neo-tribalism

Rereading The Time of the Tribes – Thirty Years On

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by James Horrox

Towards the end of the 1970s, against the backdrop of the declining relevance of the collectivities that had shaped earlier generations’ conception of communal ties (class, nation, religion, and so on), Michel Maffesoli began using the terminology of ‘tribalism’ to describe what he saw emerging in their place. A new phase in the life of Western societies was underway, Maffesoli argued, the defining feature of which was the coalescence of a multiplicity of more fluid, nebulous communities, bound together primarily by shared emotion, feelings, lifestyles, passions and tastes. These social formations, whose existence, Maffesoli contends, refutes the prevailing belief in the rise of individualism, are symptomatic of a larger paradigm shift – from modernity to postmodernity – that is witnessing the collapse of the intellectual, social and political models associated with the modern era and the emergence of new ways of thinking and being.
      In France, Maffesoli has long enjoyed a degree of notoriety as something of a dissident public intellectual, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s, with the publication of the SAGE English edition of his magnum opus The Time of the Tribes (originally published in French in 1988), that he began to make an impact in Anglophone academia. With the majority of his sizable back catalogue still yet to be translated, The Time of the Tribes remains an essential introduction to the main themes in Maffesoli’s work – themes that are arguably more relevant today than at any point in the three decades since the book first appeared. Continue reading →

The Wild Mind of Michel Maffesoli

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Michel MaffesoliThe following interview first appeared in French in issue 42 of the journal Rebellion.

R / You were born in the South of France and grew up in the mining region of Graissessac (Hérault). What influence has this background had on your work and on your perception of academia?

MM — Indeed, my youth in the working-class village of Graissessac has certainly had an influence on my work, and on what we might call my perception of the world. As far as my work is concerned, I’ve talked about this in several of my books (see in particular the book of interviews with Christophe Bourseiller: Qui êtes vous Michel Maffesoli, Bourin Éditeur, 2010). The working-class milieu where I grew up taught me a sense of pride in one’s work — even a certain ‘addiction’ to it. It’s this, incidentally, that leads me to be so harsh in my judgment of those I call ‘pensioners of the Republic’, all these ineffective intellectuals and so-called researchers who never actually find anything.

At the same time, the atmosphere of the mining village gave me the sense of celebration and the ‘tragic’. So for example, the festival of Saint Barbara on December 4th was a paroxysmal moment, where effervescence in all its forms expressed itself with vigour over the course of an entire week. When I wrote L’ombre de Dionysos [The Shadow of Dionysus] (1982), I was trying to demonstrate the importance of passions and collective emotions in the organisation of the social bond. These festive phenomena, in every society, are corollaries of a sense of the tragic. It’s because of our ‘embedded knowledge’ that accident, death and finitude are always present that it’s possible in these moments to experience a heightening of the senses and a desire to fully enjoy the present. Continue reading →

Communitarianism or the Communitarian Ideal?

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by Michel Maffesoli

It’s a kind of mental laziness for which we risk paying a heavy price. A verbal tic, pervasive on both left and right, which consists in seeing ‘communitarianism’ everywhere. A foolish attitude – as if a matter would be resolved when we suppress it, artificially, by denying it – and an infantile one too, that of incantation: we repeat the words and think that by doing so we deal with the issue.

What of the facts? It was the grandeur of social organisation in modern societies that reduced everything to the unit. Erase differences. Standardise ways of being: a beautiful ideal, the Republic, One and indivisible. But – and not for the first time – we are witnessing a saturation of this unitary ideal. Heterogeneity is regaining force and vitality; reassertion of difference, diverse localisms, linguistic and ideological specificities forming around a common origin, real or mythical. All accentuate forms of life founded less in universal reason than in shared sentiment. Continue reading →