Would it be a utopia or dystopia in your opinion if humans lived not in civilization but in primitive tribes?

Question

Remember this is question not a statement. I want to know your analysis.

Answer 1

Lets see, the odds of my any child surviving to adulthood in a non technological society are about one in four.

About one in sixteen births will kill the woman giving birth.

h**l.

Don't romanticize it.

Answer 2

Utopia... Blatantly  

Answer 3

If the tribe was happy, functioning and content, it would be utopia.

If the tribe was disfunctional, and unhappy, it would be dystopia.  

Its not the people, but how society functions in the situation.

Answer 4

very good question. i would prefer tribal. based on more natural living that we were meant to live. throw greed into the picture and the formula mix is what we have now. tribal is not utopia but more natural selection. as everything else. survival of the fittest is the top rule in the natural world. the weak die off to make room for the new and strong until their turn. cycle of life.

there is nothing utopic about our present time. doctors save patients lives, medicines that cure diseases, we go to grocery store to buy food instead of hunting. being active to make the next meal or shelter. we are selfish too. in a tribe u have more team effort to survive and rely on urself and others to pull thru. it's a hard life but beat whatever we have now anytime.           did this do it ?

Answer 5

Neither.  

Take a good look at Marx's "Pre-Capitalist State Formations", V. Gordon Childe's analyses of social evolution, and the "civilizationists" of the 1950s and 1960s "new history" movements, and tell me what the difference is between anarcho-tribalism, "the collapse of civilization (as ideologized by many capitalist social theorists) and pure communism.  

Utopia has many different meanings, not all of which are opposite dystopia (despite the denotative polarity). In the sense of its original meanings, it refers specifically to an allegedly enlightened form of socialism or pure formal communism.  Don't believe me?  Look it up in the OED and check the etymology.  Few people today would consider Moore's version of utopia to be truly utopian.

In 19th century America, several community social experiments were attempted by bourgeois arm-chair pre-Marxian socialists, and through a combination of nonexistent practical experience with farming, economic inefficiency and, sometimes, external forces, each failed within the first two decades of its existence.  A few alternative communities survived and flourished by becoming corporations. Ironic eh?

Dystopia - at least in fiction - is more often used as an heuristic device to critique social injustices and the imperfection of human societies.  All social systems are inherently dystopic - even non-systemic approaches to political configuration (i.e. anarchy), because wherever humans interact with each other, injustice and inequality follow.  

Tribes are not really a specific social or political form, so, without a better delineation of the specifics of your question, aspects of it are impossible to answer.  

If you are simply asking whether or not we would be better off living in tribes - though I find aspects of the idea appealing, my answer would be no simply because tribal societies are, generally speaking, as oppressive and violent (though at a greatly reduced scale) as any other social form, and because today's population of humans is too large to be supported by any tribal social organization I can imagine.