As a once-upon-a-time-student of anthropology, I remember that tribe is one of four major types of political organization; from least to most socially complex they are bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. I went looking up more today.
A tribe is of the order of a large collection of bands, but it is not simply a collection of bands. The ties that bind a tribe are more complicated than those of bands. Leadership is personal-charismatic-and for special purposes only in tribal society; there are no political offices containing real power, and a "chief" is merely a man of influence, a sort of adviser. The means of tribal consolidation for collective action are therefore not governmental.
Technically, the tribe is a group of bands. The tribe is, of course, a larger society tied together by familiar bonds. Family structures known as lineages, clan, moieties, and phratries form the primary bonding mechanisms. The local groups that compose a traditional tribal society are communal and strongly social, with members linked by kinship ties.
Tribes have developed kin-based mechanisms to accommodate more sedentary life, to redistribute food, and to organize some communal services. Public opinion plays a major role in decision making.
Tribal people tend to think in certain ways. They tend to be egalitarian, think humans are part of nature itself, the world is composed of dualities that form a harmony, and life is designed to work for the good of the community - good of the whole. Tribal people also stress consensus in determing what is good for the whole. ~ Cultural Science Dept, Mesa Community College
Even before I was an anthropology student, I read a book by Chinua Achebe entitled, Things Fall Apart. It is about the clash of cultures and the destruction of a tribal world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. The title of the book came from a W.B. Yeats poem:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That thirty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
~ W.B. Yeats, 1919
All of this post STARTED because while I don't have the poem memorized, there are four lines that have been stuck in my mind since high school and I find them dreadfully applicable to my mood today:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
There are deep and intensely personal pieces of the puzzle that I cannot share, but I definitely feel that things are falling apart. I am a part of it...at the center of it...and I feel completely helpless to DO anything. I'm afraid my tribe is about to shatter. What will be let loose if it does?
In ceramics there are stages to throwing on a wheel. You begin with a lump of clay on a spinning disc and you apply pressure to center it. This requires constant and consistent pressure. Once centered you may begin to squeeze push and pull at your clay to create the form you desire. Different tools may be used to create different effects but it all comes down to consistent pressure.
ReplyDeleteThere are also moments when the clay takes on a mind of it's own. Where parts begin to sag or to fall off of the center. You have a couple choices at these points. You may crush it and start over. You may try to recover the form by carefully and firmly nudging it back into alignment at the risk of it flying off the wheel. Or you can accept that it's not going to look exactly as you planned and try to allow it to have a life of it's own.
I find, again and again in my own life, that the biggest disappointments are the ones were I give up and crush the creation. I have also found that some of the most beautiful are those where I allowed it to take on a life of it's own. I look at the real pots that have been kept or bought and we are drawn to those with imperfections.
It can be so difficult to do when you feel responsible, when you take some form of ownership over the end product. You want to nudge, you want to 'correct' it but some times doing so will only destroy the parts that would be beautiful if you just let it be what it wants to be.
Here I am speaking in analogy... what I mean to say is that *the* tribe is made of stronger stuff than you think. Allow that MCC is correct and that you don't own it but you help craft it. You can destroy it but you can also allow it to take on a life outside the bounds of some plan. You may find that what you end up with is a thing of real beauty. A true work of Art.