PATHS OF DEVELOPMENT

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PATHS OF DEVELOPMENT

• Research among indigenous peoples
• Fear expectation that all societies will soon
  resemble one another
• Disappearing worlds
• Genocides and/or ethnocides
• white mans burden save their souls or zeal
  to acquire land resources?
• Researchers salvage anthropology
• Work with a sense of loss at the prospect of
  cultural extinction
• Preservation holism
• convergence thesis process of modernization

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The modern

• Human societies organized around industrialism
• Nuclear family
• Forces of bureaucracy
• Technological specialization
• Traditional or tribal societies marginalized or
  engulfed by this new social order
• Gellner, the convergences thesis, the end of
  history

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The primitive

• Categories
• The primitive the civilized
• Tradition modern

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PRIMITIVISM THE SAVAGE SLOT IN ANTHROPOLOGY

• Anthropology as research from somewhere
• Long standing association with the primitive
• Anthropology placed in the savage slot
• Enlightenment notion of nature
• Underlying drive of behavior
• As the real, objective universe as distinguished
  from the spiritual, intellectual, or imaginary
  world
• Cartesian reductionism
• Nature denotes pre-cultural, primitive,
  uncultivated or uncivilized in humankind
• Nature is independent of social law
• Nature refers to sub-human -- animal, plant,
  physical
• Nature remains when the peculiar qualities of
  sapiens the sentient, cultural, and technological
  are omitted
• Notions of primitivity, sub-humanity,
  non-intellectuality, emotionality linked to
  nature and non-white

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The Enlightenment on Human Diversity Stages
Progress

• Condorcet (18th century) -- all peoples history
  fall somewhere between OUR present degree of
  civilization that which we see among savage
  tribes
• nature distributes her gifts unequally
• from egalitarian small society to inequality
  within and among
• The primitive mind -- monstrous aberrations of
  idolatry of first men
• Animatism superstition
• The enlightened mind
• Progress degeneration
• history of world presents to us more than once
  the spectacle of a civilized people invaded by
  barbarians communicating in its manners its
  language its knowledge forcing them to make one
  people with it
• Primitivism
• Important trope/episteme/argument for rule

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Enlightenment theories of human nature

• Hobbes -- competition progress we are all
  savages
• Rousseau -- savage-utopia configuration also
  story of dystopia
• savages in the forest frightened
• peace is first natural law
• to seek nourishment peace the establishment
  of societies
• with establishment of society -- lose feelings of
  weakness, equality ceases, state of war begins
• The noble savage
• Locke tabula rasa we are all blank
  slates/empty closets

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Nature and progress 1915 anthropologists

• we see that the higher civilized white man has
  already in some respects out distanced others,
  that he is rapidly diversifying, and that all
  about us those who cannot keep the accelerated
  pace are being eliminated by nature
• Overemphasis of the naturalism of non-white
  societies
• some groups adapt by virtue of their natural
  attributes while others adapt through sentient,
  cultural, and distinctly human means

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PRIMITIVISM RACISM

• Meld together
• T. Jefferson blacks, whether originally a
  distinct race, or made distinct by time and
  circumstances, are inferior to whites
• Race and racial differences as a state of nature
• Sociobiological notion that racism derives from
  genes that cause groups to compete against those
  who are genetically different
• Nature outside of culture

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race and ethnicity

• There are no biological human races
• up until 14th cent. in Europe cultural social
  evolution based on the idea of progress from
  kin-based societies to civil society through
  governance law
• after 16th cent. in Europe ideas of blood were
  used to characterize difference

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After 1500

• European exploration increased contact with
  other human societies
• exploration turned to conquest and Ethnocentric
  feeling of European superiority

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The Enlightenment 17th 18th Century Europe

• race used interchangeably with type, variety,
  people, nation, generation species
• race equated with breeding stock
• 1700s Enlightenment science
• social phenomena and the worlds peoples into
  natural schemes

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Formal Human ClassificationLinneaus Systemae
Naturae, 1758

• Europeaeus
• White muscular hair long, flowing eyes blue
• Americanus
• Reddish erect hair black, straight, thick
  wide nostrils
• Asiaticus
• Sallow (yellow) hair black eyes dark
• Africanus
• Black hair black, frizzled skin silky nose
  flat lips tumid

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1795 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach race
classifications

• Malayan
• Ethiopian
• American
• Mongolian
• Caucasian
• coined the term "Caucasian" because he believed
  that the Caucasus region of Asia Minor produced
  "the most beautiful race of men".

