The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Past and present. You can't make this stuff up.
User avatar
Doc
Posts: 12561
Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 6:10 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Doc »

Apollonius wrote:Crops, towns, government - James C. Scott, London Review of Books, 21 November 2013
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n22/james-c-sc ... government




Review of:

The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond (Penguin, 2013)

The commonest contemporary cause of [language] death is cultural and economic engulfment: the majority language so dominates the public sphere, media, schools and government that mastering it is the sole route to employment, social status and cultural citizenship. Diamond pauses to consider the argument that the consolidation of languages might be a fine thing. After all, eliminating language barriers makes for better mutual understanding. Why would one prefer a world in which hill peoples navigate through a linguistic thicket in which they must operate in five or more languages, as his informants do in the New Guinea Highlands?

Here, Diamond, as evolutionary biologist, has two choices. He could claim that the extinction of languages is the process of natural selection at work, just as the scientific racists of the late 19th century claimed that the extermination of backward tribal peoples like the Herero was a tragic but inevitable result of the expansion of superior races. But instead, he takes up a position not unlike that held by E.O. Wilson on the disappearance of species. He argues that just as natural diversity is a treasury of variation and resilience, so linguistic diversity represents a cultural treasury of expression, thought-ways and cosmology that, once lost, is gone for ever.
Literature, culture and much knowledge are encoded in languages: lose the language and you lose much of the literature, culture and knowledge … Traditional peoples have local-language names for hundreds of animal and plant species around them; those encyclopedias of ethnobiological information vanish when their languages vanish … Tribal peoples also have their own oral literatures, and losses of those literatures also represent losses to humanity.
It is undeniable that we are in danger of irrecoverably losing a large part of mankind’s cultural, linguistic and aesthetic heritage from the effects of ‘steamroller’ languages and states. But what a disappointment it is, after nearly five hundred pages of anecdotes, assertions, snippets of scientific studies, observations, detours into the evolution of religion, reports of near-death experiences – Diamond can be a gripping storyteller – to hear the lessons he has distilled for us. We should learn more languages; we should practise more intimate and permissive child-rearing; we should spend more time socialising and talking face to face; we should utilise the wisdom and knowledge of our elders; we should learn to assess the dangers in our environment more realistically. And, when it comes to daily health tips, you have to imagine Diamond putting on his white coat and stethoscope as he recommends ‘not smoking; exercising regularly; limiting our intake of total calories, alcohol, salt and salty foods, sugar and sugared soft drinks, saturated and trans fats, processed foods, butter, cream and red meat; and increasing our intake of fibre, fruits and vegetables, calcium and complex carbohydrates. Another simple change is to eat more slowly.’ Perhaps wary of resistance to a fully fledged hunter-gatherer diet, he recommends the Mediterranean diet. Those who have trekked all this way with him, through the history of the species and the New Guinea Highlands, must have expected something more substantial awaiting them at the end of the trail.
:o
I would just have to ask. If a tribal language dies in the rain forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound? It is like all volumes of knowledge. Say an old book on a shelf in a dusty back corner of a large library. Even though there is a catalog card of its existence, even though it may have been referenced elsewhere; if the pages burn away from the acid they contain and no one alive has read it. Then it is lost to entropy. That is likely the fate of all information in this universe. In the end will mankind make any sound at all? And isn't that the ultimate question here?
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

The captions below two photographs in Jared Diamond's most recent book read:

Traditional warfare: Dani tribesmen fighting with spears in the Baliem Valley of the New Guinea Highlands. The highest one-day death toll in those wars occurred on June 4, 1966, when northern Dani killed face-to-face 125 southern Dani, many of whom the attackers would personally have known (or known of). The death toll constituted 5% of the southerner's population.

Modern warfare: the Hiroshima atomic bomb cloud of August 6, 1945. The American soldiers who dropped the bomb did not personally know their victims and did not look them in the face as they were killing them. The 100,000 Japanese killed at Hiroshima represent the highest one-day death toll in modern warfare, and constituted 0.1% of Japan's population at that time.
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

