I agree with this. Sometimes, I think our self-awareness of culture and obsession with hanging onto arbitrary pieces of it (either in our own culture or in the cultures of other people) is a major roadblock to cultural evolution and change.
The point of preservation is learning. Once we’ve learned what we can, there’s no reason for a practice to remain. If we ever did want to do it again, we could just read about how it was done and why and do it again. The tragedy is in the loss of knowledge.
Also, progress for its own sake is stupid. The point of progress is to find better solutions to older problems. But if the older solution is better, progression actually becomes a regression. The costs of progress must always be measured. Leaping ahead without looking is nearly always more foolish than holding on to the past.
Oops, sorry, didn’t see this post till today.
One of the things that they won’t permit is the compilation and publication of a Kumeyaay dictionary. That would be something I’d enjoy having in my library.
This kind of exclusivity makes it harder for the language to be preserved.
I certainly can’t blame them. It’s their intellectual property, and if they don’t want it published, no one should try to compel them. I just find it sad, given my own pro-publication cultural biases. (I’m glad that Emily Dickinson’s family rejected her desires that her poetry be destroyed.)
I think the loss of knowledge is a small tragedy. But there’s a reaction to this that says indigenous people should be encouraged to maintain their culture, and I think that’s the wrong reaction. I see no reason the people born into this small society should be discouraged from assimilating elsewhere. I think the proper reaction is to fund anthropological research so that the people preserving the information are people who grew up wanting to do that.
I have a copy of Ted Couro & Christina Hutcheson’s Dictionary of Mesa Grande Diegueño. It’s 116 large-format pages. If you’re serious about it and you can remind me in a couple of weeks, I can scan & send it to you—I think it’s out of print. I also have Couro & Langdon’s Let’s Talk 'Iipay Ay, which is a bit longer but you might find in the library.
Everyone can see and distinguish between blue and yellow, though. If we’re losing a language that has 20 different words for snow, is it tragic purely due to the loss of all those descriptors? When most of the world doesn’t need that many words for snow? I don’t agree that it is.
One place where it does come up is differentiating species. In remote areas, local people may have differentiated and names variations of animals and plants that we currently lump together.
You’re extremely kind to offer, but, to be honest, my interest would only be abstract, and I would never get any real use out of it. It would be a “cool thing to have” but I doubt I’d ever actually look anything up in it. Thank you very much, however! And I’m glad such books do exist.
One interesting (?) difference between the extinction of a culture and the extinction of a species is that a culture could be revived, if there is enough documentation. A culture could be “frozen” (written down) and then brought back to life again. At present, we don’t know how to do that with extinct species.
(One could, of course, enter into a Star Trek “transporter” debate over whether it’s really the “same” culture!)
Yes. And inuit doesn’t have 20 different words for snow any more than english does. It just happens to be agglutinative. But there is information within a language. If we don’t know the language, we can’t determine its sister languages. There’s a minority language known as Ket that happens to have been spoken in some slavic regions in Europe. It is quite similar to Na-Dene languages such as Navajo and some other native american languages to the point where several linguists who’ve studied the matter consider them descended from the same mother language. This relationship helps support theories about prehistoric movement from Europe and Asia to American via the bering land bridge. That is the sort of information we can lose when a language dies out. It’s not a huge thing in the grand scheme of things but it is a thing.
So most people in this thread are realistic about how cultures change and pass away as time goes by, and yet we get into so very much hand-wringing over what has happened to Native Americans - why the disconnect?
The treatment of the American Indians was far from benign neglect. It was out-and-out murder, and on a very large scale.
This thread is more about the falling away of cultures because of a more genteel attrition: the kids don’t learn the old languages any more, but pick up the dominant language of the region. They don’t weave baskets the way their ancestors did, but learn computer programming.
The comparison between the two is absurd, and to accuse us of hypocrisy on that basis is insulting.
I think the comparison is completely germane; the deaths of so many aboriginal North Americans was terrible of course, but one of the things that people get very upset about is their loss of culture. Is loss of culture bad or not? It’s okay if it happens by genteel attrition, but it’s bad if it’s caused by people moving into your country and taking over (like has happened a million times in the history of humanity)? What’s the difference?
It’s all right if it happens organically. It’s bad if it happens because the minority is actively oppressed, suppressed, or bullied by the majority culture. It’s bad if the imbalance of power between the two causes people to make the choice to abandon their culture not because it’s better, but because it’s too expensive to keep your culture.
Think about an elderly Indian who speaks his own language, but not English. How will that situation affect his medical care in an emergency? How will that affect his ability to earn a living if he is younger? You can see why people are forced to make a choice, especially if they’re poor and don’t have the luxury of choice.
If people just decide that they don’t like their language, well, fine, but that basically never happens. They decide they don’t want to hold their children back, or they are shamed and pressured.
There’s a middle ground: they are out-competed. Another culture offers greater rewards. The pressure is not coercive; there is no shame or arm-twisting. We just have candy bars and mens’ magazines over here, and your culture doesn’t.
You say “that basically never happens.” But, in fact, it happens all the time. It’s much of why Judaism in the U.S. is moving away from the extreme Orthodox and Conservative end of the spectrum, and become more liberal. The liberality is more attractive.
It’s also why 7-Up is losing so much market share to Coke and Pepsi. It’s a matter of superior market competition.
Choice, duh. If a bunch of people decide they prefer Miley Cyrus to their traditional music, hey, that’s their choice. But if someone says “you must stop your traditional songs and only listen to Miley Cyrus, and we will imprison you and take away your children to be raised in pop music camps,” that not so cool.
Cultures adapt to what they need. But they can also be forced in to something that doesn’t suit them. And that has a human price. People who are in a culture that doesn’t fit their surroundings get disoriented and have a tough time with identity, values and their place in the world.
There are practical concerns as well. A materialist culture that emphasizes having lists of stuff is a great adaptation for modern capitalism. People who encounter modern capitalism pick it up quickly. But it’s a terrible thing to pick up in a tiny farming villages, where the only real way to amass stuff is to rob cars passing through and where your all going to die the first time the rains fail if you don’t share your crops.
Cameroon has a GREAT school system-- for French people in the 1950s. But everything about it, from the school term starting in September (smack in the middle of harvest) to the subject matter taught to the rules and regulations (pregnant ladies are not allowed to attend-- a if issue when girls get married in their mid-teens) made it a bad match for the country.
So choice=A OK, force=very likely to be harmful.
Yes, but in this case, it’s often Coke competing with Uncle Fred’s Traditional Berry Juice. Uncle Fred’s may be the better product, but it’s bulldozed by the Coke marketing machine.
In other words, if something is outcompeted in a more-or-less level playing field, awesome. Nobody is going to mourn its loss. But that’s not often the case, and it’s naïve to think that culture and language shift is merely a matter of people choosing a superior product.
I recommend the excellent article “No Time to Worship the Serpent Deities” if you have access to JSTOR.
Cultures do indeed get out-competed; the culture of England and France 500 years ago was to go to new places and subjugate them. Their culture won, the aboriginal culture lost.
So I guess grossly unfair competition is okay? If you lose when the playing field wasn’t anywhere near level, well, too bad! You still lost!
How… Machiavellian.
Cultures colliding is rarely fair; we’re all warm and fuzzy about it these days, but our enlightened state is extremely recent.
So?