Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 19:08:23 -0700 (PDT) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Michael Eisenscher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [PEN-L:901] Re: Re: sell-out Indians and western arrogance Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] At 03:24 PM 8/14/1998 -0400, Ricardo Duchesne wrote: >RD: >Am a generalist by profession. You are the expert on Indian affairs. >We need experts, but the generalist, as we all know, has a better >view of the forest. New World Indians did not practice >agriculture before Mesopotamians, or Babylonians. The neolithic >revolution in the east is dated to about 10.5 thousand years ago. >In Mesoamerica to about 7, 000 years ago. Towns were already present >in the east 8000 years ago, if not earlier. But settled village life in >Mesoamerica began around 3.5 thousand years ago. (Perhaps because >agriculture was more sporadic, plus no large animals were >domesticated). > >Now, what about North American Indians? The evidence >is that domestication there came even later. Permanent villages >eventually came, but never a civilization, or a state (as with the Aztecs, >or Incas). Meanwhile, many remained hunters and gatherers, >particularly in the northern regions. So, by and large, North American >Indians were nomadic. What's wrong with being nomadic? > >ricardo ME: I offer myself as no expert on any of this debate, but this last remark caught my attention. I had been led to believe that by the time the first 'Pilgrims' landed, a number of tribes in No. America had relatively well developed civilizations and state apparatus, including a diplomatic corps and principles of government. Am I mistaken in this belief? RD: Anthropologists generally agree there are 4 basic stages in the evolution of political organization: 1) bands with informal, transient democratic leadership by natural (older or skilled hunter) leader of the band; 2) tribe with better off redistributors who have prestige but little and non-heritable power; 3) chiefdoms with a centralized form of government organized in a hierarchy of powerful chiefs and subchiefs who inherit their positions and can back their power through the use of force, but who have kinship ties to the community and must redistribute some of the surplus and lack complete control over administrative and military resources; 4) states with a tiny elite at the top in full control over military and administrative resources able to meet any threat, without always being successful, against their leadership. N.American Indians formed chiefdoms but not states. And, arguably, so did the Africans (Egypt is not African). ME: I think this debate, however is degenerating into a pissing match over secondary factoids (interesting as they may be to the partisans and spectators). Is it really important that we know which society established towns and agricultural production first when the differences are over how many thousands of years ago this may have occurred? So what? How does that bear on contemporary issues confronting indigenous peoples and capitalist development? It seems to this untrained eye that we have degenerated into a battle of expert egos and the points at issue are getting lost in the 'who's the greater expert' competition. What is demonstrated in the process is who's the more self-important INNNNNtellectual! Come on boys, reign in your egos long enough to find the original point. RD: Craven started the pissing competition with his continuous claims that I know "absolutely nothing" about Indians and should keep my mouth shut, jst because I questioned a bit of what he says. The last "source" I mentioned - "Red Blood, While Lily" - was meant sarcastically, as a way of questioning his own sources. ricardo