Military historians routinely compile national casualty totals for each modern war: e.g., for Germany during World War II. That permits one to calculate national war-related mortality rates averaged over a century of a country's history of alternating war and peace: e.g., for Germany over the whole of the 20th century. Such rates have also been calculated or estimated in dozens of studies of individual modern traditional societies. Four surveys-- by Lawrence Keeley, by Samuel Bowles, by Steven Pinker, and by Richard Wrangham and Michael Wilson and Martin Muller-- summarized such evaluations for between 23 and 32 traditional societies. Not surprisingly, there are proves to be much variation between individual societies. The highest annual time-averaged war-related death tolls are 1% per year (i.e., 1 person killed per year per 100 members of the population) or higher for the Dani, Sudan's Dinka, and two North America Indian groups, ranging down to 0.02% per year or less for Andaman Islanders and Malaysia's Semang. Some of those differences are related to subsistence mode, with average rates for subsistence farmers being nearly 4 times hose for hunter-gatherers in Wrangham, Wilson, and Muller's analysis. An alternative measure of war's impact is the percentage of total deaths that are related to warfare. That measure ranges from 56% for Ecuador's Waorani Indians down to only 3%-7% for six traditional populations scattered around the globe.

For comparison with those measures of war-related mortality in traditional small-scale societies, Keeley extracted 10 values for societies with state government: one of them for 20th-century Sweden, which experienced no wars and hence zero war-related deaths, the other nine for states and time periods selected for notoriously horrible suffering in war. The highest-percentage long-term death tolls averaged over a century in modern times have been for 20th-century Germany and Russia, which reached 0.16% and 0.15% per year respectively (i.e., 16 or 15 people killed per year per 10,000 members of the population) due to the combined horrors of World Wars I and II. A lower value of 0.07% held for France in the century that included the Napoleonic Wars and the winter retreat of Napoleon's army from Russia. Despite the deaths inflicted by the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire-bombing and conventional bombings of most other large Japanese cities, and the deaths by gunfire and starvation and suicide and drowning of hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers overseas during World War II, plus the casualties from Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, Japan's percentage of war-related death toll average over the 20th century was much lower than Germany's or Russia's, "only" 0.03% per year. The highest long-term estimate for any state is 0.25% per year for the famously bloody Aztec Empire in the century leading up to its destruction by Spain.
[...]
It may astonish you readers, as it initially astonished me, to learn that trench warfare, machine guns, napalm, atomic bombs, artillery, and submarine torpedoes produce time-averaged war-related death tolls so much lower than those from spears, arrows, and clubs. The reasons become clear when one reflects on the differences between traditional and modern state warfare that we shall discuss in more detail below. First, state warfare is an intermittent exceptional condition, while tribal warfare is virtually continuous. During the 20th century Germany was at war for only 10 years (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), and its war death during the remaining 90 years were negligible, while the Dani were traditionally at war every month of every year. Second, casualties of state war are borne mainly just by male soldiers age 18 to 40 years; even within that age range, most state wars use only small professional armies, with the mass conscription of the two world wars being exceptional; and civilians were not at direct risk in large numbers until saturation aerial bombing was adopted in World War II. In contrast, in traditional societies everyone-- men and women, prime-age adults and old adults, children and babies-- is a target. Third in state warfare soldiers who surrender or are captured are normally permitted to survive, whereas in traditional warfare all are routinely killed. Finally, traditional but not state wars are periodically punctuated by massacres in which much or all of the population one side gets surrounded and exterminated, as in the Dani massacres of June 4, 1966, the late 1930s, 1952, June 1962, and September 1962. In contrast, victorious states nowadays routinely keep conquered populations alive in order to exploit them, rather than exterminating them.
There follows a discussion of William Tecumseh Sherman and his march through Georgia and South Carolina as a demonstration of modern "total war".


While Sherman's behavior was indeed exceptional by standards of state warfare, he did not invent total warfare. Instead, he practiced a mild form of what has been practiced by bands and tribes for tens of thousands of years, as documented by the skeletal remains of the massacre at Talheim describe on page 134. State armies spare and take prisoners because they are able to feed them, guard them, put them to work, and prevent them from running away. Traditional "armies" do not take enemy warriors as prisoners, because they cannot do any of those things to make use of prisoners. Surrounded or defeated traditional warriors do not surrender, because they know that they would be killed anyway. The earliest historical or archaeological evidence of states taking prisoners is not until the time of Mesopotamian states about 5,000 years ago, which solved the practical problems of getting use out of prisoners by gouging out their eyes to blind them so that they could not run away, then putting them to work at tasks that could be carried out by the sense of touch alone, such as spinning and some gardening chores. A few large, sedentary, economically specialized tribes and chiefdoms of hunter-gatherers, such as coastal Pacific Northwest Indians and Florida's Calusa Indians, were also able routinely to enslave, maintain, and make use of captives.

