In 2017, Vox journalist David Robert used the term 'tribal epistemology' – borrowed from anthropology – to describe a tendency for certain groups, in our current 'post-truth' environment, to trust information which is 'evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders'. In the Netflix Original series The OA (2016 -), Prairie Johnson – played by series co-creator and writer Brit Marling - is such a leader, however the knowledge she gives her tribe, that the universe is in fact a multiverse and that inter-dimensional travel is possible, emancipates them, even from her own leadership. Convinced of Prairie's claims, the tribe becomes focused on what Brian McHale calls 'problems of modes of being' (10) as does the series: Prairie may be an unreliable narrator. McHale identifies this preoccupation as a characteristic of postmodernist fiction which is distinguished from its modernist predecessor by a shift from 'an epistemological dominant to an ontological one' (10). Where tribal epistemology of the type Roberts identifies resolves problems of being and knowing by uniting them in a subjectivity guaranteed by what Max Weber termed 'charismatic authority', Prairie's tribe, each of whom has been disenfranchised from normative society, are given agency by the knowledge they acquire which empowers them to become more than mere followers, particularly when they start to doubt her. In Nietzsche's terms, they become who they are; as the series is set in a multiverse, this becoming involves engaging with multiple modes of being: a tribal ontology rather than epistemology.
In this paper, drawing on the aforementioned sources, as well as the work of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jodi Dean and Shoshanna Zuboff, I will discuss the 'tribal ontology' of The OA in the context of current debates pertaining to the social construction of both knowledge and identity. Significantly, a member of Prairie's tribe, Buck, is transgender as is the actor who plays him, Ian Alexander, who also plays himself in the second season finale where the previous events of both seasons are implied to have all been a 'series within a series'. I argue that this episode's deployment of metafictional techniques and the series' use of the trope of the multiverse are ultimately utopian in motivation, calling for a corresponding social multiplicity in the actual world which overflows 'tribal' boundaries and removes the need for an epistemology guaranteed by charismatic authority.
Works Cited
McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987.
Roberts, David, 'Donald Trump and the rise of Tribal Epistemology', Vox [online], May 19th, 2017.
Available at: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology
Last accessed: March 29th, 2019.
