NEO-Tribes

Neo-tribes was a term coined by the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli in the late 1980s and was his major contribution to debates surrounding the postmodern turn within contemporary society that came to prominence at that time. The term is used to highlight chosen or elective social groupings that people create with one another on the basis of a strong sense of shared emotion and feeling, often around a common interest. Maffesoli argues that emotional solidarity has become the basis for groupings where there is shared feeling and a coming together around some form of emotional solidarity and an associated set of markers of membership and identification ranging from values to styles of dress to common enthusiasms and hobbies.

Maffesoli's approach starts from the principle concerns of classic French sociology—how to maintain social solidarity in an increasingly individualizing and contractual society where older forms of belonging and community have been eroded. Emile Durkheim, the leading contributor to these debates in the 1890s, had argued that premodern society was premised on a form of social solidarity that he described as mechanical solidarity in which social ties were rooted in religion, custom, and tradition and were ascribed to individuals by their birth and social standing within such social conditions.

Modern society, with its complex division of labor and individualizing tendencies, undermines the conditions of mechanical solidarity, Durkheim believed, creating a potential condition of normlessness (anomie). The antidote for this, Durkheim argued, was to promote new forms of social solidarity, what he called organic solidarity, that were not founded in custom, tradition, and geographical community but rather in the modern, contractual forms of association that characterize modern society at its best. He imagined new forms of association based on civic ties that he described as corporations.

The position that Maffesoli takes up in relation to this Durkheimian view is to suggest that modern society has been characterized by mechanical solidarity too—it is as much ascribed in terms of the identities and forms of association people have available to them (mostly associated with such things as work roles, social class, and family tradition). Only as these ascriptive conditions break down with the beginnings of a postindustrial, postmodern society do we see the real beginnings of organic solidarity. But, Maffesoli believes, this will be based around emotional communities rather than the more formal civic associations that Durkheim imagined.

Neo-tribes for Maffesoli are, therefore, emotional communities that provide people with a sense of belonging and solidarity in a postmodern society. In sociological terms, they are achieved rather than ascribed, meaning that although they can provide a strong sense of belonging for members and group solidarity and rules can have a strong hold over individuals, one chooses to join or leave them in the way one does not do with family or social class. Neo-tribes make use of a symbolic language of membership associated with common lifestyle features, styles of dress, shared interests, and shared values. Typical examples of neo-tribes are youth groups, lifestyle enthusiasms, gangs, communes—in fact, any kind of grouping that is brought together around some kind of shared passion. There may be a New Age religious basis to that passion, a political motivation (often anarchist in character), or a consumer motivation based around common interests, fan culture, or even brands.

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