Tribes

I recently watched Seth Godin's  inspirational talk on how we should say what we need to say to our “tribe.”  Our tribe consists of a group of  people who have something in common with us and with whom we can share and affect change. As our social circles have become larger and larger, we find ourselves returning to a  level that must be instinctive to humans—the tribe.

A tribe is “a unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.”  We are not comfortable with huge social groups: a smaller group of like-minded people with a “common culture” and an informal leadership is what we turn to when the world is there spread out before us as our community.

This concept of smaller social groupings has shown up in Google’s new social media platform, Google+.  The “Circles” feature allows you to divide your contacts into groups that you connect with as smaller groups (e.g., a “friends circle,” a “family circle” and so on).  Again, it’s the smaller tribe we want, not the overwhelming sea of voices in the crowd.

As an educator, I became enamoured of a new approach to the classroom, called Tribes Learning Community. I saw this approach being used in a third grade classroom and it was truly an inspiration! There was much sharing and growing and learning of values, ethics, morals and healthy social skills like active listening and conflict resolution.  A common culture had been developed in this class so that children in the Tribes classroom were connecting and sharing in ways kids usually do not. 

It seems to me that humans need tribes even in this age when we can communicate across the planet in seconds. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 Do we crave tribes?  Does it give us a sense of group belonging that we cannot find when we have the world opened up to us to "friend"?