C05V-Tribal Mentality In The 21St Century

The workshop explores the relationship between thoughts, emotions and actions and how the human mind uses categories like race, gender and ethnicity. It looks at the reasons why humans are hardwired to sort everything into groups and associate in categories. It explains the differences between the tribal mentality, vital to survival of the human species in the past, to the current danger of incurring in racial, ethnic and cultural profiling. This is at the core of religious strife, political conflicts, and most rivalries. In many ways, it is at the core of the concepts of country and culture. Concepts that denote "my group", "my" religion, "my" race, "my" country are at the center of most conflicts in societies past and present. Now then, they exist because a long time ago, such things were useful, because we were surrounded by wild animals and needed to hunt, so group identification and cohesion was important for survival. The service of this tribal mentality is no longer valid and we must learn to proactively overcome the barriers it creates in our ability to engage in cross-cultural communication and healthy intercultural relationships.