However, for societies simpler than Mesopotamian states, Pacific Northwest Indians, and the Calusa, defeated enemies were of no value alive. War's goal among the Dani, Fore, Northwest Alaskan Inuit, Andaman Islanders, and many other tribes was to take over the enemy's land and to exterminate the enemy of both sexes and all ages, including the dozens of Dani women and children killed in the June 4, 1966, massacre. Other traditional societies, such as the Nuer raiding the Dinka, were more selective, in that they killed Dinka men and clubbed to death Dinka babies and older women but brought home Dinka women of marriageable age to force marry to Nuer men, and also brought home Dinka weaned children to rear as Nuer. The Yanomamo similarly spared enemy women in order to use them as mates.

-- Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (Viking, 2013)
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

Diamond goes on to consider forms of traditional warfare, as opposed to modern warfare, including pitched battles and perhaps the most famous tactic, the pre-dawn raid, where a settlement is surrounded, attacked, and the inhabitants massacred in the early morning hours before they can muster an effective response.


A traditional tactic without parallel in modern state warfare is the treacherous feast documented among the Yanomamo and in New Guinea: inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused their attention on eating and drinking. We moderns have to wonder why any Yanomamo group would let itself fall into that trap, having heard stories of previoussuch treachery. The explanation may be that honorable feasts are common, that accepting an invitation usually brings big advantages in terms of alliance-building and food-sharing, and that the hosts go to much effort to make their invitations appear friendly. The only modern example I can think of involving state governments is the massacre of the Boer commander Piet Retief and his whole party of a hundred men by the Zulu king Dingane on February 7, 1838, while the Boers were Dingane's guests at a feast in his camp. This example may be considered a the exception that proves the rule: the Zulus had been just one of hundreds of warring chiefdoms until unification and the foundation of the Zulu state a few decades previously.
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused their attention on eating and drinking.
Reminds me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyköping_Banquet
User avatar
Parodite
Posts: 5638
Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2012 9:43 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Parodite »

Ibrahim wrote:
inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused their attention on eating and drinking.
Reminds me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyköping_Banquet
Or this:

SYJTRJen1dA
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

That scene from the book/series might be based on the Nykoping banquet IIRC, maybe also some similar incident among clans in highland Scotland.
noddy
Posts: 11318
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

new guinea and melanesia in general have the highest ratios of language and distinct culture per population of any people anywhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesian_languages
By one count, there are 1,319 languages in Melanesia, scattered across a small amount of land. The proportion of 716 sq. kilometers per language is by far the most dense rate of languages in relation to land mass in the earth, almost three times as dense as in Nigeria, a country famous for its high number of languages in a compact area.[4]

they do have brutal tribal battles that get ugly when populations get out of balance but reality shows its on a completely different level and lacking in any empire conforming genocides, Asians and Europeans are on a completely different level of ruthless.
ultracrepidarian
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

noddy wrote:new guinea and melanesia in general have the highest ratios of language and distinct culture per population of any people anywhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesian_languages
By one count, there are 1,319 languages in Melanesia, scattered across a small amount of land. The proportion of 716 sq. kilometers per language is by far the most dense rate of languages in relation to land mass in the earth, almost three times as dense as in Nigeria, a country famous for its high number of languages in a compact area.[4]

they do have brutal tribal battles that get ugly when populations get out of balance but reality shows its on a completely different level and lacking in any empire conforming genocides, Asians and Europeans are on a completely different level of ruthless.
Its the history of e.g. Europe or the Middle East, only in microcosm.

History, as far back into prehistory as we are able to glimpse, shows us that humans are always doing the same things, just with greater intensity as technology permits. The entire savage/noble savage concept is an imaginary construct.
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

The last part of Jared Diamond's discussion of primitive warfare concerns the ways in which it is concluded. In traditional societies, there is no mechanism to enforce peace. Some hotheads will always be dissatisfied with any peaceful compromise and in a pre-state society, there is no way to prevent their unilateral revenge attacks, which stimulate yet another cycle of violence. States allow the warring parties to conclude a definite and lasting peace.


