What would you incorporate from a tribal based society?

[Smashter]

While I do think it is likely that nomadic people and tribal based societies of hunter-gatherers had more soulcentric societies, I acknowledge that this is far from certain. I also acknowledge that we cannot go back to that way of life now. I think we can look at what we know of how these people lived and examine what we would like to replicate in our own society and what we would like to leave behind.

I am loving Jin+Guice’s “post semi-ere” series in his journal right now. I felt like pulling on the hunter gatherer thread a little bit, but I’ll riff on it here so as to not derail his journal.

I like to think about this topic. What would we want to replicate from tribal based societies, and what would we want to leave behind? I’m curious what others think.

For me, I’d like to replicate much about their active lifestyles. The much studied Hadza tribe from Africa comes to mind. Their fitness and health metrics, as described in the book “Burn,”
are incredibly good. They basically don’t get heart disease or any other “diseases of civilization.” They walk a ton, and they are obviously outdoors all the time.

I also think there might be some hard to quantify, deep happiness that comes from living in a tight knit group that is in tune with nature. I don't think it's realistic for us to ever get back to living like that at scale. But if there's a way to get some of that eco-centric vibe into your life that seems like a pretty great thing to do. So many forumites seem to be incredible at this part. I am inspired. My rather weak attempt to do this at the moment is to make sure I go camping from time to time and to take lots of walks in nature with friends and family.

All that said, I would like to leave behind basically everything else about living as nomadic hunter gatherers.

Nothing could make my point better than this twitter thread , which highlights some anecdotes from a book by a missionary living with a small tribe in the Amazon.

The Piraha people, while apparently quite happy, live in a manner that I find appalling. They can’t count, read, or write and have no interest in learning to do so. They only believe things they have seen with their own eyes. They don’t want to introduce any new technology. They practice a disturbing amount of infant euthanasia. They have an average life expectancy of 45, mostly due to malaria. Sexual relations between kids and adults is routine. They ward off evil spirits by making necklaces adorned with beer and soda tabs. They get violent when they get drunk. They don’t produce any stockpiles of food.

Similarly, I often think about a book by Jared Diamond called “The World Until Yesterday”. The book draws extensively on Diamond’s time with isolated tribes in New Guinea. It is pretty dark at times. The tribes are constantly murdering each other, teaching their young that rival tribes are less than human, and generally acting like psychopathic fascists. Rape and male chauvinism are endemic. One anecdote that stuck with me was when a child was killed via having its head bashed against a rock because it was crying too much, which annoyed one of the male tribe members.

See also this in-depth blog post from one of the co-founders of GiveWell titled ”Was Life Better in Hunter Gatherer Times?” . TLDR, by almost any metric, the answer is no. (There’s a follow up post addressing claims that the Hadza tribe is happier than any society ever measured. The author is skeptical of the results.)

I think our modern, enlightenment-values-infused world is the worst system, except for all the others.

Though of course we should continue to make it better and we should respect anyone who want to live outside that system

[jacob]

1) The ability/constraint of easily carrying everything you own on your body. Typical ownership amounts to about 20lbs. For men it's mainly a spear and a shield. For women, it's a cooking pot and a baby.

2) The ability to easily manufacture/acquire everything you'd ever need or want from the environment. This is vastly more difficult in any kind of technological civilization above stone age level (the 20lbs restriction). In other words, such an environment would have to be created. In some sense, mass industrial consumerism does create exactly that environment in that "everything" is available via an intermediary [marketplace] as long as one has or manufactures money both of which are easily carried on one's person.

Digital minimalist nomads seems like the closest modern instantiation of someone who can do both.

[sky]

In some northern European tribes outside the reach of the Roman Empire:

When a person or couple came of age, a council of elders assigned them a section of land to farm/garden. No mortgage, no taxes. The tribe stayed in one location as long as fertility of the land was good. Members of the tribe were bound by loyalty and family, but did have freedom of movement.

The tribal ways were disrupted by feudalism/serfdom, where one pledged one's self to the lord, became bound to one's plot of land and paid an annual portion of the harvest to the lord. The lord provided security in the form of a militia, often knights. Tribal social groups could not organize for warfare as well as feudal lords, and over time the tribes either fled or were incorporated into the feudal system.

Giving young people the means for livelihood at an early age seems to be a better way to live than requiring people to take on debt at the beginning of their lives.

[DutchGirl]

The Piraha people, while apparently quite happy, live in a manner that I find appalling. They can’t count, read, or write and have no interest in learning to do so. They only believe things they have seen with their own eyes. They don’t want to introduce any new technology. They practice a disturbing amount of infant euthanasia. They have an average life expectancy of 45, mostly due to malaria. Sexual relations between kids and adults is routine. They ward off evil spirits by making necklaces adorned with beer and soda tabs. They get violent when they get drunk. They don’t produce any stockpiles of food.

I would take anything that a missionary says about this with a grain of salt. I assume that "they don't believe anything they don't see with their own eyes" means that they also rejected the particular version of the christian god promoted by the missionary, and if so: good for them. That might have made the missionary quite pissed off, though, and maybe he had to defend why he didn't gain any souls for christianity, so the image he produces of them is as negative as it could be.

I would also like to point out that apparently they are in contact with the modern world (beer and soda tabs), so some of the worst behavior might not have been there when they were not able to get drunk cheaply all the time and when they and their resources were not encroached on all sides by "us".

