tribalism

UK/ˈtɹaɪ.bə.lɪ.zəm/US/ˈtɹaɪ.bə.lɪ.zəm/

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — tribe sits at #3,258leans written

Tribalism is strong loyalty to your own group against outsiders. Political tribalism.

It is nearly always used as a criticism of somebody else's loyalty. Tribalism is easy to produce in a laboratory, since people take sides over almost nothing.

Definitions of tribalism

1nountribalismStrong loyalty to your own group against outsiders.C1
“The tribalism of the debate made agreement impossible.”

tribalism is a loyalty.

Where it comes from

German
Stammesgeschichte
Latin
tribālis
English
tribal
English, today
tribalism

From tribal + -ism. tribal comes from Latin tribālis. by surface analysis, tribe + -al, first attested in the 1630s. The specific adjectival sense under the defunct theory of recapitulation derives from tribal history as an overly literal German Stammesgeschichte; ordinarily, Stamm would only be translated as tribe when used in its ethnographic sense.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

tribalism in the wild

As a social phenomenon, this tendency can manifest itself as an unwillingness to adopt an idea or product because it originates from another culture, a form of tribalism.
Not invented here
With a negative connotation and in a political context, tribalism can also mean discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out-groups, based on in-group loyalty.
Tribalism
The separate tribal organisations were to retain their identity, and so KADU from its very start based its political approach on tribalism.
Kenya African Democratic Union
Somaliland has a multi-party system, with a constitutional limit of three official parties at the national level as an attempt to avoid political tribalism.
List of political parties in Somaliland
New tribalism is a theory by queer Chicana feminist Gloria E.
New tribalism

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the tribālis family

tribal

tribalism — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

tribe

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