Editor’s Note: As societies grapple with ecological, technological, and cultural transformation, new forms of community are emerging. Throughout this essay, the authors use the word tribes in this contemporary sense. The term is not intended to refer to Indigenous peoples or traditional tribal societies, but rather to evolving forms of human association that seek collective meaning in a rapidly changing world.

Something important is unfolding. Across many parts of the world, people, communities, and networks are searching for different ways of relating to one another, to technology, to place, and to the living world. Beneath political polarisation and institutional instability, deeper cultural and civilisational shifts are underway. The dominant paradigm of modernity, shaped around extraction, acceleration, and separation, brought considerable advances and material benefits, yet it also leading to its exhaustion. Returning to normality is not an option.

As ecological, political, and technological systems come under increasing pressure, people are also reorganising themselves around smaller and more meaning-driven forms of belonging. These new tribal forms are adaptive social forms shaped by trust, memory, reciprocity, and shared practices. In a fragmented environment, they may function as Islands of Coherence (as described by I. Prigogine): spaces where relationships, commons-based approaches, and collective responsibility can be cultivated across both physical and digital environments. Increasingly, these formations intersect with artificial intelligence, bioregional approaches, and other emerging dynamics, suggesting possible pathways towards more regenerative and relational forms of social organisation.

From Unravelling to Retrospective Coherence

Modernity comes to an end, the result of ecological disruption, mental health pressures, economic insecurity, geopolitical instability, social fragmentation, and accelerating technological change.

At the same time, a broader civilisational shift is already underway (see Fig. 1): from more individualised and static understandings of reality towards relational and dynamic ways of perceiving and organising, with contemporary tribes potentially acting as one of its vectors. In periods of systemic transition, existing structures often begin to destabilise before new forms emerge. The challenge is about learning how to remain present within uncertainty and disintegration without collapsing into denial and fear. Such a period also calls for attention and compassion towards those most affected by the unravelling.

An eco-civilisation grounded in interdependence and regeneration is emerging. Yet such a horizon also requires social forms to be lived and practised. Tribes and commons-based approaches are complementary and offer shared spaces of meaning, stewardship, collective responsibility around resources, knowledge, and infrastructures. More broadly, the question concerns how societies increasingly shaped by complexity and Artificial Intelligence acceleration generate retrospective coherence.

Table 1. Current Forms of Civilization

Tribes are Islands of Coherence, spaces within broader conditions of instability where values, and shared practices align sufficiently to sustain collective meaning and action. Within this shifting landscape, tribes are relational entities capable of reconnecting human systems with wider ecological and social dynamics.

Contemporary Tribal Forms

The re-emergence of tribes is not a romantic return to pre-modern life. Tribes can instead be understood as social formations held together by meaning, trust, memory, and practices. They may be territorial or translocal, embodied or digital, ancestral or newly formed. Their boundaries are porous, yet their internal coherence remains strong.

Recent developments in archaeology and anthropology increasingly challenge the familiar narrative of linear progress, according to which humanity evolved from “primitive” tribes towards advanced civilisation through agriculture and  urbanisation. Many early societies displayed sophisticated forms of cooperation, ritual depth, artistic expression, ecological knowledge, and at times relatively egalitarian social structures. The past contains forms of relational and interdependent intelligence that modernity has partially neglected or displaced.

Tribes are not inherently regenerative. They can become exclusionary or authoritarian, reproducing inequalities linked to gender, class, race, or generation. Tribal dynamics may also fuel conspiracy, criminality, or extremist mobilisation. Religious tribes deserve attention in this context: they can sustain faith, moral orientation, and intergenerational transmission, while also requiring vigilance against dogmatism, exclusion, abuse of authority, or political capture.

Emerging tribes are also increasingly multi-generational and multi-cultural. Their origins are diverse: climate activism, digital communities, diaspora networks, food systems, creative initiatives, cooperative enterprises, spiritual practices, neighbourhood resilience, transformative thinking, or mentoring. Creating resonance and cooperation without erasing difference is what matters.

Over recent decades, the emergence of the Cultural Creatives has pointed towards broader transformations in values and social orientation across many societies. Found in both industrialised and developing countries, these loosely connected cultural constellations often share ecological awareness, relational sensibilities, and a search for more meaningful ways of inhabiting the world. Their emergence suggests that populations sometimes evolve more rapidly than the institutional, political, and media systems meant to represent them.

