Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging is a 2016 non-fiction book by Sebastian Junger. This guide is based on the 2016 first-edition hardback published in New York by Twelve/Hachette Book Group. Junger is a journalist, essayist, filmmaker, and best-selling author whose writing about dangerous work and the people who perform it has been credited with stimulating the “adventure non-fiction” genre. His first book, Perfect Storm: A True Story About Men Against the Sea, about six fishermen from Gloucester, MA who lost their lives during a storm in October 1991 off of the coast of Nova Scotia drew comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, as much for Junger’s penchant for directly drawn characters as for the timeless trope of men facing mortality at sea. In Tribe, he focuses much of his attention on the anthropology of soldiers returning from war as he examines the nature of identification and how people can integrate well into their societies.

Tribe consists of four concise chapters that explore how tribal society sustains human life, on the one hand, and on the other, the manifold evidence that modern society threatens the viability of what matters most to humanity—the soul. Chapter 1, “The Men and the Dogs,” centers around the historical observation that American colonists abducted by Native Americans often did not wish to be repatriated, choosing instead to remain with their new tribal society. To the modern reader, this phenomenon appears contradictory at best, and absurd at worst.

Chapter 2, “War Makes You Animal,” begins with the notion that war has traditionally marked a passage into adulthood for human societies, but it ends up with a more unexpected and complex observation that societies are most human when faced with epic calamities such as war. Chapter 3, “In Bitter Safety I Awake,” discusses post-traumatic stress disorder and how its incidence and duration are less a function of violence and more the result of how society recognizes the survivor’s experience.

Chapter 4, “Calling Home From Mars,” explores the inside-out experience of returning home from a warzone. Where non-veterans assume that veterans are traumatized by their distant experiences in the war theater, Junger posits the opposite: that the isolation veterans commonly endure at home is not a sign of past trauma, but rather a symptom of the disconnectedness of modern society itself. The difference-maker in each chapter, therefore, is the nature of the tribe.