I don't have a problem with an interest in tribes as part of a serious anthropological discussion or trying to interpret Scientology in terms of tribes. I do have a problem with the deliberate attempt to introduce the subject with a postmodernist reinterpretation of what tribe means in a political context at a time when relativists want to define a given political orientation in a way that serves their attainment of power. I also do not like the way this postmodernist dig was introduced into the thread and then an attempt is made to confer validity to this obvious insertion of identity politics by association with legitimate anthropology. There are two distinctly different ideas presented in the OP. One is Tribalism as Postmodernist Identity Politics and the other is Tribalism as Anthropology. Postmodernist anthropologists deliberately set out to conflate the two just as this thread does.
I seriously doubt Hubbard could have gotten as far as he did were it not for postmodernism. By the 1950s and especially the 1960s the culture was steeped in relativism and we did not apply strict objective standards to our acceptance of his ideas. I think this is the greatest common denominator in people who become Scientologists and retain an adherence to Hubbard's ideas long after they become alienated from the organization. I fully expect postmodernist Scientologists to remain postmodernist exes. I expect that because postmodernism is in great part by definition the deliberate distortion of the language to serve the attainment of power and it is so pervasive that many postmodernists have no idea they are postmodernists. Hubbard's distortions of the language are entirely postmodernist relativism and just as postmodernists feel compelled to distort the meaning of "Tribe" Hubbard distorted the meaning of "Groups". He too leaned heavily on the valid field of anthropology as a subject to lend credibility to his reinterpretations.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018
/11/steven_hayward_dissects_the_left_behemoth.html
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If objectivity is impossible, if language is subjective or corrupt or determined purely by power-relations, if common deliberation is actually not possible, then it raises a stark question: Why exactly are we having this conversation? More importantly, how are we having this conversation?
The radical skepticism of critical theory should be contrasted with oldfashioned Socratic skepticism. Socratic skepticism begins with the famous axiom, “I know that I know nothing,” which is meant to indicate a complete openness to being, a quest that begins always with the question, “What is. . .” about everything.
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Postmodern skepticism evinces the exact opposite: I know that nothing can be known. Few postmodern thinkers say this very directly or necessarily think this explicitly, but when you try to take in the layer upon layer of the complications critical theorists lay down in the path to understanding anything, it amounts to the same thing.
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy
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Postmodernism and relativism
As indicated in the preceding section, many of the characteristic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some form of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It should be noted, however, that some postmodernists vehemently reject the relativist label.) Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some things with certainty; and that there are objective, or absolute, moral values. Reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by discourses; hence they can vary with them. This means that the discourse of modern science, when considered apart from the evidential standards internal to it, has no greater purchase on the truth than do alternative perspectives, including (for example) astrology and witchcraft. Postmodernists sometimes characterize the evidential standards of science, including the use of reason and logic, as “Enlightenment rationality.”
he broad relativism apparently so characteristic of postmodernism invites a certain line of thinking regarding the nature and function of discourses of different kinds. If postmodernists are correct that reality, knowledge, and value are relative to discourse, then the established discourses of the Enlightenment are no more necessary or justified than alternative discourses. But this raises the question of how they came to be established in the first place. If it is never possible to evaluate a discourse according to whether it leads to objective Truth, how did the established discourses become part of the prevailing worldview of the modern era? Why were these discourses adopted or developed, whereas others were not?
Part of the postmodern answer is that the prevailing discourses in any society reflect the interests and values, broadly speaking, of dominant or elite groups. Postmodernists disagree about the nature of this connection; whereas some apparently endorse the dictum of the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” others are more circumspect. Inspired by the historical research of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, some postmodernists defend the comparatively nuanced view that what counts as knowledge in a given era is always influenced, in complex and subtle ways, by considerations of power. There are others, however, who are willing to go even further than Marx. The French philosopher and literary theorist Luce Irigaray, for example, has argued that the science of solid mechanics is better developed than the science of fluid mechanics because the male-dominated institution of physics associates solidity and fluidity with the male and female sex organs, respectively.
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Because the established discourses of the Enlightenment are more or less arbitrary and unjustified, they can be changed; and because they more or less reflect the interests and values of the powerful, they should be changed. Thus postmodernists regard their theoretical position as uniquely inclusive and democratic, because it allows them to recognize the unjust hegemony of Enlightenment discourses over the equally valid perspectives of nonelite groups. In the 1980s and ’90s, academic advocates on behalf of various ethnic, cultural, racial, and religious groups embraced postmodern critiques of contemporary Western society, and postmodernism became the unofficial philosophy of the new movement of “identity politics.”