Radical tribes at warre: Primitivists on the net

W hy "tribes"? In the anthropological tradition, a tribe was a sociopolitically homogenous and autonomous group. Its members shared patterns of speech, basic cultural characteristics, and a territory. Today the term is universally used and universally undefined. Obviously, there is something in the word that appeals to the imagination: perhaps the idea that we can escape the atomized mass and reconstitute earlier, stronger ties between individuals. In order to understand the formation of online tribal identity, I use the concepts of "boundary" and "field" to analyze economic and political aspects of tribalism in anarcho-primitivist networks.