Pew Research Center chart from “Political Polarization in the American Public“

Less discussed is the terminology itself. In much of the West, “tribal” often implies “savage,” evoking stereotypes of primitiveness and backwardness. It is worth noting, then, that many Native Americans and First Nations people around the world view their tribal affiliations positively and would recoil at the suggestion that to be tribal is to be uncivilized. But the trouble with the term goes further. It rests on flawed assumptions, specifically regarding how actual so-called tribal people have for the most part lived in the past and into the present. Real “tribes” have rarely been as polarized as many Americans today are.

What is worse, we may be missing a chance to draw from Indigenous wisdom—“tribal” wisdom—insights into how better to live in pluralistic communities. My own research in Africa, among what many would consider a tribal people, reveals that tribalism, properly understood, may actually be the antidote to our problem of polarization rather than another name for it.

One cool afternoon, in a rural village of around 300 families, I sat with some elders under the straw roof of the open-wall shed on one of their compounds. We were waiting for a team of development workers who were coming to conduct surveys on behalf of a foreign NGO. When those workers arrived, they did so in a caravan of Land Rovers—this in a part of Mozambique where everyone gets around on foot, or at best by bicycle. They carried thick notepads and wore polished threads, and for an hour they plied the elders with their scripted questions. My friends responded, but without opening up. They were not nearly as animated as I knew them ordinarily to be. It was not hard to understand why.

Though the visiting team had brought someone to translate into the local Makhuwa language, they used the kind of jargon—poverty indices, development targets—commonplace in the provincial capital but foreign to this outlying village. After an hour, making sure to leave enough sunlight left for their return to town, the development workers thanked us, climbed back into their 4x4s, and drove off. Only after the dust clouds had dissipated did my friends visibly relax. They proceeded immediately to make fun of their visitors, laughing at how “those whites” (akunya ala) talked—not only that they talked in such a complicated way, but also that they seemed to like talking so much.

It was striking that my Makhuwa friends referred to the development workers as akunya—and joked about them in front of me, an Asian American—because those workers were in fact dark-skinned Africans. They were “Black” by America’s racial classification system. But they were part of Mozambique’s educated and salaried elite, which in this village made them as foreign—and therefore as “white”—as any distant European.

Because the elders knew me to be in their village for the long haul, and to speak their language and embrace their way of life, I was made to feel welcome. They felt comfortable placing expectations on me, including the expectation that I would turn to them in my own times of need. This speaks to the one thing above all that I experienced in this relatively remote African village: the quality of hospitality, an eagerness to embrace, and in some way absorb, people like me whose origins obviously lie elsewhere. This is not to say hostilities and xenophobia are absent in societies such as this one. But the single, simple story of Africa as a heart of darkness, beset by conflict and chaos, needs no reinforcing. What I find to be far truer about the everyday lives of ordinary people in this community is their willingness to engage others and extend hospitality, and to share what little they have. Their default is to welcome anyone willing to meet them halfway—anyone willing to spend time, listen patiently, and show respect.

The people among whom I have lived on and off for over a decade, and with whom I continue to do research, are Makhuwa. This is the language they speak and the ethnic label by which they are known. It used to be that anthropologists classified “the Makhuwa of Mozambique”—just as they would “the Dogon of Mali” or “the Navajo of America’s Southwest”—as a “tribe,” as do many people today. In Africa, there are 2,000 such groupings, such tribes—each with its own language, social structure, traditions, customs, and beliefs. A tribe is meant to define not only the in-group but also to distinguish it from the out-group. Each tribe is supposed to be distinct from other tribes—isolated, cohesive, bounded. As such, tribes are often characterized by hostility toward and mistrust of the other. “Tribal strife” is not only violent and ugly; it is primordial and perpetual—Tutsi vs. Hutu, Luo vs. Kikuyu, etc.

This is the image of “tribe” pundits and politicians have in mind when discussing on our nightly news the deluge of discord—not in Africa, but in the United States. We Americans are increasingly fragmented into “tribes”: left vs. right, the coasts vs. the heartland, highly educated vs. undereducated, whites vs. people of color, religious vs. secular.

It would be easy to pin this problem of polarization on the right. As the past 10 years have shown over and over, Donald Trump’s loyalists are prone to an uncritical devotion to their leader. He can do no wrong and, in their view, the media and the justice system trying to hold him to account are corrupt and evil.

