Understanding Tribe

The Norse Framework of Innangardh and Utangardh

Mar 02, 2026

I like to come back to this topic from time to time for the new followers, Relationships naturally fall into five distinct categories: enemies, strangers, acquaintances, relatives, friends, and family. I deliberately separate relatives from family because family is defined by loyalty rather than mere blood relation. Just because someone shares your DNA doesn’t automatically grant them top-tier relationship status in your life, or at least it shouldn’t. I also tend to set a higher bar than most people when it comes to these categories.

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Enemies and strangers are both pretty self explanatory but ill break down the rest in short.

ACQUAINTANCES: Less then friends, and by my standards people that most people consider friends fall into this category. Your coworkers probably fall into this category 99% of the time. They could also be people you have met once or twice or Your relationship is one of convenience, such as school, where you are forced into proximity for periods of time but you don’t see each other out side of that.

BLOOD RELATIVES: These People are related to you by blood and ancestry, and could be considered by marriage as they are the blood of your spouse, that is it. This is what most people consider family and they typically put this group above all else no matter how toxic a relationship it might be.

FRIENDS: These are people that you have active relationships with. You make a point to reach out and talk to each other, you probably started as an acquaintance, its just how these things work. You may or may not have some shared history, you may or may not have know each other for along time. Regardless, you have each others best interest in mind.

FAMILY: Your inner circle. These people may be blood related, but they don’t have to be. Blood relation doesn’t get you into this group loyalty does. These may be people you served with in the military, they may be friends you have known for years. You definitely share history and most likely some life changing events hopefully good but likely some bad too. You dot have to question if they have your best interest at heart and you wouldn’t think about crossing or back-stabbing them in any way. These are the people that will drop what they are doing to help you if you need it and vice versa.

The Norse Framework: Innangardh and Utangardh

The Norse pagan tradition offers a useful framework for understanding these relationships through two key concepts:

Innangardh (in-yard) represents your inner circle, your family and friends, those to whom you are obligated. This is your chosen family and allies, your tribe. In Norse paganism, this group is often called “kindred.” Those with whom you share loyalty, common views and beliefs, and preferably geographic proximity. This is where your efforts and obligations should be focused, at least until you have your own house squared away.

Utangardh (out-yard) encompasses everyone else, enemies, strangers, and acquaintances to whom you have no obligations. This outer world demands less of your time and energy.

Relatives sit on the dividing line between these two realms in my opinion. Sometimes they can be family (Innangardh), and other times they feel more like acquaintances or even strangers and enemies (Utangardh). While blood relation can be a factor it alone shouldn’t guarantee top-tier relationship status.

What Defines a True Tribe?

A tribe can take many shapes and sizes depending on circumstances and personal views. You might already be part of one without recognizing it, or you may need to build it from scratch. A tribe could be your family, friends, and maybe relatives, or it could be a team you’re part of along with your teammates and their families, such as a military unit, fire department or sports team.

What matters is how bonded the group is, whether you feel responsible for each other, and whether it members qualify as innangardh to you.

Size Limitations

Research shows the human brain can only maintain meaningful relationships with about 150-250 people at any given time. This number fluctuates based on your standards for “meaningful relationship” and how you spend your time, but it likely caps lower rather than higher. This limitation developed over generations of human evolution and defines the maximum size of a functional tribe. This size is where you are going to feel that sense of belonging. Its why people join gangs, and clubs.

Most people today don’t approach this limit if they honestly consider who is close enough to be part of their tribe. Those 1,000 Facebook friends? Most won’t make the cut.

Loyalty and Culture

Sebastian Junger’s work sheds light on what tribe means: people who care enough about each other to take responsibility and care for one another, to “share the last of your food with them.” This requires a level of loyalty rarely seen today, making it the most challenging aspect of building tribe.

Finding loyalty is difficult because it is only rewarded in modern society when its loyalty to your government, loyalty to individuals is frowned upon. Typically it is used to refer to frequent buyer programs rather than human connections. Loyalty among people isn’t rewarded by “The Empire of Nothing” or the governments it buys and pays for because it runs counter to its interests, and few people reward it themselves.

Once a tribe develops it starts to grow its own culture, not necessarily completely different from mainstream society, but with unique elements. Whether through rituals, customs, or language/slang, tribes develop collective identity that makes them distinct. This could stem from the organization that brought them together (like military units), or from habits they share that become rituals (like weekly gatherings).

The Broken Chain

The generations before us systematically dismantled the tribal structures that had sustained humanity for millennia. They broke our tribes and communities, replacing them with systems that now sell back to us what was once provided through tribal bonds.

This process began with industrialization, which pulled people from their ancestral lands and tight-knit communities into factories and cities. The nuclear family model replaced extended kin networks, and each generation became more isolated than the last; starting over at 18 when they were sent out on their own for the “American Dream.” Grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings now spread all across the country or even the globe. With no ability to easily help each other if the time came.

The systems they created then monetized the very functions that tribes once provided naturally:

Elder care: Once handled within families and tribes, now outsourced to expensive nursing homes, assisted living facilities, or in home nurses.
Childcare: Previously a community responsibility, now paid for through daycare centers and after-school programs.
Education: Once passed down through family and community knowledge, now institutionalized with higher quality versions sold as a commodity to those that can afford it.
Food security: Tribes hunted, farmed, and shared resources together; now we depend on corporate supply chains and grocery stores to sell us toxic food like substances.
Emotional support: Once found in tribal gatherings and shared experiences, now purchased through therapists and life coaches.
Security: Tribes protected their own; now we pay for private security, alarm systems, and insurance policies.

