When you hear the word “tribe” whats the first thing that comes to your mind. You might think of primitive humans from centuries ago and so did I, but the word means a lot more than that. Tribalism is used to define a group of people who are connected in some way and normally have a leader. With this in mind we can see tribalism in many forms throughout our society. In PLP 11 we took a look at what tribalism is in society. 

“Jonestown”

One of the things we started on, with no prior idea of what was going on. Was to be left alone. A groups of teenagers given a rather simple task, but left in complete isolation from the authority of teachers. Given the ability to govern ourselves how would we tackle the task of organizing into groups. Well, rather decently actually well when compared to the other story’s we’ve heard of people going completely mad and jumping on tables screaming at one another. This was a pretty well done social experiment, we saw from the very start of the project the core idea we would focus on in our reading of lord of the flies by William Golding.

There were two main parts to our project, LOTF reading and analysis and a real tribe and its role on society. For the real tribes I was in a group with Maggie and Daniel and we chose to research the Jonestown Massacre and the Peoples Temple. We had to make an 8 minute long presentation on the tribe, this wasn’t my best part of the project personally. While I researched it a lot before going in to the presentation I completely messed my presentation and most certainly stumbled over myself. So I think Id rather talk about the rest of the project with the failure on my part here.

I was supposed to cover the effect that tribalism has on society and what the role of the peoples temple was in society as a tribe. Very clearly as seen in the video I wanted to convey how the peoples temple has become famous in culture as a warning for the dangers of the tribalism mindset.

Heres a video of our presentation 

I definitely spent more time on the other part of the project which was on William Golding’s Lord of the flies. I really enjoyed reading the book, I don’t really read for the message behind everything or pay attention to the smallest of scenes in the way I did with Lord of the Flies. There were so many small parts that foreshadowed, hinted at and supported the core message that the book cantered around. That of the disconnect from society and how it influences tribes of people.

We were given a lot of work around analyzing that text and I’m pretty proud of my abilities with some of it. I felt that I was able to clearly understand the messages being portrayed and I showed that in the many paragraphs I wrote on the subject. This is something I actually found really entertaining and the tests, except for the second one that the entire class sucked on were all pretty easy.

There wasn’t really that much presentable work that I could show here for the project as the main part were the tests that we did, and while the presentation didn’t go that well I can say I have a good understanding of the role the tribes play in our society.