Tribalism

Tribalism January 18, 2007

To grasp what Rosenstock-Huessy says about tribalism, we need to recognize that he sees the tribe as one moment in the development of ancient civilization. In The Fruit of Lips, he describes the origin of the tribe: “The ancient cycle began in the primitive tribe, among a little group of frantic and frightened, yelling and bouncing men, who took heart, spoke and danced, and proceeded from fright, yelling and bouncing to an inspired view of life.” Tribes look back to the ancestors for guidance, and worshiping the spirits of the ancestors. They mark their bodies with tattoos to identify themselves, and engage in rituals and dances.


The second phase in the development of ancient man was the temple civilization, which “lifted the heart of man into the universe.” Tattoos on the body gave way to markings on the temple, and instead of the ancestors in the past they began to look above them to the sky for guidance. They became astrologers, and their kings were associated with Sun, Moon, and Stars. After temples came poetic civilization, the civilization of Homer and the Greeks, which looked to Nature. Greeks lived in cities and organized themselves by laws.

Israel is a final stream in this development. The other forms of civilization and speech aimed to rid the world of panic, but Israel saw that the world was still full of panic: “Israel saw that ritual contradicted ritual, and that neither temples nor tattoos nor poems ever would get outside their own local and temporal boundaries. So the more rituals and temples were built, or the more poems imagined, the greater became the confusion of tongues, the higher the tower of Babel. Israel withdrew from the world of Tohu and Bohu, of locally restricted myths.”

The Old Testament both takes up and negates tribe, temple, and poetry: “Israel built a temple, it is true, but they added that God did not live in it. Israel voided the temple. Israel circumcised her young men, it is true; but they did it to the child in the cradle, not to the initiate adolescent. In the clan’s fertility rites the boy was meant to become inspired as a bisexual being, by circumcision. Israel voided this rite. Israel wrote poems but she denied that she ‘made’ them; no idols or pictures made by men could be worshiper. She insisted that she was told by the living voice of God and that she replied. Israel voided the arts.” In voiding temple, tribe, and arts, she cleansed them “of their lure and charm as absolutes.” And instead of looking back to the ancestors, up to the sky, or out to nature, Israel looked ahead: “The real speech, Israel insisted, was yet to come. It only was heard by him who could hear the future, who could live as the listener of the revolving Eon, as the prophet of the future.”

Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes what he has to say about the development of speech and civilization in four points:

“1. Listeners to the spirits of the dead created Ritual.
2. Listeners to the skyworld and the cosmic universe built the temples.
3. Listeners to laws and cities already achieved became poets and artists.
4. Listeners to the future became prophets.”

His essay on tribalism in I Am An Impure Thinker should be understood in the context of this development.

He makes several basic points about tribalism. He defines a tribe as an “institution to create marriages” and families. The tribe is the eternal source of marriages, the marriages and families are the temporary product of the tribe. Families are not, he insists, eternal and it is heresy to say so: “When a man comes of age, the family must be second-rate, when we have children, we must give our parents the privilege of being grandparents to them, and that is how they reconquer their family status.” Tribes are permanent institutes for the creation of families, necessary as “a spring to supply water.”

Tribes are historical achievements, not “natural” or “animal” organizations. And the purpose of the tribe is not mere reproduction or breeding. When the tribe is seen as a biological entity only, that “leads inevitably to mother-worship and ancestor-worship in the most primitive sense.” Rather, the tribe creates marriages in which “one man and one woman can belong so close together that their children treat them as one.”

This occurs only as a man and woman stay with one another through and after a birth: “In nature, animals mate and their young forget who their parents were.” Human reproduction occurs when the parents remain past the birth. Marriage thus, Rosenstock-Huessy says, creates a “body of time.” This requires that the couple be married in the name of ancestors and that their marriage be public. This is a great act of power on the part of the couple. Two people marrying for love, he says, are unimpressive; it’s impressive, though, that “they have forced the community to say that these people are married.”

He points out that this has weakened significantly today, where private weddings before JPs are common; they cannot “force upon the community the esteem, the dignity, and the distinction which two people need to have a house of their own, to bring up their children as their own, to bestow upon their children their own name, and to have the authority, for example, to make the religion of their children their own decision.” With marriage comes the right of the parents to influence their children, including their children’s deepest beliefs. And the erosion of marriage means the erosion of this authority: What gives the parents the right to impose their religion on poor, unsuspecting kids? Parents have lost the power to “consecrate” their children, to give them a direction.