The Empire doesn’t just replace these functions, it profits from our isolation. It sells us pseudo connection through social media platforms that actually increase loneliness. It offers convenience that further isolates us from one another. It creates dependency by distorting self-sufficiency a one person or nuclear family doing it all, which in the long run is impossible.

The Norse Kindred Model

In Norse pagan traditions, these tribal groups are often called “kindreds.” These are small groups of people who honor the Norse gods together, gathering to celebrate rituals, hold meetings, and share knowledge. They serve both spiritual and social roles, offering structure, support, and belonging.

The word “kindred” echoes old notions of kin, including family by blood and adding those chosen by shared belief. Members might call each other folk, tribe, or clan. Loyalty holds deep meaning in a kindred, though it’s not blind, members support each other while holding one another accountable.

Kindreds may be led by a goði (male priest) or gyðja (female priestess), but these roles don’t resemble a church hierarchy. Instead, leaders are chosen based on merit and trust, and many kindreds believe anyone can take on priestly functions, with members sharing organizational duties.

The Problem of Isolation

Humans are social beings, even the most introverted person will need social time with their people at some point. The romantic notion of the lone wolf hero is just that, a romantic notion. After extended isolation, most people suffer mentally and emotionally. The statistics on mental health and suicides in recent years provide stark evidence of this.

Humans without collective identity, strong alliances, sense of belonging, or people they can depend on become drifters dependent on larger systems that take advantage of them. Some people fill this void with sports teams, religious brand fixations, or national identity. But as these universalist identities expand and brands and governments disappoint their customers, people lose what little sense of belonging they have.

This explains why people join gangs, cults, frat houses, or ideological movements, they provide that sense of belonging that humans crave and that “The Empire” can never duplicate.

Two Paths to Building Tribe

As I see it, tribes generally fall into two categories:

The Enhanced Friend Group

This is essentially a club, brotherhood, or men’s group type organization. You might find an established one or build your own. This could be as simple as adding formality to your existing close friend group. Nothing else about your life needs to change dramatically, you’re simply looking to be closer with a group of friends or relatives than superficial social media interactions allow.

The Intentional Community

This more closely resembles what tribes have looked like throughout history. These “intentional communities” have grown popular in recent years as people seek to recapture community or simply check out of the rat race. These groups typically share property, live near each other, work toward common goals, and might have their own education systems or businesses (farms, gardens, etc.). They may have dietary restrictions or other exclusivity based on faith or politics. They can also be “family compounds” where multiple generations of relatives live on the same land.

This can grow out of the first option if your group decides to take it a step further, or you can pursue it directly if it appeals to you but that can have some other road blocks and headaches.

Tribe vs. Society

The fascination with tribal living has existed as long as industrialized civilization has tried to eliminate it. At one point, all humans lived tribally in small villages and bands. This changed as agriculture developed, people settled in one place, villages became cities, and civilizations grew.

Junger notes that by the end of the nineteenth century, while factories were being built in Chicago and slums took root in New York, Indians still fought with spears and tomahawks a thousand miles away. Surprisingly, many Americans, joined Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and occasionally fought alongside them. The opposite almost never happened. Indians rarely ran away to join white society. This emigration always seemed to go from civilized to tribal, leaving western thinkers baffled by this apparent rejection of their society.

This happened so frequently that it was made illegal in most areas as a form of desertion. But it didn’t stop those who desired to leave because tribal existence offers something the so-called civilized world can never provide to the same degree: a true sense of belonging.

The Cost of Modern Society

Michael Kurchina notes in his book that “civilization is a collection of loners.” Society as a whole is empty and superficial, offering little more than rampant materialism. People lack this sense of belonging and feel alone even when surrounded by others. Despite being crammed into ever-growing cities, the average person knows few, if any, of their neighbors. Social bonds dwindle as families grow apart, responsibilities increase, older generations die, and friends become less available.

Part of why society is in its current state is that people stopped depending on each other and started depending on systems. This began eroding personal and tribal sense of group identity, replacing it with belonging to countries, brands, sports teams, and other superficial layers of belonging.

All the while we are told this normal, or even preferred, that we are winning. Any one who tries to go against this is “weird”. Neighbors give you dirty looks when you knock on their door and introduce yourself. To a citizen of the empire, a tribal individual might seem immoral or uncaring for placing their tribe above the Empire. But members of a tribe demand far more of each other on all fronts than the fair-weather friends and strangers of the Empire could ever understand.

The Foundation of Identity

As Jack Donovan puts it: “Whatever your ‘us’ is and whatever your tribe is, it’s just an idea in your head until you have a group of truly interdependent people who share the same fate. That’s what a tribe is. That’s what a community is and that is the future of identity in America.”

Your tribe is your kindred, your chosen family and allies. Your family should be those who are loyal, share common views and beliefs, and preferably live in your geographic region. This is where your efforts and obligations should be focused. At least until you have your own house squared away.

In a world that increasingly isolates us, finding or building your tribe isn’t just desirable its becoming mandatory. Though it will be the hardest thing you may ever try to do, it’s essential for human flourishing. The Norse framework of Innangardh and Utangardh and 6 types of relationships provides a useful way to categorize your current relationships and focus your energy where it matters most: on those who are truly your people. The systems of the Empire will continue to divide us and sell you back what your tribe once provided, but the price they demand is your autonomy and your very humanity.

Refuse to pay that price.

Modern Problems Require Ancient Solutions