Ray,
You misunderstand me. I wasn't writing of tribes
in any pejorative way, anymore than any of the
other stages of the social/governance ratchet,
but only of their size and structure. Cultures,
institutions, tribes, cliques, single leaderships
are all equally valid at the right time and in their appropriate context.
KSH
At 18:57 21/06/2011, REH wrote:
When President Kennedy had the same situation
as Obama, they did not, call it a tribal thing
but a group pathology called Groupthink.
Over the years, the White part of the American
population has downgraded the Indian Nations to
Tribes in order to escape the Supreme Courts
ruling of us as Dependent Nations. (It
reminds one of the Turkish response to the
Armenians or the Iranians and the
Bahais.) However, it has been much worse for
African culture. African culture has simply
not been allowed and demeaned almost as badly as
the Europeans have the Romany. (For a good
description of this I would recommend the works
on the Gypsies by the bible salesman George
Burrows which formed the research basis for the
opera Carmen, followed by the excellent current
volume by Yale Historian Ben Kiernan Blood and
Soil, A World History of Genocide and
Extermination frpom Sparta to
Darfur. Yale. The are plenty of books on
the cant of slavery. Especially the terrible
scientific justification put forth by the early
Anthropological scientists. (Too many books on
this to mention them all.) Tribal was just one
of the many pejorative terms used to justify
theft and murder. Keith, I mention this
knowing full well that you are a civilized and
compassionate human being. I just dont
understand this reflex to such language. Its
really a problem here where the diversity is so
rich and we have our first black President.
Today it has become a right and left wing issue
although it wasnt originally. As the
conservative right wing has cut back on funding
for Native education and expanded the
propaganda, some Indian Nations have even gone
along with the designation and now call
themselves tribes. However, its historically
inaccurate and is a bastardization of the
translation of what Native Nations called
themselves into the English language. In our
communities that has been a great problem in the
unification of our peoples as modern day Americans.
Sadly to say, many of my own people, (the ones
connected to the government through enrollment,)
now use that term interchangeably with
nation. The Cherokee nation was once the
size of France and had a population that was
comparable to the France of that day (although
you cant get anyone to admit that now).
What American citizen preaching American
specialness wants to know that they
downsized a nation to 150,000 official
Cherokees over the past four hundred
years? There are now millions of descendants
of the original 69 Mayflower Puritans but our
people have been deliberately forced to do the
opposite. Calling us a Tribe or Tribal is a
part of that strategy by the dominant
society. (Note the Bryan Fischer argument I
published a couple of days ago on Blacks and Indians. )
<http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-gop-s-favorite-hate-monger-how-the-republican-party-came-to-embrace-bryan-fischer#racism>http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-gop-s-favorite-hate-monger-how-the-republican-party-came-to-embrace-bryan-fischer#racism
Do you really want to be connected to such
thinking? In Brazil, they use the
Environmental changes and the sophisticated
ritual structures to project the true sizes of
the pre-Columbian Amazon Nations. They call
the groups Remnant Nations because they were
clearly urban structures that were consonant
with what the first explorers spoke of, but were
later doubted, since they had no understanding
of what their germs did to the people they encountered.
They saw it simply as the economics of
exploration and conquest. They came to trade
and conquer not to wipe out. There are many
histories here where colonists would enter an
Indian town to trade only to find that a few
days later the entire population sickened and
died from the germs. Cortez couldnt believe
that the Aztecs fought to the last man and
destroyed their city rather than having the
eternal city model of the Romans. No one
wants to see themselves as the evil
person. Everyone uses the terms that basically
mean bringer of culture. In that context,
tribe become a perjorative and a weapon in the
hands of those who seek to win rather than to understand.
As for winners for the Stalins, Hitlers,
etc. they are more consonant with what Joseph
Campbell called The Heros Journey that had
its roots in Odysseus and Alexander. The
only difference here is that they
lost. The losers dont get to write the
histories. Im reminded of the advertising
campaigns during the Cold War that painted
Russian women as fat and ugly. That is of
course what we all think of Anna Netrebko
right? And the urbane Siberian Dimitri
Hvorostovsky. The best example of
this Heros Journey is found in the massive
Kazantzakis poem study of Odysseus that he
titled simply The Odyssey, a 20th Century
Sequel. I know of no better analysis of the
Western traditions that extend from family,
through tribe to nation that the Kazantzakis poem.
