Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Author site

This book reflects upon how we are evolutionarily optimized to live in tribal communities, and how life in super-tribal societies (ones in which no one can know everyone else, where one has no shared fate, and where – for better or worse – one can easily end up invisible) is doing us in. The book sprang from an article Junger wrote about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD,) an affliction Junger found himself with after working as a war correspondent in Afghanistan (pre-911) and elsewhere. It might seem like there is a large leap from human social structures to PTSD, but it turns out where a community’s experience is all tied together, PTSD is relatively rare and / or fades quickly. It is because the afflicted soldier is going from the tribal entity (military unit) back to a decidedly conflicted super-tribe that trauma is so pernicious. Junger explores cases such as the bombing of London in WWII and the shelling and sniper attacks in Bosnia in the 90’s, where such afflictions were far rarer than one would expect because there was — to some degree — a shared experience of the traumatic events.

I found this book fascinating. It’s quite short. It has just four chapters. The first discusses the importance of tribe in human development, generally. It then looks at war, PTSD, and the challenge of returning home (and why so many soldiers have such difficulty doing so, though one would expect a peaceful world would be decidedly preferrable to a warring one.)

I found this book to be gripping and intensely thought-provoking, and I’d recommend it for all readers.

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