That difference between states and small centralized societies is a major reason why states exist at all. There has been a long-standing debate among political scientists about how states arise, and why the governed masses tolerate kings and congressmen and their bureaucrats. Full-time political leaders don't grow their own food, but they live off of food raised by us peasants. How did our leaders convince or force us to feed them, and why do we let them remain in power? The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated, without any evidence to back up his speculations, that governments arise as a the result of rational decisions by the masses who recognize that their own interests will be better served under a leader and bureaucrats. In all the cases of state formation now known to historians, no such farsighted calculation has ever been observed. Instead, states arise from chiefdoms through competition, conquest, or external pressure: the chiefdom with the most effective decision-making is better able to resist conquest or to outcompete other chiefdoms. For example, between 1807 and 1817 the dozens of separate chiefdoms of southeastern Africa's Zulu people, traditionally warring with each other, became amalgamated into one state under one of the chiefs, named Dingiswayo, who conquered all the competing chiefs by proving more successful at figuring out how best to recruit an army, settle disputes, incorporate defeated chiefdoms, and administer his territory.

Despite the excitement and the prestige of tribal fighting, tribespeople understand better than anyone else the misery associated with warfare, the omnipresent danger, and the pain due to the killings of loved ones. When tribal warfare is finally ended by forceful intervention by colonial governments, tribespeople regularly comment on the resulting improved quality of life that they hadn't been able to create for themselves, because without centralized government they hadn't been able to interrupt the cycle of revenge killings. Anthropologist Sterling Robbins was told by Auyana men in the New Guinea Highlands, "Life was better since the government had come because a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot. All men admitted that they were afraid when they fought. In fact, they usually looked at me as though I were a mental defective for even asking. Men admitted having nightmares in which they became isolated from others in their group during a fight and could see no way back."

[edit = put through spell-checker]
Last edited by Apollonius on Mon Nov 25, 2013 9:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

You often hear that tribal warfare got started or intensified from contact with neighbouring states, an assertion that Diamond refutes:


Thus, the long-term effect of European, Tswana, or other outside contact with states or chiefdoms has almost always been to suppress tribal warfare. The short-term effect has variously been either an immediate suppression as well or else an initial flare-up and then suppression. It cannot be said that traditional warfare is an artifact of European contact.

Nevertheless, there has been a long history of denial of traditional warfare among Western scholars. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, already mentioned for his speculative theory of state formation not based on any empirical evidence, had an equally speculative and ungrounded theory of warfare: he claimed that humans were naturally compassionate in a state of nature, and that wars began only with the rise of states. Trained ethnographers studying traditional societies in the 20th century mostly found themselves dealing with tribes and bands that had already been pacified by colonial governments, until some anthropologists were able to witness the last examples of traditional wars in the 1950s and 1960s in the New Guinea Highlands and Amazonia. Archaeologists excavating fortifications associated with ancient wars have often overlooked, ignored, or explained them away, e.g. by dismissing defensive ditches and palisades surrounding a village as mere "enclosures" or "symbols of exclusion". But the evidence of traditional warfare, whether based on direct observation or histories or archaeological evidence, is so overwhelming that one has to wonder: why is there still any debate about its importance?

One reason is the real difficulties, which we have discussed, in evaluating traditional warfare under pre-contact or early-contact conditions. Warriors quickly discern that visiting anthropologists disapprove of war, and the warriors tend not to take anthropologists along on raids or allow them to photograph battles undisturbed: the filming opportunities available to the Harvard Peabody Expedition among the Dani were unique. Another reason is that the short-term effects of European contact on tribal war can work in either direction and have to be evaluated case by case with an open mind. But the widespread denial of traditional warfare seems to go beyond those and other uncertainties in the evidence itself, and instead to involve reluctance to accept evidence for its existence or extent. Why?

There may be several reasons at work. Scholars tend to like, to identify with, or to sympathize with the traditional people among whom they live for several years. The scholars consider war bad, know that most readers of their monographs will also consider war bad, and don't want "their" people to be viewed as bad. Another reason involves unfounded claims (to be discussed below) that human warfare has anexorable genetic basis. That leads to the false assumption that war would be unstoppable, and hence to a reluctance to acknowledge the apparently depressing conclusion that war traditionally really has been widespread. Still another reason is that some state or colonial governments are eager to get indigenous people out of the way by conquering or dispossessing them or by turning a blind eye to their extermination. Branding them as warlike is used as an excuse to justify that mistreatment, so scholars seek to remove that excuse by trying to absolve the indigenous people of the charge of being warlike.


