The Need for Tribal Living in a Modern World

Sept. 10, 2019

Ancestral health advocate and pioneer of Evolutionary Feminism Stephanie Welch is back on the podcast today. We met up at the Ancestral Health Symposium in San Diego, California in August where she gave a talk on gender-segregated housing as an alternative to the traditional nuclear family. Stephanie is dedicated to exploring the boundaries of relationships and sexuality, and she makes a compelling case for a living arrangement most of us have never considered.

In this podcast, Stephanie identifies the time in history that humans abandoned tribal living and gravitated to segregated nuclear families and sexual monogamy. She talks about the many ways this change has been a detriment to society, resulting in families and relationships lacking in social support and other basic human needs. She also offers solutions for re-establishing aspects of tribal living in a modern world.

Here’s the outline of this interview with Stephanie Welch:

[00:00:50] Stephanie's previous podcast: Disruptive Anthropology: An Ancestral Health Perspective on Barefooting and Male Circumcision.

[00:02:09] Josh Turknett; Intelligence Unshackled Podcast. If you're going to intervene, you better have a good reason to do it.

[00:04:35] Books: Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, et al.; Civilized to Death, by Christopher Ryan; Sex at Dusk, by Lynn Saxon.

[00:06:14] Ancestral Health Symposium videos - look for 2019 presentations to be posted in the next several months.

[00:06:24] Differences in male and female reproductive strategies.

[00:07:56] The need for a robust system of caretakers.

[00:09:41] Bruce Parry, documentary filmmaker, visits modern hunter-gatherers.

[00:10:21] The nuclear family vs. the tribe as a reproductive unit.

[00:12:56] Agriculture as a catalyst to dividing the tribe into nuclear family houses and sexual monogamy.

[00:15:40] Book: Against the grain, by James C. Scott.

[00:21:13] The things a domestic environment should provide: health, social relationships, growth.

[00:22:34] Julian Abel on NBT podcast: Building Compassionate Communities to Improve Public Health, and Michael Ruscio's podcast: The Importance of Community Interventions in Healthcare.

[00:27:59] The problem with living with a romantic partner.

[00:36:43] Challenging the convention of monogamy.

[00:41:30] Cal Newport; Podcast: How to Live Well in a High Tech World.

[00:43:06] Steps to take to move in this new direction.

[00:50:13] Our recent podcast with Malcolm Kendrick: A Statin Nation: Damaging Millions in a Brave New Post-health World. His first podcast with us in 2018: Why Cholesterol Levels Have No Effect on Cardiovascular Disease (And Things to Think about Instead).

[00:52:00] What about gay people? An evolutionary perspective.

[00:54:49] Robert Epstein on STEM-Talk, the Epstein Sexual Orientation Inventory (ESOI).

[01:01:33] Find Stephanie: Recivilized Woman; Twitter; Paleo Fx; Future Frontiers; Physicians for Ancestral Health.