I was thinking, earlier, about tribes. Now, this word is too general, and obviously… can mean nearly anything. That said, I noticed that in our modern situations and circumstances, while we do not precisely have tribes, we have something that mimics them.

Originally, tribal identity appears to have been deeply associated with place. Which is also deeply associated with memory. And ancestors. But, over time, these tribes were displaced by something resembling a disease or crisis.

Today I was noticing that there are tribe-like (mimetic) cohorts, whose identifying criteria are not so much place… as they are ontologcial and/or epistemological »consonance.

That is to say, that people will recognize another as ‘one of us’ if their ontological and epistomological suppositions seem to match up, mostly.

Which is, of course, a feature of what we call ‘religions’.

Ontology can be described as ‘what things or situations are’. Epistomology is ‘how we know things’. I can see, in the modern electronic fake-society, how little para-tribes form… not necessarily from relationships (at all), but rather, from systems of belief or opinion… and their resulting worldviews.

As if our relationships with the living places, with timespace, with the world, with the animals and plants… were displaced.

And became thus disembodied.

By a peculiar species of terrain predator that appears in human populations as ideas about meaning, identity, evaluation, authority… and ‘knowledge’. So that now, ‘my people’ refers to those whose ontologies and epistomologies are similar to my own — regardless of how absurd, wrong, dissociated… or confused they may be.