Comments on: Black Hills, White Law, Red Grievances http://www.cornellsociety.org/2010/02/black-hills-white-law-red-grievances/ Unity in charity, diversity in truth Mon, 10 Oct 2011 03:49:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc By: Matt Beck http://www.cornellsociety.org/2010/02/black-hills-white-law-red-grievances/comment-page-1/#comment-282812 Matt Beck Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:22:06 +0000 http://www.cornellsociety.org/?p=3168#comment-282812 I think you've hit the nail on the head with this one Bonifacius, but the point can also be applied more generally. For instance, there is a great deal of fervor among anthropologists (and a plurality of assent among sympathetic lay white people), for the preservation of indigenous cultural forms, and especially of indigenous languages. But this fervor ignores the fact that cultural exchange between primitive peoples is extremely rapid, with things like word-borrowings and the development of pidgins being commonplace; and the wholesale transfer of forms of religious observences and artisanal techniques occur much more often than most people realize. Thus, tracking the spread of clovis spear points from Alaska down to the southern tip of Chile reveals not "the migration of a people," but the <i>spread of a technique</i> which was alternatively carried, copied, and traded from place to place as the case may be. The convetional idea of a small, homogeneous, huddled mass of people wandering all over BFE, never forgetting to drop their beloved spear points behing them like the Lone Ranger's silver bullet, is a notion only a Western anthropologist could conceive. Therefore, when Native Americans speak of the need to preserve "the" Navajo language or "the" Cherokee culture, they are forgetting that these things never existed in such a definite form as that which they wish to preserve. What these nouns indicate is not a single, classifiable system, but a highly fluid mass of individual elements. Even the tribal identities themselves were very indistinct, with tribes raiding, absorbing, conquering, bifurcating, and joining one another according to the needs of the moment. The effort to preserve the culture or language <i>as it now stands</i> amounts to nothing more than the act of memorializing the very moment when the tribes were conquered by Westerners, or at least the moment when Western anthropologists deigned to take notice of them - the very moment which, given their general attitude, you'd think they would most want to forget. Besides which, the entire sentiment of linguistic preservation is Western in and of itself, for primitive peoples felt no such patriotism toward their native tongue when they really were primitive, and they were (as the rest of this post should show) quite ready to change it when the tongue of a more powerful people proved to possess superior efficacy. The first chapter of the second volume of Oswald Spengler's <i>The Decline of the West</i> contains a veritable corpus of commentary on these observations. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with this one Bonifacius, but the point can also be applied more generally. For instance, there is a great deal of fervor among anthropologists (and a plurality of assent among sympathetic lay white people), for the preservation of indigenous cultural forms, and especially of indigenous languages. But this fervor ignores the fact that cultural exchange between primitive peoples is extremely rapid, with things like word-borrowings and the development of pidgins being commonplace; and the wholesale transfer of forms of religious observences and artisanal techniques occur much more often than most people realize. Thus, tracking the spread of clovis spear points from Alaska down to the southern tip of Chile reveals not “the migration of a people,” but the spread of a technique which was alternatively carried, copied, and traded from place to place as the case may be. The convetional idea of a small, homogeneous, huddled mass of people wandering all over BFE, never forgetting to drop their beloved spear points behing them like the Lone Ranger’s silver bullet, is a notion only a Western anthropologist could conceive.

Therefore, when Native Americans speak of the need to preserve “the” Navajo language or “the” Cherokee culture, they are forgetting that these things never existed in such a definite form as that which they wish to preserve. What these nouns indicate is not a single, classifiable system, but a highly fluid mass of individual elements. Even the tribal identities themselves were very indistinct, with tribes raiding, absorbing, conquering, bifurcating, and joining one another according to the needs of the moment. The effort to preserve the culture or language as it now stands amounts to nothing more than the act of memorializing the very moment when the tribes were conquered by Westerners, or at least the moment when Western anthropologists deigned to take notice of them – the very moment which, given their general attitude, you’d think they would most want to forget. Besides which, the entire sentiment of linguistic preservation is Western in and of itself, for primitive peoples felt no such patriotism toward their native tongue when they really were primitive, and they were (as the rest of this post should show) quite ready to change it when the tongue of a more powerful people proved to possess superior efficacy. The first chapter of the second volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West contains a veritable corpus of commentary on these observations.

]]>