[chenda]

Most governments today have no contact rules with uncontacted tribes, the few who are still living a stone age lifestyle with little contact with the outside world. This is for fears that contact will introduce infectious diseases. Most of such tribes are in Brazil, where the government occasionally conducts fly overs to keep an eye on them. Stories also abound of illegal loggers running into them.

Some understandable don't welcome outsiders, like the tribe in north sentinel island. The India government forbid anyone from visiting but occasionally people have illegally, and usually end up dead. Back in 2018 a young American missionary, John Allen Chau, bribed local fishermen to drop him off on the island to preach Christianity. The fisherman reported a few days later seeing tribesman dragging his body along the beach. The authorities prosecuted the fishermen but were unable to recover Chau's body.

[7Wannabe5]

There are only around 2600 billionaires on the planet, so their lifestyle might be more akin to the tribal.

[Jean]

go hunt with friends, share meat with friends.

[IlliniDave]

Not much TBH. I think most tribal people throughout history were in constant conflict with rival/competing tribes, at least where population densities were such that competition for resources arose. Having my most essential skill/duty likely be adeptness at killing other humans up close and personal is unappealing. I think present day examples of tribal societies usually don't have that dynamic to contend to the extent tribal societies that existed when such organization was the norm did. As mentioned above, many contemporaty examples have non-tribal governments protecting them/their territories.

The physical activity level is something I'd see as beneficial, and some aspects of the quality of food (though without the wide swings in availability). The hunting/foraging skills are also something I wish I had more of. But that is looking at it from a individual perspective.

As an introvert having fewer people to deal with day to day would be nice. The lack of actual privacy not so much.

[chenda]

The lost tribe by Edward Marriott recounts the authors journey visiting the Liawep, an uncontacted tribe which came to light in the early 1990s. It generated some rather sensationalist headlines in western media, and Marriott, a rather naïve chap, goes in search of them unlawfully. He finds them, together with a idiotic missionary named, oddly enough, Herod.

It all has a tragic end. Despite the book being a bestseller there's almost nothing about the Liawep online. Which is strange but perhaps appropriate.

[icefish]

As someone who married into one, it's a little funny to see tribespeople being talked about like some kind of distant relics, instead of just my in-laws posting memes on Facebook, haha.

From a position alongside but outside, some things I think have incredible value:

1) Ritual markings of adulthood help give an inherent base feeling of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Breaking from an immature state to a mature one, and achieving a visual signifier of it, is a boon most cultures seem to have had but then lost.

A lot of my Western friends still have real, genuinely distressing feelings of 'but I'm not a real adult yet! I don't know what I'm doing!', even into our late 30s. The 'adulting is hard' thing is very pervasive! I feel that's a lot harder to struggle with when you've achieved a ritual sign of competency, especially a visible one like a face tattoo. People who have that signifier still face uncertainty, feel lost, and have to muddle through things, sure! But those feelings get felt within the marked category of 'real adult', and I feel like there's a certain anchor there, compared to the really quite juvenile flailing I see a lot of.

2) Concepts of internal spiritual power boosts people up, ties them to nature and each other, and comes with the inherent flipside that it can go bad and needs to be actively maintained and stoked correctly. A type-A who works 90-hour weeks and neglects their social and familial ties isn't a laudable go-getter; something has gone wrong with their power, and they need to go off and talk a bit with elders or peers to set it straight.

3) Death comes with emotionally powerful rituals, but also with a practicality of caring for the body that's mostly absent in the Western world. My experience with Western funeral practices is that they seem to aim for a very emotionally-neutered middle-ground, missing both the really big feelings and the boring everday practicality of death. Don't spend real time with the body, give it to someone else. Don't feel too much, cry a little (but within acceptable bounds), and say some nice things to make everyone feel better. Then play some nice music and go home.

If you really on a fundamental level know and accept that one day you and everyone you love will be in the position of the corpses you spend days with... I feel it slants a very different light on how you treat your life and the people in it.

4) Being outdoors a lot. There are a lot of spiritual/relationship positives that come with this, and the financial/nutritional benefits of all that hunting and gathering, but just going out and spending time moving your body in nature is its own reward.

There's more, but those are the main ones I can think of. Life there isn't perfect; colonialism has left long scars, and there are a lot of ongoing issues. But, man, ways of being like those do seem to make a difference in how you feel about yourself and your place in the world.

Though I find it very difficult to think about some of these being able to be incorporated outside of a network of family and community. Like, the whole thing kind of needs to be there for it to work. You can give yourself a signifier of adulthood, but it doesn't really hit the same without a greater context of what it means to be signified... I could make my own little personal ritual and it might make me feel good, but that would be different from DH getting his face tattoo, and everyone else then interacting with him in the category of a marked adult. I guess the superset of the big job and the big mortgage and the big car is the closest Western equivalent. :p

[PhoneticNachos]

First of all, go and talk to actual First Nation people and communities. They have probably one of the strongest oral traditions amongst ethnic groups, depending on the tribe. Where I have lived they had many people who could tell direct lineage stories from far back pre-colonial days.

Less "stuff" is a pretty constant state of life/being for them. They used to migrate for different food sources. So de-clutter your house, the "Spark of Joy" method popularized by Marie Kondo is a fun thing to do.

Read the book 'The Rational Optimist' for a great understanding of how skill and knowledge gets passed on or disrupted based on social/economic/ecological conditions. One of the most fascinating books I have ever read.