by Raven Glomus
Communal living is important.
It’s what this blog is all about and it is how, I believe, we are meant to live. At the same time, many people find communal living hard and new communities fail at a rapid rate.
On Facebook I started exploring this paradox over several posts. In this one I decided to look at why, if we are tribal animals, communal living doesn’t come naturally.
Yes, I got thirty-one responses (actually, a few of the responses were mine, responding to other comments). Here are a lot of them, beginning with a quick response from Nyle Alantin, followed by a two part comment from Lucy Perry, which elicited a much longer comment from Allen Butcher.
Then there was a back and forth between Zamin Danty and me:
Then Katya Slepoy stepped in, eliciting reponses from Theresa, me, Allen, Rejoice, and Dina Ciccarone.
Then Allen wrote an extremely long comment that got a response from Delaney Calyx which elicited two more comments from Allen:
Finally, another commenter, Mary Hall stepped in and started a back and forth with me and Allen.
commune life 
One thing I think is overlooked with tribal communities is the nomadic/migrant nature of the human as animal. In order to truly function naturally, we keep moving. With our whole tribe.
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[…] I have written that I believe that humans (along with our close cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos) are tribal animals. We are meant to live in groups and nuclear families (not to mention loads of folks living in […]
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[…] Lately I have been reading a lot about what has been called “evolutionary biology” or “evolutionary psychology”. I just finished (at least much of) Trust and Reciprocity, a book edited by Elinor Ostrom and James Walker, and I’m currently reading Sapien: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal (a primatologist who also had a chapter in Trust and Reciprocity). All this has gotten me thinking once again about how humans evolved to live tribally and why we don’t anymore. […]
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