The Moken are a tightly knit community. The first family that I met, with the two boats on the beach were in close physical contact. The two women held their children in a close embrace, and one of the women was actually massaging her young girl's head as the girl laid her head in her mothers lap. The young girl was very relaxed.
Later when I came into contact with the whole tribe, I found all the adults in a sort of Pow Wow in which they all talked casually in a circle. This way of close physical contact and connectedness is the way they spend their entire lives.
Alyette De Munck tells of one of his experiences with the Mbuti hunter/gatherer Pygmies of the Congo, where he observes the extensive amount of social cohesiveness, especially at the evening meal. He says, "Now I hope to understand these people better, when I sit among them in the evening by the fire their tongues will wag more freely."
The Mbuti are verbally expressive and social. Although the way they speak to each other is not always perfect, they do not hesitate to express feelings whatever they may be. De Munck tells of another moment in the early morning when the camp is waking up as the sun rises. "Young people are singing and talking. Women are reviving their fires under their pots. Suddenly I hear a violent quarrel. The Bambuti express their emotions very freely."
The Mbuti are a social people that not only talk often, but sometimes the children, for example, are in constant physical contact in which they walk around in permanent embrace. The children are in safe social units that protect themselves from any danger in the jungle. For these children, days are broken up into various social gatherings. The children wake up together, then they may have a group meal, and they may later join in a communal gathering of mushrooms with their mothers and aunts. At the end of the day there are together for an evening meal of recently caught deer and/or mushrooms. Then there is often dance in which everybody comes together to socialize around fires, make music and smoke.
The women are the verbally gifted coordinators of foraging activities, children's' welfare and their own domestic crafting at home in the camp. They are often found in constant verbal exchange, which creates a presence that is the social center and nucleus of the camp.
The men of course hunt together in social gatherings and must coordinate their hunting plans and information in order to achieve successful results. Hunters and Gatherers have oral tradition in which they pass down and teach each new generation an amount of knowledge, custom, and culture. For male hunters conversation is a necessity.
Native American male hunters of interior Alaska are known for their ecological knowledge, all based on a long oral verbal tradition. An ethnographer who lives among them, Richard Nelson, explains in his ethnographies that the expert Koyukon has large amounts of information, all passed down generation after generation, that the hunter receives as an ongoing lifelong verbal education, received in the field while hunting with other men. He in fact quotes them in his graphic work, which reveals what some of their conversations were like. "Several times" he says "when my Koyukon hunting companion did something especially clever, he'd point to his head and declare: 'You see-Eskimo scientist!' He said that later he realized that these Koyukon Indians were speaking the truth. He explained that the hunters had what seemed to be volumes of encyclopedic knowledge that was passed down to them from generations of naturalist observation in the wilderness. He explained that these Koyukon have as much information as trained scientists in industrial society and that these people could write volumes of books on animal behavior and ecology. Their understanding of nature is not kept in books, though. It is all kept in a cultural somatic body of knowledge within each new generation. "Comparable bodies of knowledge" he says "existed in every Native American culture before the time of Columbus. Since then, even in the far North, Western education and cultural change have steadily eroded these traditions" of verbally transmitting the knowledge of the land. "Reflecting on a time before European contact we can imagine the whole array of North American animal species-deer, elk, black bear, wolf, mountain lion...-each known in hundreds of different ways by tribal communities; the entire continent sheathed in an intricate web of knowledge. Taken as a whole this composed a vast intellectual legacy, born of intimacy with the natural world."
The anthropologist William Laughlin once wrote that conversations among hunters sound like "classroom discussions of ecology, of food chains and (the nutritional value of different foods)." He writes that "They recite events of hunting" much like a fisherman in industrial society will talk about the size of fish that he catches. Lauphlin explains that he has noticed that hunters "discuss endlessly the weather and its effects on ice conditions, or on the moss in which caribou feed; they make predictions on the number of various animals based on weather conditions and its effects on animals and plants that serve as food for carnivores and grazers."