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1830s Philadelphia doctor and polygenist Samuel
Morton

• collected hundreds of human skulls of known races
• measured them by filling the skulls with lead
  pellets and then pouring the pellets into a glass
  measuring cup
• tables assign the highest brain capacity to
  Europeans (with the English highest of all)
• Second rank goes to Chinese, third to Southeast
  Asians and Polynesians, fourth to American
  Indians, and last place to Africans and
  Australian aborigines.
• work establish the scientific basis for
  physical anthropology but also the idea that race
  is inherently biological

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Stephen Jay GouldThe Mis-measure of Man
(1981)

• Re-analyzed Mortons data
• Mortons racist bias -- prevented identification
  of fully overlapping measurements among the
  racial skull samples he used

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race and social difference

• Race as social grouping based on perceived
  physical differences and cloaked in the language
  of biology
• Charles Wagleys term social races groups
  assumed to have a biological basis but actually
  defined in a culturally arbitrary rather than a
  scientific manner
• Racism systematic social and political bias
  based on idea of race

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AAA statement on race

• Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g.,
  DNA) indicates that most physical variation,
  about 94, lies within so-called racial groups.
• Conventional geographic racial groupings differ
  from one another only in about 6 of their
  genes.
• Race thus evolved as a world view, a body of
  prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human
  differences and group behavior.
• The racial world view was invented to assign
  some groups to perpetual low status, while others
  were permitted access to privilege, power, and
  wealth

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from race to ethnicity

• ethnicity forged in the process of historical
  time
• subject to shifts in meaning
• shifts in referents or markers of ethnic identity
• subject to political manipulations
• ethnic identity is not a function of primordial
  ties, although it may be described as such
• always the genesis of specific historical forces
  that are simultaneously structural cultural

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building blocks of ethnicity

• associated with distinctions between language,
  religion, historical experience, geographic
  isolation, kinship, notions of race (phenotype)
• may include collective name, belief in common
  descent, sense of solidarity, association with a
  specific territory, clothing, house types,
  personal adornment, food, technology, economic
  activities, general lifestyle

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ethnicity and boundaries

• where there is a group there is some sort of
  boundary
• where there are boundaries there are mechanisms
  for maintaining boundaries
• cultural markers of difference that must be
  visible to members and non-members
• Marked and unmarked categories

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ethnogenesis

• "fluidity" of ethnic identity
• ethnic groups vanish, people move between ethnic
  groups, new ethnic groups come into existence
• ethnogenesis -- emergence of new ethnic group,
  part of existing group splits forms new ethnic
  group, members of two or more groups fuse

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interactionist approach

• I didnt know I was Japanese until I came to the
  United States
• I am not a woman of colour
• First Nations
• Switch from the noun identity to the social
  process of identifying
• Relational process

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The State, The Nation, and Ethnicity

• 181 states but 5000 nations?
• idea that nation and state coincide is rare
• The appearance of ethnicity and the rise of the
  nation-state
• (Nash) nation-state responsible for the rise and
  definition of social entities called ethnic
  groups - last 500 years
• grew out of the wreck of empires, breakups of
  civilizations
• within borders of nation-state - social and
  cultural diversity

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Assimilation Melting Pot

• melting-pot model of American identity, prevalent
  at the beginning of the 20th century, immigrants
  were encouraged to completely discard the
  cultural heritage they brought with them.
• all ethnic groups acculturate to a universalistic
  set of values and symbols with no ancestral
  connotations
• there is two-way influence between ethnic groups
  in the society such that no ancestral group
  achieves symbolic dominance

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Mosaic Model

• the mosaic model, people of different backgrounds
  can fit together without losing their original
  identity
• 'vertical mosaic' of distinct classes and ethnic
  groups
• "vertical" implies that these ethnic and racial
  groups are arranged into a hierarchy
• A similar term would be ethnic stratification

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Development Developmentalism

• accusations that indigenous peoples (ethnic
  groups) stand in the way of development
• Should Abandon Separate Identities and Assimilate
• Disappearance of Indigenous Cultures Regrettable
  but Impede Modernization
• If Dont Assimilate How Will Indigenous Peoples
  Survive in Modern World
• Social Darwinism stronger societies are bound
  to extinguish weaker ones survival of the
  fittest

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Politics of embarrassment

• Or recognition
• The use of the media public relations to expose
  the inconsistencies injustices of government
  action
• The bigotry impact of the governments
  negligence on the living conditions of native
  communities

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Modernity politics of recognition

• The State The idea that there should be a
  single supreme authority over a group of people
  occupying a territory
• The Nation -- communities of people who see
  themselves as one people on the basis of common
  ancestry, history, society, institutions,
  ideology, language, territory, and (often)
  religion new idea as form of political org.
• Contemporary multi-ethnic nation-states
• The focus on peoples and their rights
• politics of recognition rather than on states and
  their advantages

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The return of the primitive indigenous peoples
indigeneity

• Nations within groups that formed complete and
  functioning societies on their historic homeland
  before being incorporated into a larger state
• Typically been involuntary colonization,
  conquest, etc.
• Indigenous groups around the world
• Drive for recognition of rights
• Sovereignty and self-governance

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Professional Primitives

• ecological symbiosis
• rural proletariat of the political economic model
• freedom fighters of indigenous perspectives

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The Cree of Québec

• Forest economy
• Hunting, fishing, trapping way of life
• Thread of continuity
• Attachment to forest life source of efforts to
  reform administration of justice, social
  services, health care
• Claim that Cree are distinct society
• Greater claim to sovereignty self-determination
  than Québecs francophone community