Document is current

Article History

Received: 3 May 2025

Accepted: 5 June 2025

First Online: 18 June 2025

Declarations

:

: The process of formally proposing the TTM follows the progressive process shown in Fig. .The core concepts of the tribal theater model are naturally the "tribe" and "theater." The sociological concept of a "tribe" was refined primarily by Maffesoli (). He pointed out that a tribe refers to a kind of community. People naturally gather together for some reason to form social groups. Furthermore, he connected the concept of the "tribe" with that of a "theater." Maffesoli () pointed out that "the characteristic of social relations is that individuals can have functions in society… As individuals change stage costumes based on their (cultural, religious, friendship) taste, they will gain a place in various games of the 'World Theater' every day" (p. 104). It can be seen that Maffesoli's "tribe" is part of the "theater" in this description.The theater is actually a metaphor that is highly consistent with Bourdieu and Wacquant's () description of a "field." A field can be understood as a place of interaction. In their hypothesis, each field prescribes its own peculiar regulating principle. These principles define an interaction space. In such a space, actors contest one another based on the positions they occupy, striving either to alter or to preserve the boundaries or form of that space. This is a power struggle. Through it, actors compete for the limited capital and social status available within the field.Merleau-Ponty () provided a case in point. When playing rugby, the field is seen by the players as covered with various constraint lines that divide and connect, for example, different kicking areas that require players to take certain determined actions. Each action taken by the players adjusts the characteristics of the field in their eyes and establishes new offensive routes. Their actions, in turn, unfold within a new range, once again changing the field as it is perceived by the players (Merleau-Ponty ).It can be seen that the field is changed by the actions of the users, but what is directly changed is not the "tribe" aspect of the field mentioned earlier, but another more abstract aspect, namely its "atmosphere" (Norberg-Schulz ). In turn, the content of the action is strongly related to the current field. However, it is obvious that each person may take different actions when facing the same scene. Therefore, the generation of action also requires an individually related factor, namely, the "habitus." This concept is similar to what we would understand as the habits of an individual (it is actually the Latin word for "habits," and its plural form is "habiti"), but in the TTM, it can be understood as a decision tree of actions. When we are within an environment, a corresponding decision tree is activated, and we decide on an action to take based on our action habits. This is similar to the logic of reinforcement learning, in which the environment and agents influence each other. The field shapes the habitus, and the habitus becomes a product manifested by the body as a result of the inherent and inevitable attributes of a certain field (Bourdieu ).From this, we can obtain a basic closed-loop structure, such as that shown in Fig. (a): the field shapes the habitus, and the field and habitus together lead to action, which in turn changes the field. We can continue the analogy with the logic of reinforcement learning: in reinforcement learning, feedback from the environment constructs the model of the agent, the environment and the model together lead to the action of the agent, and the action of the agent leads to changes in the environment.In fact, if we had only a structure similar to reinforcement learning, it would still be insufficient to model human interactions (Hackel et al. ). According to Grenfell (), Bourdieu thus pointed out a key to interactive regulation, namely "capital." Sociology uses this term in a broad sense to expand the concept and enable it to be applied to complex interpersonal networks and to different types of transformations and exchanges between different fields. Concepts such as literacy level and social status have been introduced into the scope of capital and play a role in interaction scenes. In the TTM, it can therefore be referred to as "resources."For example, when we play a certain game, the various strategies of players and the different factors that determine their game are not only a function of the quantity and structure of their resources at the moment of consideration but are also a function of the evolution of the quantity of these resources and their structure over time, that is, a function of their social trajectory.Therefore, changing the distribution and relative weights of the various resource forms is equivalent to changing the structure of this field. By considering fields in this way, they all have a certain degree of dynamic change and adaptability and avoid the inflexibility and resilience of social theater (Lehmann ) or traditional structuralism, such as reinforcement learning, which was mentioned earlier.On this basis, Bourdieu and Nice () provided a formula for action (with some modifications):As described in Fig. (b), on the basis of the original closed loop, resources participate in the generation of action, while the resources themselves are determined by the combination of the field content and action. Figure (c) provides a more detailed division; that is, actions affect the atmosphere portion of the field, relationships and resources are influenced by the tribe portion of the field, and the overall field (including the tribe and atmosphere) directly leads to actions as an environment. The role of this more detailed division is provided in Sect. .From this equation, we can obtain the TTM as a foundational sociological model. As mentioned above, the structure of this model provides flexibility and adaptability that is not contained in traditional models of social theater. In social theater and a series of similar theater metaphor approaches, actors must perform with scripts; this provides an order but loses the subjectivity of the actors themselves (Nacache ). However, the TTM operates in the style of Boal (). There is no longer the need for an order that provides requirements, serves as a "director," and forces individuals to follow. In contrast, people have gathered into a small-group consciousness, that is, in the matrix of a tribe; it has taken the position of the director. According to Simmel (), this is explained by Zimmer and his sensory sociology as a stage of "shared by all."