The vocabulary that hunters and gatherers have and had in the past was and is botanical and zoological. For example the Amazonian Indians have several hundred different words for the various colors of green that they see in their rain forest. Knowledge of Astronomy is often very developed in these cultures. A European Naturalist Ernst Mayr who tells of a field experience. "I spent several years with a tribe of superb woodsmen. They had 136 different vernacular names for the 137 different species of birds that occurred in the area". Eskimo Inuit also have over one hundred names for various types of snow.
The culture of hunter/gatherers is social. They are always with family and friends. Men hunt together with brothers, cousins, fathers, and sons. Today's hunter and gatherers, such as the example of the pygmies, reveal that women often join each other to gather food. They also performed religious rituals in communal space.
The hunter/gatherer is now and was extremely social, even in comparison to the social nature of other mammals. This social attitude of the human forager is a strong survival mechanism. It was important to be social for our ancestors. We humans have long childhoods in comparison to other species. As children we are dependant on assistance from our relatives in order to survive. The pygmy child is helpless in the jungle without support from family members until the child can hunt or gather for him or herself. Even as an adult, a pygmy or an ancestor will have a hard time surviving by him or herself. This is comparable to mammals such as a mother bear with cubs that protect its cubs until they grow up. This nurturing care of our family contrasts with reptiles that abandon their eggs after they lay them. So the origin of the need to be social in the wild in the past now characterizes the human psychological need in the present. Our ancestors that were social in the past survived to hand down their genes to us. This past social adaptation now has become a present psychological need to have social contact.
Research in Social Psychology often reveals what we often intuitively know. Social interaction in humans today is a psychological necessity. When people live alone they statistically die younger. Infants need social interaction to live. Infant babies that are receiving everything they need to live, yet who are not being touched and held, will die. What was once a survival adaptation has now become a psychological necessity.
Industrial culture is witnessing a breakdown of traditional nuclear and extended families. The anthropologist Conrad Kottak put it his way "For many Americans and Canadians the nuclear family is the only well defined kin group. Family isolation arises from geographic mobility, which is associated with industrialism so that a nuclear family is characteristic of many modern nations. North Americans leave home for work or college, and the break with parents is under way. Eventually most North Americans marry and start a family of procreation. Because less than three percent of the population now farms, most people are not tied to the land. Selling our labor to the market, we often move to places where jobs are available." The geographical mobility that Kottak mentions is due to the industrial revolution. Because of advanced transportation such as trains, airplanes, boats, and the automobile, a person can travel great distances with the new industrial forms of transportation. The reason is simply the ease in which family ties can be broken with these modern forms of transportation separating all of us easier and faster. These modes of transportation and therefore ease of separation is recent in our history. The oldest of these modern forms of transportation and therefore the degree of family isolation is only 150 years old in comparison to the close knit culture of foraging that is millions of years old.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography, towards the end of his life, that he had a huge house and no one to live in it. "What a fool I have been" he says after making the money he did to build his big home yet not thinking ahead about the fact that he might not be able to share it with any clan members. His wife had died. An ocean separated Mark Twain and his last surviving daughter, who utilized a steamboat that took her to Europe. His brothers, cousins, and their kids were in all different states with different lives. He had no clan to support him in his old age.
H.G Wells, the writer of the classic Time Machine, lived at the beginning of the industrial revolution. He wrote in his autobiography that "None of us (in the family) realized how much we are drifting apart, each one of us to new associations that the others would never share". One of his two brothers went to South Africa, another lived in a separate town, and his mother had to sell her labor in another town as a maid. He says that he "desired to keep up the old closeness... I suppose every autobiography (in industrial culture) would, if fully told, would reveal this early predominance of home affections and the successive weakening out of one strand of sympathy after another, as new ones replaced them. That, I think, is the normal way of the individual life. It is a pilgrimage of familiarity into loneliness."