[edit = put through spell-checker]
Last edited by Apollonius on Mon Nov 25, 2013 9:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Apollonius wrote:The last part of Jared Diamond's discussion of primitive warfare concerns the ways in which it is concluded. In traditional societies, there is no mechanism to enforce peace. Some hotheads will always be disatisfied with any peaceful compromize and in a pre-state society, there is no way to prevent their unilateral revenge attacks, which stimulate yet another cycle of vilence. States allow the warring parties to conclude a definite and lasting peace.
Individual hotheads engage in violence all the time in modern society, and due to modern technology they are able to cause even more havoc than they could in traditional societies. We label them terrorists or criminals or mentally ill, and we either kill them or jail them. We accept that we cannot prevent these attacks, and really don't even try beyond a few token measures. I don't see how this is substantially different from how traditional societies dealt with the problem.
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

The difference is in proportional impact, which was far greater in primitive societies.


In any case, Ibrahim, I think you need to take it up with Jared Diamond and others who describe this from observation or first-hand accounts, maybe even read the book to get a better feel for the numbers.
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Apollonius wrote:The difference is in proportional impact, which was far greater in primitive societies.
Due to scale. The behavior is the same.


In any case, Ibrahim, I think you need to take it up with Jared Diamond and others who describe this from observation or first-hand accounts, maybe even read the book to get a better feel for the numbers.
Convince Jared Diamond to join the forum and I'll be happy to take it up with him. In the meantime I'll take it up with anyone espousing his theories.
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

Ibrahim wrote:Due to scale.


Do you even know what proportional means?



Convince Jared Diamond to join the forum and I'll be happy to take it up with him. In the meantime I'll take it up with anyone espousing his theories.



Jared Diamond has expounded many theories in many books. I've criticized some of them on this very thread.


The part of his latest book which I've quoted is not theoretical, but rather, statistical.
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Apollonius wrote:
Ibrahim wrote:
The difference is in proportional impact, which was far greater in primitive societies.
Due to scale. The behavior is the same.
Do you even know what proportional means?
Obviously.



Convince Jared Diamond to join the forum and I'll be happy to take it up with him. In the meantime I'll take it up with anyone espousing his theories.
Jared Diamond has expounded many theories in many books. I've criticized some of them on this very thread.
Good for you. I was responding to this theory.

The part of his latest book which I've quoted is not theoretical, but rather, statistical.
Well one of you is extrapolating theories based on those statistics. I'm replying to the theory, feel free to decide which one of you came up with it.
noddy
Posts: 11318
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

Apollonius wrote:The last part of Jared Diamond's discussion of primitive warfare concerns the ways in which it is concluded. In traditional societies, there is no mechanism to enforce peace. Some hotheads will always be dissatisfied with any peaceful compromise and in a pre-state society, there is no way to prevent their unilateral revenge attacks, which stimulate yet another cycle of violence. States allow the warring parties to conclude a definite and lasting peace.
this is a theory ive heard lots.

reality, as I tried to point out earlier is that one of his examples is the Melanesian region im very familiar with and they *still have* over a thousand separate little tribal groups with separate languages in a space the size of a single American state.

sometimes things are so obvious its beyond being able to explain them.

how can this in anyway be a meaningful insight when the real world outcome is that all the small tribes are still around and their has been no conformist imperial genocides, their is no suspiciously uniform gene pool (hello han china, hello Germanic Europe) and they mostly live in peace and have done for thousands of years.

all sounds a bit like a catharge version of peace to me.

im not trying to paint it as utopia or claim they are better, just pointing out that this particular angle on the peace a centralized state brings is suspicious to me and that it is a flimsy justification on something that happened with brute force and destruction of non compliant ones, it wasn't typically a democratic choice.

I wonder how many europeans or americans would like china to bring peace to them, good n hard.
Last edited by noddy on Tue Nov 26, 2013 3:13 am, edited 3 times in total.
ultracrepidarian
noddy
Posts: 11318
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

Ibrahim wrote:
noddy wrote:new guinea and melanesia in general have the highest ratios of language and distinct culture per population of any people anywhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesian_languages
By one count, there are 1,319 languages in Melanesia, scattered across a small amount of land. The proportion of 716 sq. kilometers per language is by far the most dense rate of languages in relation to land mass in the earth, almost three times as dense as in Nigeria, a country famous for its high number of languages in a compact area.[4]

they do have brutal tribal battles that get ugly when populations get out of balance but reality shows its on a completely different level and lacking in any empire conforming genocides, Asians and Europeans are on a completely different level of ruthless.
Its the history of e.g. Europe or the Middle East, only in microcosm.