Table 2. Contemporary Tribal Forms and Their Civilisational Dynamics

Commons, Territory, and Relational Life

Tribes become civilisational when they move beyond identity and begin to function as forms of stewardship. Such tribes provide trust, meaning, and commons-based practices. The commons transform shared energy into shared responsibility.

Place matters in bioregionalism through living constellations of watersheds, soils, species, settlements, livelihoods, and cultural memory. Tribes then become patterns of relationship that sustain continuity, belonging, and shared experience. Bioregional approaches also require coordination across scales: cosmo-localisation offers a promising path by connecting local resilience with global knowledge-sharing and cooperation, where experiments gain wider influence as they connect across networks.

Several new tribal forms already influence global affairs. Diasporas, global influencer networks, faith-based communities, AI-enabled groups, and even destructive tribes increasingly shape transnational identity, coordination, and conflict. Tribes can thus become channels for a global dialogue between different worldviews.

In this international role, tribes may increasingly become catalysts for meaningful dialogue across cultures, sectors, and scales. Future institutions may emerge less from inherited bureaucratic arrangements and more from meaningful international conversations capable of generating trust, legitimacy, and shared purpose across diverse communities.

Indigenous traditions remind us that beauty resides in the quality of relationships woven between people, land, memory, and life itself. From this perspective, aesthetics becomes inseparable from stewardship and wisdom. Within this broader pattern, tribes and commons reflect a double movement: tribes cultivate meaning, trust, and forms of belonging, while commons create the shared conditions through which value, reciprocity, and collective responsibility are regenerated. Indigenous cultures develop multiple narratives which go beyond the danger of a single story.

The metaphor of an archipelago can be seen in indigenous traditions where each island retains its identity through relationships rather than existing independently. Among the Blackfoot Nation, people traditionally ask, “How are the connections?” rather than “How are you?” The African philosophy of Ubuntu offers a similar insight: “I am because you are, and you are because I am.” Buddhism and traditional Chinese thought likewise emphasise the interconnectedness of individuals, communities, and the living world.

AI, Attention, and the Conditions for Wisdom

Artificial intelligence does not emerge in an empty space. It is part of the cultural infrastructure through which attention, meaning, and social life are organised. It develops within institutions, incentives, and worldviews already shaped by extraction, acceleration, and prediction. If AI remains embedded in these logics, it will scale them further.

Tribes, as spaces of shared values and symbolic resonance, help us re-inhabit meaning against the abstraction of algorithmic systems. They can be understood as adaptive archipelagos of hybrid intelligence across time and space, where meaning is cultivated through lived experience rather than mined from data alone. Each tribe is a node in a wider federated network, developing contextual experience. Individual wisdom is then cultivated to contribute to a distributed archipelago of relational wisdom.

Such an evolving archipelago of wisdom may offer a way of staying in relationship with uncertainty, resisting the urge to close things down too quickly while also avoiding withdrawal when clarity is not yet available. In this respect, AI can expand what tribes are able to perceive, but it does not determine what should be done.

AI can support tribes when treated as a bounded tool rather than as a substitute for human interdependence. Yet accelerated informational environments can weaken attention, reduce relational depth, and make collective meaning more fragile. The challenge is therefore not only technological but anthropological: how human beings continue to cultivate attention, memory, judgement, and meaningful forms of relationship under conditions of permanent cognitive acceleration.

Technologies scale through iteration and optimisation, while wisdom emerges through care, lived experience, and intergenerational transmission. AI alone will not make us wiser; the question is which patterns it amplifies, and whether the conditions for wisdom can improve within accelerated environments. Decentralised AI, hybrid intelligence, and wisdom-fostering AI agents offer a promising path, provided they remain embedded within living communities. In this sense, tribes matter as islands of coherence: spaces where humans and AI co-evolve through dialogue and accountability.

Attractors of Tribal Emergence

Social systems also reorganise around centres of gravity for meaning and practices –attractors. Some attractors are mighty: climate disruption encourages local resilience, mutual aid, and bioregional stewardship (Table 2). Digital life creates new communities of affinity, while also introducing new risks of manipulation and enclosure. Cultural memory and diaspora sustain identity across distance. Food communities reconnect ecology, health, and place. The search for meaning gives rise to retreats, circles, intentional communities, and spiritual experimentation. Even parts of the private sector are beginning to express more regenerative and post-competitive values.

Yet tribal emergence is also influenced by symbolic, aesthetic, and emotional forms of experience. Artists increasingly reveal these deeper dimensions through evolving relationships between art, science, and technology. Artistic practices do not simply entertain; they shape perception, memory, imagination, and the collective experience of meaning. In societies marked by acceleration, loneliness, and disembodiment, the arts may help restore forms of relational and existential depth. Yet the question remains: while the arts nourish societies, who nourishes the artist?