Today 25 percent of people in American households are living alone (Casper and Bryson 1998). This is a growing trend. In 1970 only 17 percent of households were homes of isolated lonely people compared to today's 25 percent. We are designed by evolution to be "social animals" yet we are not all receiving outlets for these social instincts.
The most common form of psychotherapy is talk therapy, simply because it is one of the best ways to heal the mind. One of the reasons talk therapy functions as medicine for the mind is because it is tuning into an ancient social need to communicate. Humans that were social and talkative survived, so the gene has become stronger and stronger. Now the gene is so strong that it is unhealthy not to express it, just as it is unhealthy not to express our need to walk with our legs.
Psychologists have termed talk therapy "insight therapy". Insight therapy uses verbal interaction to improve and increase a patient's self-awareness and general insight, and therefore positive change in behavior. Talk therapy not only works because it helps people to gain insight but it also works simply because it gives clients someone to talk to and, after all, a healthy conversation with a caring person is therapeutic in itself. Many people have made the observation that bartenders and priests work as psychologists because they often just listen to people who need to talk about their problems.
The most well known form of this talk therapy is psychoanalysis pioneered by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis attempts to translate verbal messages presented by a patient in order to bring the thoughts of the unconscious into conscious understanding. One of the most important techniques in psychoanalysis is the use of "free association", in which the patient is taught to quickly express and associate her or his feelings and thoughts in a free and non-edited way, without any forethought or plan. It basically requires that the patient disclose personal information about their selves, as one would do with a close trusted friend, so that they can help each other through psychological problems and life in general. The patient lies on the traditional couch and expresses his or her dreams and anything that comes to mind. Through this communication the patient is guided in a way that the psychologist thinks that he or she can come to some self-revelation. This therapy taps into an ancient need to communicate and to use the tool of verbal interaction to solve life's problems.
Group therapy is also a talk therapy that has had positive results in the past. It is defined as the use of simultaneous therapy on several people in one group. Group Therapy also works for the same reason that Talk Therapy works, because it enables people to gain insight, but it also allows people to communicate with others that have similar problems such as Alcoholism or Relationship conflict, etc. But again, the act of being social is part of what makes it therapeutic.
Group therapy can be conducted in a number of ways but there are some general ways in which they usually work. Group therapy usually consists of maybe 4 to 20 people. Often these people will break up in pairs or just communicate in smaller groups. The members will discuss their problems, their dreams, or whatever subject may be relevant.

The English Zoologist Desmond Morris says the human animal is a social species, capable of loving and greatly in need of being loved. A simple tribal hunter by evolution he finds himself in a bewildering inflated communal world...in personal relationships the word alienation is constantly heard, providing an eloquent proof of the burning need that exists in our modern society for a revision of our ideas concerning body contact and intimacy, Known in general terms as Encounter Group Therapy. The principle common factor is the bringing together a group...largely...in which they indulge in a variety of personal and group interactions. The aim is to break away the facade of civilized adult conduct...to play like children again...finding a return to intimacy." Desmond Morris wrote this in 1971. Since then there has been a growth in group therapy.
Individually we would benefit by trying to stay connected to our families through out our lives in this industrial age. We may not be able to change the world overnight and reinstate the strength of the nuclear family, but we can promote community at the individual level. As the institution of the extended and nuclear family is breaking up it is urgent for our mental health to do the obvious and become social and make friends with strangers. There are lots of creative ways in which one can create the clan, bands and tribes that we used to have. Starting our own families, for example, or joining a church or organization that have the same fundamental belief system that we have also works. We can join a culture club, arts club, scientific organization or a sporting club.
Talk and group therapy is good, but the best way to experience what our minds are genetically designed to experience is to work hard at masking friends and to develop a family and then frequently connect to friends and/or family.
If you can get into nature and recreate the tradition of being together with loved ones, then you are experiencing tribal culture.