I cannot agree with you about Obamas tribe,
however, anymore than I would call the Harvard
centered Groupthink of Kennedy Tribal or
even Irish. You do realize that Obama was
the son of a Harvard trained economist who
worked for the Kenyan government? And that
his mother was an anthropologist scholar.
After all of that time we still are stupid when
it comes to knowing the underlying artistic and
spiritual culture of the African Peoples. I am
literally stunned daily by what I learn of the
sophistication of their musical traditions and
the complexity of their virtuosity. Evidently
Picasso agreed with me when speaking of the
visual arts as well. Today, there is a whole
new division of Anthropology called Sensorium
Anthropology that has sprung out of Western
Anthropology becoming sophisticated enough to
see what Sir Herbert Read called The Sensory
Minds of the African cultures in his
magnificent Education Through Art. (Except he
was speaking of Greece!) Unfortunately, Sir
Herbert was ignored on that until Howard
Gardener came along and rebranded it as Frames
of Mind and Steven Pinker was so outrageous as
to stir people up to debunk his silliness around
the sensorium and the Arts which he termed
evolutionary cheesecake. Hence we get a
whole new way of looking at Africa called
Sensorium Anthropology. (Culture and the
Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African
Community; Kathryn Linn Geurts, Univ of Cal press)
John Warfield created two other categories
of group pathology. One was called
Clanthink and the other was
Spreadthink. What you describe is
actually closer to Clanthink in that
context. John walked awfully close to the
edge around the clan as well since the clan
type governments are quite sophisticated
politically. What we think of today as clan
is the Klu Klux Klan, not a real clan at
all. Genuine clan structures are actually
closer to what Warfield called Interactive
Management than the KKK which is Klanthink.
I think you will be on much safer territory if
you dont use terms that are as loaded with
Western chauvinism as the word tribe is and is
still being used here by the likes of Newt
Gingrich and company as a way of stealing.
Better to be more accurate and create a new way
of analyzing the management problems of a
brilliant President who, like JFK, suffers from
the same issues that the Ivy League folks here
have when considering the rest of the
country. (Although Harvard was originally
an Indian school for missionizing, I dont think
they would refer themselves as tribal today.)
Originally the term savage referred to
non-domestic people of the forest, (in some
cases even farmers and blacksmiths working in
the wild woods were called savage) and is in
contrast to the Civilized city folks. (See
Balee below) A lot of this bias can be traced
to the different methods of forestry found in
Europe versus the cultivated forests that the
Europeans found here as a result of native uses
of fire and planting methods.
It can also be traced to the interaction with
this New World where their images of themselves
as human beings were severely tested with the
massive die off from disease. What person
wants to believe that their very breath destroys
a whole world? You come up with all kinds of
rationalizations that are essentially useless
except as defense against your own fears.
The problem of the city (civilized) folks today,
is that they know almost nothing of the
management patterns of the original Savage and
are unconscious to the connection in their own
roots where they elected to leave the garden
in what they termed the quest for real
knowledge encouraged by a snake and a
woman. The metaphors dont translate and no
one speaks the others language well enough to
be able to stop the carnage. But the use of
trigger words that in most contexts are
pejoratives is outrageous at the very least and duplicitous at worst.
REH
savage
c.1300, "wild, undomesticated, untamed" (of
animals and places), from O.Fr. sauvage,
salvage "wild, savage, untamed," from L.L.
salvaticus, alteration of silvaticus "wild,"
lit. "of the woods," from silva "forest, grove."
Of persons, the meaning "reckless, ungovernable" is attested from c.140l
earlier in sense "indomitable, valiant" (c.1300).
Implications of ferocity are attested from 1579,
earlier of animals (1407).