History, as far back into prehistory as we are able to glimpse, shows us that humans are always doing the same things, just with greater intensity as technology permits. The entire savage/noble savage concept is an imaginary construct.
pretty much.

one day in Melanesia (probably the malaita people), their will be a group that does smash the rest ala the euro/Asian empires or the Zulu's in southern Africa.

apparently that will be a higher form of peace.
ultracrepidarian
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

apparently that will be a higher form of peace.
One of the great Victorian innovations was the idea that, not only are we going to conquer and kill you, but you really ought to thank us for it. Makes me all weepy for the Assyrians.
noddy
Posts: 11318
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

civilization and the powerful state have many advantages over the primitive types but those advantages are the advantages of mass organization.

better access to resources, more toys, comfier lives for some at the expense of others, better ability to deflect outside attack, more arts and sciences, hospitals and advanced medicine, their are plenty of them.

once you get into words like freedom and peace it gets far far messier and their are good reasons most of the tropical pacific has strict immigration laws to keep westerners out and that's because if you are below the magic middle in the modern west then pros and cons of civilization versus the true independent low key laziness of the villagers becomes an extremely debatable topic.

I think this reality is unthinkable and shocking to many westerners who need to repeat the "our way is best" mantra to themselves a lot as a way of distracting from how ugly their lives can actually be.

this manifests itself as a strawman called "primitive authenticity" and all sorts of philosophy about the utopian silliness of abandoning the wonders of civilization when actually if you just asked the average lower middle bloke if he would give up wage slavery for a spot on the beach and fishing you might get a slightly different argument because that's the lifetimes goal of retirement for many of the guys I know and the reason they motivate themselves everyday for wage slavery.

reality is the average tropical "primitive" works a couple of hours a day at most and they live primitive lives because the effort required to keep our show on the road is not worth it to them... for all the benefit I personally get from our system id be miles ahead living there, sad but true.


calling em lazy has truth in it, calling them violent and primitive is hugely suspicious coming from folks who hide their violence away .. police and army do all the bashing behind closed doors and the butcher presents the meat in neat little trays in the super market.

fwiw, homelessness and starvation dont happen in Melanesia, they all get together like the amish and build new houses for everyone and the coastal ones eat damn well.

the mountain ones not so much, they struggle for protein and get bit more prone to isolation and desperation so they are the groups that tend to be used for these broad brush smears and its like accusing all americans of being psycho hillbillies or all muslims of being Pashtuns.
ultracrepidarian
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

noddy wrote:civilization and the powerful state have many advantages over the primitive types but those advantages are the advantages of mass organization.

better access to resources, more toys, comfier lives for some at the expense of others, better ability to deflect outside attack, more arts and sciences, hospitals and advanced medicine, their are plenty of them.
Philosophy aside this is exactly how I believe we differ from primitive man or most traditional societies. Essentially the same people with the same drives and behaviors, but with greater comforts and conveniences, and perhaps slightly more neurotic. This doesn't amount to a critique or defense of either modern or traditional living.


once you get into words like freedom and peace it gets far far messier and their are good reasons most of the tropical pacific has strict immigration laws to keep westerners out and that's because if you are below the magic middle in the modern west then pros and cons of civilization versus the true independent low key laziness of the villagers becomes an extremely debatable topic.

I think this reality is unthinkable and shocking to many westerners who need to repeat the "our way is best" mantra to themselves a lot as a way of distracting from how ugly their lives can actually be.
Its precisely this which gave rise to the "noble savage" myth and the overzealous "our way is best" reaction against it.

this manifests itself as a strawman called "primitive authenticity" and all sorts of philosophy about the utopian silliness of abandoning the wonders of civilization when actually if you just asked the average lower middle bloke if he would give up wage slavery for a spot on the beach and fishing you might get a slightly different argument because that's the lifetimes goal of retirement for many of the guys I know and the reason they motivate themselves everyday for wage slavery.

reality is the average tropical "primitive" works a couple of hours a day at most and they live primitive lives because the effort required to keep our show on the road is not worth it to them... for all the benefit I personally get from our system id be miles ahead living there, sad but true.


calling em lazy has truth in it, calling them violent and primitive is hugely suspicious coming from folks who hide their violence away .. police and army do all the bashing behind closed doors and the butcher presents the meat in neat little trays in the super market.

