a particular fried chicken joint near where I live, readers, writers, lapsed Unitarians (and Unitarianism is hard to lapse from; it's pretty lapsed already), partisan Democrats, I could go on ad infinitum with the tribes I belong to both large and small, general and insanely specific.

I visualize these tribes like those circles that always used to appear in my math homework: the ones that overlap and the common, shared numbers go in the part in the middle, the ones unique to each category in the part that is just of the individual circle. Do you know what I mean? Venn diagrams, they're called, I think. They're used for factoring; you could make a circle for 12, say, and one overlapping it slightly for 36, and the numbers in the little middle part would be 1, 2,3,4, 6 and 12 but not 9, not 18. This seems so clear to me--it's how I see it--but I can tell I'm not explaining it well, and I haven't yet said how it relates.

I think that each of us belongs to so many tribes, and that in the people we like the most, many of the tribes overlap, give us a feeling of genuine kinship. This, "kin," another word I have always liked. The concept of the kindred spirit, which I first read about in Anne of Green Gables 30 some odd years ago, has always made total sense to me, from the first time I read about it 30 years ago. I am always on the lookout for kindred spirits, consider myself lucky in having found a few. But even in those we love most, know best, the tribes don't overlap universally. People are way too complex for that. My husband belongs to some tribes whose language I can't even feign understanding, as do both of my parents, my sister, and all of my closest friends. As it should be.

And to take this just a little further, I think when people limit the number of tribes they belong to, or censor their tribe membership for the wrong reasons, they really limit themselves, become stunted in some sad way. People who refuse to acknowledge others in a tribe are the bigots, hatemongers, ignorants among us. They build impenetrable walls around their tribes and in doing so become smaller and less powerful.

Or at least that's what I think. I am trying to see the strength and beauty in the tribes I belong to, from my own primal tribe of origin to the many, many tribes I have joined, belong to by default or admire.

I don't think it's too strong a statement to say that taken all together, the tribes a person belongs to is who they are.