But it is not just in Trumpism that one finds blind allegiance and exclusionary behavior. As the legal scholar Amy Chua argues in her book Political Tribes, identity politics is common even among people like me and those in my academic circles. The truth is we self-segregate, and we largely fail to interact or intermarry with people of different educational or economic backgrounds.

Across the political spectrum, we have become increasingly insular and intolerant, irrational and primitive, in our loyalties and hostilities. Whether through the cable news channels we watch, the social media friends we keep, the neighborhoods we inhabit, or the affinity groups we join, we have effectively sorted ourselves into silos: closed communities that keep us ignorant, and often dismissive, of those beyond our bubbles.

This problem could well be called divisiveness or simply partisanship, but the metaphor of tribalism has caught on, and for good reason. “Tribalism” has a certain moral force. It calls attention to just how unthinking and uncivilized we have become, despite our claims to be modern.

We can thank colonial-era anthropology for bequeathing us the idea of “tribes” that is so commonplace today, defined as age-old social units, bounded, closed, and above all, primordial—there since the dawn of humanity. But this last point especially has come in for a radical rethinking in recent decades. What anthropologists today generally contend is that tribes did not exist until constructed as such during the relatively recent expansion of European empires, when colonial administrators, missionaries, and ethnographers encountered fluid groups composed of crosscutting identities and immediately sought to make sense of them.

Doing so meant sorting people into separate, hermetically sealed compartments—into “tribes.” This allowed Europeans to achieve some cognitive mastery over realities that must have struck them as bewilderingly complex, to make intelligible what was otherwise beyond their comprehension and control.

It is not that precolonial peoples lacked social and political structures. Rather, in most cases their associations looked more like loosely organized bands than tightly bounded “tribes.” The groupings that existed were dynamic and fluid—continually disaggregating and reconstituting, contracting and expanding through movement, marriage, and trade (and, yes, through war). The idea that they comprised closed, cohesive, and enduring groups—unified through such disparate factors as kinship, culture, language, politics—simply was not the case.

That is, not until they were categorized and consolidated as “tribes.” This occurred by many means: the appointing of chiefs for the purpose of colonial administration, the standardizing of languages for the purpose of Bible translation, and the codifying of culture for the purpose of scientific investigation.⁴ Colonized communities themselves played a role. Forced to make their claims and assert their rights within the newly introduced framework of the nation state, they came to think and talk of themselves as they never had before: as members of this or that closed group, this or that tribe.

Empirically we know that precolonial social units were rarely, if ever, as rigid, insular, and mutually antagonistic as terms like “tribe” and “tribalism” suggest. Rather, they were dynamic and diverse, marked by porous boundaries and constant change. And yet, today’s colloquial understanding of “tribe” remains anthropologists’ erstwhile one—partially, it seems, because the term has gained so much traction, not least among other social scientists.

Psychologists in particular tend to see “tribalism” as intrinsic to the human condition, as hardwired into our psyche as an inheritance from our earliest African ancestry. Here is a quote representing this view: “Homo sapiens spent much of its evolutionary history in small bands on the African savannah competing with other bands for scarce resources. As a result, tribal competition is written into our DNA.”⁵

Courtesy Devaka Premawardhana.

But I came to learn that this may just be the point. Unlike modern constructions, mud huts are easy to build—they can be completed in a day. And because the sunk costs of building them are negligible, they are not only quickly built, they are painlessly abandoned. They are architecture for the fleet-footed.

It is interesting that the district administrator in the area where I worked, hoping to see his territory “develop” and “modernize,” once confided in me that his biggest challenge is that the local population is “too mobile.” They live like nomads, he complained. But what for him was a marker of primitivism was experienced by the Makhuwa themselves as a capacity—a strategic adaptation to the inevitability of facing circumstances otherwise beyond their control.

To be sure, it is not that those I work with lack interest in feeling at home, or even in being rooted. It is rather that they see roots more the way we see routes. The Makhuwa word for roots—mikakari—is used interchangeably with the word for veins—misempha—because roots and veins share the same function. They circulate the life source, whether blood or soil nutrients, through us. And that, in turn, allows us to circulate: to move, to dance, to live. Roots, in this conception, do not just stabilize us. They mobilize us.

This idea finds expression in the writings of some of Africa’s foremost thought leaders—in Achille Mbembe’s claim that identity in Africa is identity in motion, and in Chinua Achebe’s words: “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”⁷ Most revealing about this proverb from Achebe’s Igbo people is that it compels one beyond Igbo parochialism not in spite of but because of one’s grounding in Igbo proverbial wisdom. To be rooted, in this case, is to reach out as much as it is to reach down.

