The tribal metaphor has been popular since the counter-culture of the 1960s as a reaction against technocracy / industrial society. Re online tribes, I was inspired by "pomo" sociologist Michel Maffesoli and his concept of neo-tribalism on the one hand and by 1970s radical anthropologist Pierre Clastres and his ideas around non-leadership in amazonian tribes (?) on the other to use the term - a bit later than Jeremy says though ;-) First in a collection edited by Ty Adams, Electronic Tribes (U of Texas Press) I wrote about people who actually want to return to their understanding of a "tribal", non-industrial way of life, i.e. primitivists, yet they have websites etc. Then I wrote a book about leadership/authority in anti-authoritarian online environments such as FLOSS, blogs, wikis called Cyberchiefs (Pluto Press). Tribes as stateless and anti-authoritarian forms of collective organisation. However I have found that the term is ambiguous and evokes very strong reactions from anthropologists for a variety of reasons so I now only use sociological / org science terminology to analyse online forms of organisation. hth, cheers Mathieu On 01/10/13, Jeremy hunsinger <jhunsinger@wlu.ca> wrote:
I've used the sociological literature by Zymunt Bauman and others to talk about tribes and neo-tribes in online environments in a forthcoming book, but that is a very specific argument about governance that I'm making, but I think both tribes and neo-tribes were fairly well known concepts to be applied in cyberculture in the mid '90s to early 2000's then they fell out of favor. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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