Understanding my tribe, the Anglo-Saxons
Unlike race, which is a nonsense concept, tribes actually do exist. And that's because they're a social construct, like any type of group created by people, like nationality, or people who like to drive MGs. And since I can time-travel anywhere in this blog, today I thought it would be fun to go take a look at my tribe, the Anglo-Saxons.
It's been a very long time since that tribe existed, and really, you're talking about two tribes combined together, the Angles, and the Saxons. Yes, that's where we get the word "England". It could just have easily been "Saxonland". And of course my people didn't call themselves Angles, they were just "the people" - all tribes are "the people" to themselves, only outsiders give them names.
Of course, I have no written documentation that I'm from these tribes, I just know that my ancestry is from England, going back to the 1640s. In the days of King Arthur, there was no written language for my people, whom the Romans named the Britons, and there certainly wasn't anything written down before that time. But people lived there on that island. And as someone who has spent all of his adult life in Arizona, and Southern California, I often wonder why they chose to stay in a cold and rainy climate. But they probably had never even heard of the Riviera!
The easiest way to be accepted into a tribe is to be born into one, but there are other ways to join a tribe than blood. You can marry into it, or you can just be accepted. So there's no blood test for being part of a tribe, although for most people that tends to be the easiest way to determine it. I suppose that someone from the Italian Riviera could have journeyed up to this remote island a thousand years ago and become part of my tribe. Not likely, but possible.
So a tribe is a political construct, made up of a group of people who have similar goals, who trust each another. And like all tribes all over the world, my tribe protected their territory. So make no mistake, the invisible boundaries that the young King Arthur flew over in "The Once and Future King", were actually very visible to the people who protected those boundaries. A tribe's territory might extend to a river, or a particular clearing in the woods. My 21st Century eyes would never see it, but my ancestors eyes would have seen it with ease.
You can replace the word tribe with just about any word that describes a group of people who protect themselves. It can be a country, or it can be a gang, or it can be a club (I'm picturing an old treehouse club with the words "No girls" painted on a sign (with the S backwards of course). For some people it's their immediate family, or it could be just a spouse and their dog. I remain in the tribe of people who went to my high school, which is just one of many tribes to which I belong. I was a member of the tribe of people who lived at the apartment complex in Canoga Park in the 1980s, and I was called a "home boy", which I accepted with pride.
Anytime a group has accepted me I've worn it with pride. When I drove an MG I would always wave to fellow Morris Garagers. I had a shirt with the logo on it, and I would have been quick to stop and help anyone who needed to balance their SUs. I was polite, albeit a bit standoffish to people who considered their cars to be sports cars, but people who drove AMXs weren't part of my group. Of course, I would have welcomed them to the joy of owning a car that constantly broke down, but I know that for some people it was a difficult concept to understand.
And so, if you ask me if I'm proud of being part of the Anglo-Saxon tribe, of course I am. That's how tribes work.
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