| Abstract: | Tribalism gets a very uneven press in the US, particularly in the present political climate. Images of tribes as exclusionary and pugnacious are both misleading and injurious. After briefly surveying some of the common misuses of the category, the article suggests that a view of tribes as characterized by their qualities of shape‐shifting, openness, and suspicion of power leads not only to a reconceptualization of a category worth maintaining by anthropologists but a realization, as Justice Cardozo said, that analogies can begin by assisting us only to end by enslaving us. |
