One challenge Sebastian Junger faced as he wrote Tribe was how to use observation, intuition, or indirect evidence to prove a point. A common tactic he used in such situations was to note the absence of an expected observation and use this absence as a compelling starting point for answering a difficult question or making a challenging point.
A good example was how he approached the question – what is missing in life? Junger thought a good way to find possible answers was to observe what spontaneously arose when life was disrupted. Another example was how he studied emigration patterns for hints about what people value when they make major changes. The most startling such example was his note that on the American frontier, settlers often joined Indians yet Indians never joined settlers.
Junger also does very well throughout Tribe in sifting through observational data to make comparisons across groups that are nearly identical save for one attribute that is obviously different. I liked his comment that Northern European societies (and the USA) are among the first in human history to force small children to sleep by themselves and that they are also the only societies where small children bond intensely with stuffed animals. He uses a related technique when he notes that veterans report similar trauma rates irrespective of whether they actively participated in combat, an observation that suggests reentry to society is a much more significant issue for veterans than is commonly acknowledged.
Footnotes / leftover thoughts
0. Two more…
Another thought from Tribe that follows the theme of this post was how the way people miss aspects of a war suggests there is an underlying problem with the way we experience peace.
I also referenced in my original reading review that people who do not sacrifice for the group are unlikely to receive full acceptance from the group. To add to that thought, it is possible that if many or most people who are allegedly in the group do not sacrifice for it, then it is likely the case that the group in question does not actually exist.