The noun meaning "wild person" is from 1588;
the verb meaning "to tear with the teeth, maul" is from 1880.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
For a discussion on the European Forestry
Methods as a metaphor, there are good references
in the internet as to both methods of use but
the best Ive seen is in the excellent Michael
Williams book from Cambridge, Americans and
Their Forests, a Historical Geolography.
For the discussion of Savage, Heathen, Pagan
etc. I would recommend an old friend, Robert W.
Venables book, with Christopher Vecsey
(editors) American Indian Environments,
Ecological Issues in Native American
History Syracuse Univ. Press The excellent
article by William T. Hagan called Justifying
Dispossession of the Indian, the Land
Utilization Argument and Venables article
Iroquois Environments and We the People of the
United States Gemeinschaft and Gesellshaft in
the Apposition of Iroquois, Federal, and New York State Sovereignties.
For the classical discussion on the use of the
word Tribe I would recommend an excellent new
volume edited by William Balee, called Advances
in Historical Ecology. Columbia U. I
would recommend the whole book but especially
Balees Chapter 1 Historical Ecolory: Premises
and Postulates and Darrell Poseys Chapter 5
Diachronic Ecotones and Anthropogenic
Landscapes in Amazonia: Contesting the Consciousness of Conservation.
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 5:40 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION
Subject: [Futurework] The tribal imagination
When in difficulty, human cultures, however
elevated, are predisposed to default to
institutions (or classes) which in turn are
predisposed to default to tribes, which in turn
so easily default to cliques, which in turn
default to single leaders. The last are the
equivalent of daddies of the original
family-sized groups in which we and our
predecessors lived, and in which our genes have
been shaped, for millions of years. The default
tends always in an anti-evolutionary direction
towards the earlier basics. "Cometh the hour,
cometh the man". The Tolstoyan view of history.
So, if cultures are unfortunate in their
immediate past histories, they produce the
Stalins, Hitlers and Mao Zedongs of the human
world. Monsters. Sometimes, if the nominal
leaders are not so monstrous but still powerful
then the default condition is a little higher,
at the clique level. This is why President Bush
needed three or four others (but only three or
four others) in order to manipulate America into
invading Iraq -- an illegal act if there ever
was one. When the nominal leader is neither
monstrous nor powerful -- and really hardly
knows what he's doing -- then the reverse
default is a clique that can be well-nigh
invisible and works in mysterious ways.
Thus President Obama's financial policy is
actually that of a clique centred around top
nerds in the US Treasury and also friends in the
banking world. Not so much a clique in this case
as almost a tribe, almost at a higher notch.
Whether this bunch, this almost-tribe, can
continue succeeding in mystifying the other
tribe in Congress is a moot point. But then, the
latter tribe is actually in a further default
condition already -- two tribes which spend most
of their energy performing war-dances around each other.
Thus human behaviour is a ratchet which works
both ways. With a gentle following wind, it can
proceed very slowly in one direction towards
culture, but this takes generations. If met with
storms, then the ratchet clicks very rapidly in
the default direction. Whether a nation is
formally a selected bureaucracy as in China, or
an elected democracy as in America, matters
little. It is where it is on the ratchet that's important.
I've simplified, of course. There are many
components of a culture -- fertility, science,
art, sports, industry, entertainment, etc. --
and they're not necessarily correlated. But some
specific state of politics, some specific
position on the ratchet, applies in all of them.
In the fertility department, for example, the
Western cultures are right at the family end. In
fact, less than that, because singlehood is a
growing phenomenon and, also, families are no
longer able to sustain themselves -- neither
looking after their old people humanely enough nor producing enough children.
Perhaps one day when the default system is
taught to children at school as a rendered down
account of anthropology, behavioural psychology
and evolutionary genetics -- but essentially
simple withall -- then perhaps we can govern
ourselves and our activities just a little
better than now without today's much practised
manipulation by a few on the one hand or the
punter-like credulity of the masses on the
other. Perhaps we'll really begin to know
ourselves, as Socrates used to say, and for
cultures to know more truly how they ought to operate.
The book that's inspired today's outburst? The
Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind by Robin Fox.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
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