Quotes About Tribal Culture

“In addition, the most reliable and recent studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were simply experiencing a condition here that they would otherwise experience, probably in more oppressive fashion, in their mother country.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

“The culture in which you parent, mentor, or educate boys exhorts them to be individualistic and group-oriented at once, but does not give them a tribal structure in which to accomplish both in balance. It used to be that the tribe formed a boy's character while the peer group existed primarily to test and befriend that character. Nowadays, boys' characters are often formed in the peer group. Mentors and intimate role models rarely exist to show the growing boy in any long-term and consistent way how both to serve a group and flourish as an independent self.”

— Michael Gurian

“Counter-culture celebrates the supposedly natural life of primitive peoples. Its members wear beads, headbands, body paint, and colorful tattered clothing; they yearn to be a tribe. They seem to believe that tribal peoples are nonmaterialistic, spontaneous, and reverently in touch with occult sources of enchantment ...”

— Marvin Harris

“Oh, no, no, you've got that all wrong. You're not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they're idiots. Especially if they're idiots. You can't just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they're crazy.”

— Sherman Alexie

“But happiness is a difficult thing-it is, as Aristotle posited in The Nicomachean Ethics, an activity, is is about good social behavior, about being a solid citizen. Happiness is about community, intimacy, relationships, rootedness, closeness, family, stability, a sense of place, a feeling of love. And in this country, where people move from state to state and city to city so much, where rootlessness is almost a virtue ("anywhere I hang my hat ... is someone else's home"), where family units regularly implode and leave behind fragments of divorce, where the long loneliness of life finds its antidote not in a hardy, ancient culture (as it would in Europe), not in some blood-deep tribal rites (as it would in the few still-hale Third World nations), but in our vast repository of pop culture, of consumer goods, of cotton candy for all-in this America, happiness is hard.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

“It's not enough to say it's shocking, it's appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more homogenous culture than ours. As well, their interest lay not in the individuation of the person but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world.”

— James Hollis

“I have great respect for Oklahoma's tribal members, and I celebrate their traditions and culture.”

— Mary Fallin

“I come from a time when every kid dressed up. Everybody. If you didn't, you wouldn't be able to hang out. It was very tribal. There's nice things in that. It's culture; it's roots for me.”

— Paul Weller

“Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.”

— Richard Flanagan

“I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.”

— Sherman Alexie

“Electronic culture created soulless replacements for connective rituals- television supplanted tribal legends told by the fire; 'fast food' consumed in distraction took the place of a shared meal. We substituted matter for Mater (feminine principle), money for mother's milk, objects for emotional bonds.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Gangs have always existed - they are primarily a community a young men trying to find intensity, meaning, a path to the outer world (outside of home) that most tribal groupings addressed with rituals, rites of passage, initiation ceremonies. We've lost this knowledge as a culture.”

— Luis J. Rodriguez

“In many tribal cultures, it was said that if the boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped by the skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture. If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth.”

— Michael Meade

“Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native [sic] Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.”

— Bryan Fischer

“Who could deny that privacy is a jewel? It has always been the mark of privilege, the distinguishing feature of a truly urbane culture. Out of the cave, the tribal teepee, the pueblo, the community fortress, man emerged to build himself a house of his own with a shelter in it for himself and his diversions. Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need's sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place.”

— Phyllis McGinley

“The American Indian, once proud and free, is torn now between White and tribal values; between the politics and language of the White man and his own historic culture. His problems, sharpened by years of defeat and exploitation, neglect and inadequate effort, will take many years to overcome.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

“We celebrate Thanksgiving along with the rest of America, maybe in different ways and for different reasons. Despite everything that's happened to us since we fed the Pilgrims, we still have our language, our culture, our distinct social system. Even in a nuclear age, we still have a tribal people.”

— Wilma Mankiller