Commentary: A cure for tribal politics? Try learning from actual 'tribal' people
The word "tribalism" has become shorthand for everything toxic and ugly about politics in the Trump era. It's meant to convey not just brute partisanship, but also how uncivilized and unthinking this divisiveness has made us.
There is good reason, though, to drop the metaphor. "Tribes" were rarely this polarized.
What's more, an understanding of actual social life among indigenous groups may be just the antidote to what ails us.
Anthropologists used to speak of tribes as