Not all attractors are regenerative. Some crystallise fear, resentment, or exclusion. A tribal perspective must distinguish between forms of coherence that heal and incoherent ones that harden into violence, particularly as AI increasingly amplifies narratives, identities, and collective intentions.

Table 3. Attractors of Tribal Emergence

Every attractor invites both opportunity and discernment. Can local resilience remain open to the wider world? Who should govern the digital common? What forms of community can replace narratives that no longer serve life? Can art and ritual become practices of collective renewal? How do we cultivate security without exclusion? And amid accelerating technological change, can we still preserve beauty, symbolic depth, and multisensory experience—and care for the artists who help us imagine what comes next?

Tribes as Islands of Coherence

Prigogine’s concept of islands of coherence is useful because it avoids both despair and naïve optimism. In turbulent systems, local zones of order can emerge. New tribal forms may function in this way when relationships, values, and shared practices align sufficiently to sustain collective meaning and action. As meaning-driven and self-organising communities, they can become spaces of order and regeneration within turbulence, where cultural diversity, spiritual insight, and technological imagination begin to form new civilisational patterns. The emergence of such islands has the power to shift entire systems, but is not sufficient on its own. What matters is how tribes relate, learn, and influence one another across time and space.

A food cooperative, eco-village, diaspora network, digital commons, mentoring circle, or territorial lab can become a small centre of coherence. None is sufficient alone, yet when connected with others they may generate wider patterns of trust, care, and coordination. Many contemporary tribes emerge from the search for spaces where relationships, embodied experience, and collective orientation remain possible.

The metaphor of islands of coherence also clarifies the limits of the tribal idea. An island can become a refuge, but it can also become a fortress. Its value depends on permeability, humility, and the capacity to remain in relationship with other islands. The future is therefore not one tribe, but a constellation of differentiated communities capable of cooperation across difference.

Cultivating Regenerative Tribal Practices

Contemporary tribal forms may be understood as emerging relational responses within a broader civilisational transition marked by fragmentation, acceleration, ecological breakdown, and the exhaustion of modernity itself. More than by their identity structures, tribes matter as relational environments where collective awareness can still emerge under increasingly unstable conditions. Some tribes contribute to regenerative dynamics, while others may deepen fragmentation.

If new tribal forms are to become islands of coherence within an emerging eco-civilisation, their role cannot remain purely conceptual. The question becomes practical: what kinds of habits, infrastructures, and forms of attention can help communities sustain meaning, cooperation, and resilience under conditions of accelerating fragmentation? A more provocative question also arises: could emerging tribes be a reality we are failing to sense, functioning as early indicators of transformations that dominant institutions and narratives have not yet learned to see? They may reveal how far the stories we tell ourselves are misleading, incomplete, or simply illusions. The following practices are concrete orientations that communities can adapt to their own contexts.

Table 4: Regenerative Tribal Practices

Closing: Reweaving Meaning Through Tribes

As larger symbolic systems lose part of their stabilising power, many communities are searching for spaces where trust, memory, responsibility, and shared meaning can still be practised and transmitted. Some tribes may deepen exclusion, fear, and fragmentation. Others may contribute to more regenerative dynamics grounded in reciprocity, interdependence, and living systems. In this sense, tribes matter because they help reweave relationships between people, territories, technologies, cultures, economies, and the wider living world.

The question is therefore civilisational: Under accelerating technological, ecological, and cognitive pressures, how can human communities preserve the conditions through which meaning, discernment, responsibility, and collective wisdom continue to emerge?

In this context, tribes may play an important role as environments of transmission, embodied memory, relational depth, and collective sensemaking. They help sustain forms of attention, reciprocity, symbolic depth, and connection with life that increasingly fragile societies struggle to maintain. Ultimately, the future depends on sustaining the human capacity for meaning, wisdom, beauty, and relationship within a living Earth community. Regenerated tribes play an important role in this respect. And they already do.

We are grateful to: R. Nelson, M. Luyckx, Kosmos Journal, J. Lent, Ch. Eisenstein, R. Hames, J. Quilligan, V. Machado, J. Brewer, T. Yunkaporta, S. Magsamen/I. Ross, B. Lietaer, P. Ray, B. Latour, I. Prigogine, G. Pör, Schumacher Institute, and ChatGPT