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State of being organized by, or advocating for, tribes or tribal lifestyles
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Tribalism is the state of being organized by, or advocating for, tribes or tribal lifestyles. Human evolution has primarily occurred in small hunter gatherer groups, as opposed to in larger and more recently settled agricultural societies or civilizations. With a negative connotation and in a political context, tribalism can also mean discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out groups, based on in group loyalty.

The social structure of a tribe can vary greatly from case to case. The relatively small size of customary tribes results in a social life which usually involve a relatively few significant political or economic distinctions between individuals. As a result, social hierarchy is uncommon, and deep bonds are made between individual members. A tribe often refers to itself using its own language's word for "people", and refers to other, neighboring tribes with various words to distinguish them as other. For example, the term "Inuit" translates to "people".

Tribalism implies the possession of a strong cultural or ethnic identity that separates one member of a group from the members of another group. Based on strong relations of proximity and kinship, as well as relations based on the mutual survival of both the individual members of the tribe and for the tribe itself, members of a tribe tend to possess a strong feeling of identity. Objectively, for a customary tribal society to form there needs to be ongoing customary organization, inquiry, and exchange. However, intense feelings of common identity can lead people to feel tribally connected. The distinction between these two definitions of tribalism, objective and subjective, is an important one because while tribal societies have been pushed to the edges of the Western world, tribalism, by the second definition, is arguably undiminished. A few writers have postulated that the human brain is hard wired towards tribalism, but that claim is usually linked to equating original questions of sociality with tribalism.

Tribalism has a very adaptive effect in human evolution. Humans are social animals and ill equipped to live on their own. Tribalism and social bonding help to keep individuals committed to the group, even when personal relations may fray. That keeps individuals from wandering off or joining other groups. It also leads to bullying when a tribal member is unwilling to conform to the politics of the collective. Some scholars argue that inclusive fitness in humans involves kin selection and kin altruism, in which groups of an extended family with shared genes help others with similar genes, based on their coefficient of relationship (the amount of genes they have in common). Other scholars argue that fictive kinship is common in human organizations, allowing non kin members to collaborate in groups like fraternities. Socially, divisions between groups fosters specialized interactions with others, based on association: altruism (positive interactions with unrelated members), kin selectivity (positive interactions with related members) and violence (negative interactions). Thus, groups with a strong sense of unity and identity can benefit from kin selection behaviour such as common property and shared resources. The tendencies of members to unite against an outside tribe and the ability to act violently and prejudicially against that outside tribe likely boosted the chances of survival in genocidal conflicts. Modern examples of tribal genocide rarely reflect the defining characteristics of tribes existing prior to the Neolithic Revolution; for example, small population and close relatedness. According to a study by Robin Dunbar at the University of Liverpool, social group size is determined by primate brain size. Dunbar's conclusion was that most human brains can really understand only an average of 150 individuals as fully developed, complex people. That is known as Dunbar's number. In contrast, anthropologist H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth have done a variety of field studies in the United States that came up with an estimated mean number of ties, 290, roughly double Dunbar's estimate. The Bernard–Killworth median of 231 is lower because of upward straggle in the distribution, but it is still appreciably larger than Dunbar's estimate. Malcolm Gladwell expanded on this conclusion sociologically in his book, The Tipping Point, where members of one of his types, Connectors, were successful by their larger than average number of close friendships and capacity for maintaining them, which tie together otherwise unconnected social groups. According to such studies, then, "tribalism" is a hard to escape fact of human neurology simply because many human brains are not adapted to working with large populations. Once a person's limit for connection is reached, the human brain resorts to some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes and other simplified models to understand so many people.

Anthropologists engage in ongoing debate on the phenomenon of warfare among tribes. While fighting typically and certainly occurs among horticultural tribes, an open question remains whether such warfare is a typical feature of hunter gatherer life or is an anomaly found only in certain circumstances, such as scarce resources (as with the Inuit or Arabs) or only among food producing societies. Certain tribes use forms of subsistence such as horticulture and foraging that cannot yield the same number of absolute calories as agriculture. Those subsistance methods thus limit those tribal populations significantly, especially when compared to agricultural populations. Jesse Mathis writes in War Before Civilization that examples exist with low percentage rates of casualties in tribal battle, and some tribal battles were much more lethal as a percentage of population than, for example, the Battle of Gettysburg. He concludes that no evidence consistently indicates that primitive battles are proportionately less lethal than civilized ones.

Various authors, such as Aidan Southall, have attacked the notion of tribe as a tool of colonial ideology, and identified modern tribalism as a product of colonial governance in Africa. The Africa Policy Information Center describes the term, and tribalism in particular as a byword for ethnic strife, as invoking negative stereotypes of Africa as a land of primitive and territorial peoples. An April, 2021 article published in The Journal of Hospital Medicine titled "Tribalism: The Good, The Bad, and The Future" by Zahir Kanjee and Leslie Bilello of Harvard Medical School was retracted due to protest from readers over the use of the terms tribe and tribalism. The article was then republished with the title "Leadership and Professional Development: Specialty Silos in Medicine" along with an apology from the editor in chief. The revised version of the article substituted the terms groups and medical specialties for tribes, and siloed and factional for tribalism.