Consecration is a tribal right, and usually a rite. Tribal parents consecrate their children. Christianity does the same, but to the tribal consecration adds a universal note. A baptized child is not merely a member of the tribe, following the path set by the parents, but shares a faith and a path with many outside his own tribe. Strikingly, Rosenstock-Huessy says that European use of biblical names was a brake on tribal nationalism, and that soon after this customary naming ceased Europe fell into massive World Wars.

Rosenstock-Huessy notes several of the typical tribal practices. Tattoos, he says, are “the first writing of the tribe.” The tattoo signifies several things: Because the tribe moves, the tattoo is a permanent marker of identity and tribal association; tattoos are painful, and thus tattoos emphasize that “pain [is] the great memorizer”; through the pain of the tattoo, which marked the ancestry and membership of the tribe member, he moves from nature to history.

Tattoos are also taboo: “One’s tattoo shows that he cannot marry those who have exactly the same tattoo, and in that way, inbreeding is excluded.” The tattoo thus is the marker of the great taboo of incest. Rosenstock-Huessy intriguingly defines incest as the “destruction of a sacred space inside of which the passions of sex shall not rage.” This is again a cultural, spiritual, and historical achievement, not a natural one. Incest is not taboo among chimps. But the taboo indicates that there are zones of life, relationships, that are not marked by sexual passion. In this “spare room” of incest-prohibition and chastity “man is unafraid of the other sex.” Chastity is “the creation or the division of the world of men into two spaces, one for sex, and the other for non-sex.”

He draws this out in several ways. With regard to families, this division of sexual and non-sexual relations is essential if the family is to remain a single body of time: &#8

220;Parents and children to each other form one body of time, and the consecration of the children makes it necessary that the father and mother remain to these children, father and mother.” Parents must leave their children to create a new generation: “We recognize in our daughter someone who must reach the future in freedom.” He notes that “It is no small matter, and quite unnatural, that for the last 8000 years parents have not slept with their children.” Even within a marriage, this division of sex/non-sex is necessary. A man’s wife must be a sister and mother as well as a bride: “A man has to have a sister and a bride in his heart before he can get married. If he is only expelling the sister or the mother by this woman, he can get a strumpet but not a wife.” Even if he gets married, he can still treat his wife as a strumpet, if he does know, and doesn’t let his wife know, that he knows the difference between sex and non-sex. Without that knowledge, a man may be physically potent, but he is not ready to get married; he is not ready to consecrate children.

In one of his provocative formulas, he says, “it is unimportant today whether people go to church or not, because everyone misunderstand the church anyway, but it is terribly important that people should rediscover their divinity in this power to be alternatingly a lover and a brother. It is the sovereignty of man, that by the simple word ‘sister,’ he can suddenly see in his sweetheart a human being who is not dependent on his lust.” Psychoanalysis undoes 8 millennia of history, telling us that it’s normal that “the mother is an object of lust.”

Rosenstock-Huessy also makes the suggestive comment that there is something odd and even perverse about first naming a woman “sister” and then desiring her sexually. It was the wisdom of the tribe to divide the tribe into marriage groups, so that men would marry when they love a woman they have seen for the first time. He comments on the suburban phenomenon of boys and girls growing up together and then falling inn love: “by marrying the girl with whom we went to school from our eighth to thirteenth year, we may already be making a mistake, because we have first called her as a fellow child, and as a classmate and a playmate, and such a prior relationship is not the true origin of marriage.” Inbreeding is a product of schools as much as of the family. We are lukewarm in loving our spouses because we are inbred; we all marry “sisters.”

Finally, Rosenstock-Huessy comments on the connection of tribalism and animals. Tribes take the names of animals, often dressing themselves as animals, and in this way they admit their “dependence on the universe, on the existing cosmic order.” This is not an abstract dependence: Paths through the wilderness were first traced by animals, and men followed in their steps. “The first five days of creation,” he suggests, “are much more with modern man than he cares to admit.”

“Path,” he says, summarizes the “political understanding of tribalism”: “The tribes tried to find paths in the jungle, paths in time, paths in the thicket, and that is why going upstream following the watercourses, or following the paths of the wild animals, was the first political power that enabled these groups to become a little larger than the small group of husband, wife and children.” Tribes honor animals for this reason, that the animals were fore-runners, greater than man, as expressed in the ancient belief in animal-like spiritual beings like sphinxes and cherubim.

The institutions of the tribe – tattoo, totem, incest rules – have one problem at their heart: “How do two people so fall in love, that their marriage means more than the satisfaction of their momentary lust?”


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