It is perhaps in the realm of religion that mobility and fluidity most come into play. We often think of religious affiliations as master categories that preordain one’s entire faith and practice, and religions do often put themselves out there as all-encompassing life programs. Yet what is also true about religion for most people is that it functions not primarily as an intellectual system, but rather as a means of confronting our most concrete and pressing problems. The pragmatic qualities of religion, especially in places like northern Mozambique where medical facilities are scarce, give rise to an eclectic and experimental way of being.

When health clinics are absent, you go to the traditional healer. If that healer fails to cure you, you seek out another—or a church, or a mosque, or a different church, or a different mosque. What matters is not logical consistency or abstract truth. What matters is life. As the psychologist James Leuba put it (in words well known to us thanks to William James): “Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.”⁸

The priority the Makhuwa give to existential imperatives over abstract ideals proves enormously frustrating to the evangelists of the new Pentecostal churches spreading rapidly throughout Africa. These churches enjoin their worshippers to convert by making an absolute break with the past, which requires them to denounce and even to demonize their ancestors and ancestral traditions. Yet for the Makhuwa, it has always been the case that converting to something need not mean converting from something else—particularly when life is on the line.

Illustration by Kristie Welsh

Underlying common enemy identity politics is a basic epistemic error, one which the philosopher Theodor Adorno termed “identity thinking”: the tendency to reduce objects to concepts and the failure to recognize that life is irreducible to the terms with which we seek to grasp it.¹² The greatest fallacy in identity thinking is its flawed understanding of the human subject. We are not set pieces or static entities. We are beset with complexities and nuances, inconsistencies and contradictions. We are human becomings at least as much as we are human beings.

If the epitome of common humanity identity politics is Martin Luther King Jr., it may be tempting to take Malcolm X—King’s foil, as he is often presented—as the icon of common enemy identity politics. It was Malcolm X, after all, who spoke of the white man as the devil. Yet Malcolm X underwent multiple conversions in his life—not only to the Nation of Islam, when he changed his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X, but also to a more universal, inclusive, and, crucially, multiracial understanding of what it means to be Muslim, at which point he changed his name again, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—an indication of the pivotal role of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, for his evolving sense of self. It was as a result of this ritual par excellence of—what else?—movement, that Malcolm X came to think things anew and renounce the hatred he previously harbored toward all white people.¹³

This capacity for reinvention is one of Malcolm X’s most impressive qualities. As he says on the last page of his autobiography, “my whole life has been a chronology of changes.”¹⁴

All our lives can be viewed this way. We are more than just the identities we claim or that claim us. The endpoints of our most common binaries—white vs. Black, oppressor vs. oppressed, Global South vs. Global North—rarely reflect the fullness of lived experience. We are continually in flux. We are constantly changing. The question is whether we will embrace this or resist it, build bridges to ease movement or build barriers to keep things in place.

One of the real privileges of teaching undergraduates, as I do, is introducing them to the wisdom of Indigenous ways of knowing and being, including those of the Makhuwa. It is striking that what the world despises or simply disregards may very well be precisely what it most needs. Religious studies scholar Philip Arnold calls this the urgency of Indigenous values.¹⁵

Another privilege of teaching college students is the chance to encourage them at their pivotal life stage to take seriously that they have their own traditions, backgrounds, histories, and, yes, identities, but to see their identities not as the limit of their inquiry, but as the basis for it. They are not landing pads but launching pads.

The English word “education” comes from the Latin educere, which means “to lead out.” What this usually is taken to mean is movement in the vertical direction, a rising above the mundane to a higher plane that allows one to see things more clearly, more purely, like Plato’s cave-dwellers ascending to see the sun. I prefer to think of the movements worth making as movements on the horizontal plane, as lateral displacements that enable us to consider our own world critically from the vantage point of another. In this way, we learn to see things not from above, but from aside.

My point is not that everyone should go on pilgrimage—or spend time in far-flung corners of the world, as anthropologists like me are privileged to do for a living. Lateral displacements can be made wherever in the world you happen to find yourself. All that is required is curiosity, courtesy, and a willingness to engage people whose backgrounds, perspectives, and life circumstances are different from your own. Increasingly we can find such people on our own streets and in our own communities.

The concern is real that in leaving our comfort zones we might make others uncomfortable. It is the height of hubris to assume those on the margins always care to dialogue with those in the center. But it would also be too bad if we allowed the legitimate concern for others’ autonomy and agency to rationalize our isolation and ignorance.