fwiw, homelessness and starvation dont happen in Melanesia, they all get together like the amish and build new houses for everyone and the coastal ones eat damn well.

the mountain ones not so much, they struggle for protein and get bit more prone to isolation and desperation so they are the groups that tend to be used for these broad brush smears and its like accusing all americans of being psycho hillbillies or all muslims of being Pashtuns.
A agree with all of this.
User avatar
Parodite
Posts: 5638
Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2012 9:43 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Parodite »

All fine, but doesn't Pinker have a point?

sjT4HlNJNgI

He suggests that we are now doing much better than in the past, world wars and genocides included. He has numbers, statistics and a theory.
noddy
Posts: 11318
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

its hard to have a definitive opinion, the biggest change is the techno levels for both food production and medicine and that has changed the stats on deaths and desperation that leads to some types of violence

im uneasy with comparing now to history because in history many hundreds of years gets compressed into one opinion and that brushes over alot of ups and downs and our view on modernity is barely a few generations old.

we have plenty of time to catch up on the statistics for death yet.
ultracrepidarian
Ibrahim
Posts: 6524
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:06 am

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Its all about technology, which allows more material security, but also allows easier and not necessarily violent forms of suppression on behalf of the state. Thus, the human impulse for violence is dulled by plenty as well as curtailed by social control mechanisms. But when we do get violent, buddy, we get violent.
User avatar
Apollonius
Posts: 1065
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:32 pm

Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

Shortly after the publication of Spengler's original essay I objected to his sweeping generalizations about hunter-gatherer societies being *all* viciously warlike, and pointed to a few contrary examples, and noted specifically the Greenland Eskimos, who rarely even came into contact with one another, being far too dispersed to engage in anything like what we could sensibly call "war". Jared Diamond is a little more careful than Goldman, and allows for exceptions, including the very one I mentioned:

Like these modern states without recent involvement in wars, a small minority of traditional societies have also been peaceful for understandable reasons. Greenland's Polar Eskimos were so isolated that they had no neighbors, no outside contacts, and no possibility of war even if they had wanted it. Absence of war has been reported for quite a few small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers living at very low population densities, in harsh unproductive environments, with large home ranges, with few or no possessions worth defending or acquiring, and relatively isolated from other such bands. These include the Shoshone Indians of the U.S. Great Basin, Bolivia's Sirono Indians, some Australian desert tribes, and the Nganasan of northern Siberia.


On the other hand, a lot of people just don't like having anyone else around:

For example, until around 500 years ago Finland's population was concentrated on the seacoast and Finland's forested interior was sparsely inhabited. When individual families and small groups began moving as colonists into the interior, they tried to live as far as possible from each other. Finnish friends told me a story to illustrate how those colonists hated feeling crowded. A man cleared for himself and his family a small farm by a river; pleased that there were no signs of any neighbors. But one day he was horrified to observe a cut log floating down the river. Someone else must be living upstream! Enraged, the man started walking upstream through the unbroken forest to track down the trespasser. On the first day of walking he met no one; on the second day, again no one. At last, on the third day he came to a new clearing, where he found another colonist. He killed that colonist and marched three days back to his own clearing and family, relieved that he had once again secured his family's privacy. While that story may be apocryphal, it illustrates the social factors that cause small-scale societies to have concerns even about distant "neighbors" far out of sight.



And this attitude appears to be general among peoples who lead traditional lifestyles:

How do people in traditional societies without state government and police protect themselves against the constant danger of violence? A large part of the answer is that they adopt many forms of constructive paranoia. One widespread rule is to beware of strangers: routinely to attempt to kill or drive off a stranger detected on your territory, because the stranger may have come to scout out your territory or to kill a member of your tribe. Another rule is to beware of the possibility of treachery by supposed allies, or (conversely) to practice pre-emptive treachery against potentially fickle allies. For instance, a tactic of Yanomamo warfare is to invite people of a neighbouring village to come to a feast at one's own village, and then to kill them when they have set down their weapons and are eating. Don Richardson reports that the Sawi people of southwestern New Guinea honor treachery as an ideal: better than killing an enemy outright is to convince an enemy of your friendship, to invite the enemy many times over the course of months to visit you and partake of your food, and then to watch his terror when you declare, just before killing him, "Tuwi asonai makaerin!" (We have been fattening you with friendship for the slaughter!).
Post Reply