Does an Alumni qualify as a tribe then.
-Tarun
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Udhay Shankar N <ud...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Fascinating. I'd be greatly interested in your thoughts on, inter alia,
> how many of these conditions apply to silklist itself. :)
>
> Udhay
>
> http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/03/manufacturing-fictive-kinship-.html
>
> Friday, 06 March 2009
> TRIBES!
> This may fill in some gaps for people thinking about surviving the
> future intact.
>
> How do you manufacture a strong community that protects, defends and
> advances the interests of its members? You build a tribe. Tribal
> organization is the most survivable of all organizational types and it
> was the dominant form for 99.99% of human history. The most important
> aspect of tribal organization is that it is the organizational cockroach
> of human history. It has proven it can withstand the onslaught of the
> harshest of environments. Global depression? No problem.
>
> If you are like most people in the 'developed world,' you don't have any
> experience in a true tribal organization. Tribal organizations were
> crushed in the last couple of Centuries due to pressures from the
> nation-state that saw them as competitors and the marketplace that saw
> them as impediments. All we have now it is a moderately strong nuclear
> family (weakened via modern economics that forces familial diasporas), a
> weak extended family, a loose collection of friends (a social circle), a
> tenuous corporate affiliation, and a tangential relationship with a
> remote nation-state. That, for many of us, is proving to be
> insufficient as a means of withstanding the pressures of the chaotic and
> harsh modern environment (D2 in particular).
>
> The solution to this problem is to build a tribe. A group of people
> that you are loyal to you and you are loyal in return. In short, the
> need for a primary loyalty to a group that really cares about your
> survival and future success.
>
> So how do you build a tribe? A strong tribe, in this post-industrial
> environment*, isn't built from the top down. Instead it is built
> organically from the bottom up. A simple tribe starts with cementing
> ties to your extended family, a connection of blood. The second step is
> to extend that network to include other families and worthy
> individuals. A key part of that is to build fictive kinship, a sense of
> connectedness that leads to the creation of loyalty to the group. That
> kinship is built through (see Ronfeldt's paper for some background on this):
>
> * Story telling. Shared histories and historical narratives.
> * Rites of passage. Rituals of membership. Membership is earned
> not given due to the geographic location of birth or residence.
> * Obligations. Rules of conduct and honor. The ultimate penalty
> being expulsion.
> * Egalitarian and often leaderless organization. Sharing is prized.
> * Multi-skilled. Segmental organization (lots of redundancy among
> parts).
> * Two-way loyalty. The tribe protects the members and the members
> protect the tribe. If this isn't implemented, you don't have a tribe,
> you have a Kiwanis club.
>
> The development of fictive kinship will likely be key to the development
> of resilient communities (as it is already for global guerrillas). We
> can already see this process at work in the UK's Transition Towns
> movement with their story telling, honoring elders, re-skilling, and
> leaderless approach (see the 12 steps).
>
> *Nationalism is a form of fictive kinship manufactured/bent to serve the
> needs of the state during our industrial phase of economic organization.
>
> Posted by John Robb on Friday, 06 March 2009 at 10:15 AM
>
> --
> ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
>
>
