I’m talking about groups like hunter/gatherer tribes in Africa, the ones you see on National Geographic specials. Why are they still so primitive after all this time?
First, they’ve had encounters with the rest of the world, or we wouldnt know about them. Do they simply not want any of the advancements our technology could give them? I’m thinking medicine more than nuclear reactors here.
Second, why didn’t they develop with the rest of the world? While our ancestors were inventing Steam Power and Electricity and Magnetism, they haven’t made it past Ceremonial Burial. Why didn’t they follow the same development rate as the rest of human societies? Living in at least a fairly hostile environment, they had pressures to develop. Didn’t they produce any geniuses? No one who could come up with the Gatling Blowgun?
Not sure about your first question, but the answer to your second question (“why didn’t they develop with the rest of the world?”) is the topic of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” – a very good (and oft-cited, here) book.
In a nutshell, his answer is that conditions there (and in many other places in the world) were less conducive to making the switch from hunting-gathering to agriculture. He goes into far more elaboration and detail, of course…
But that doesn’t answer the question. Hunter gatherers exist in close proximity with agriculturalists in Africa and South America. GG&S is more about about why Eurasian civilizations outperformed those civilizations and agricultural societies in Africa and the New World, not so much about hunter/gatherer societies.
I think the answer to the OP is more that the existing h/g societies tend to be in rather poor countries which don’t have the resources to assimilate them and a few countries that can afford the luxury of “protecting” them.
They’re poor. They can’t afford much modern technology; and the countries they live in are among the poorest in the world and can’t afford the sort of infrastructure needed to make use of modern technology anyway. (A washing machine is no use if you don’t have electricity, for instance.) They do have basic medicine, though - witness the eradication of smallpox, for instance.
Take the case of African colonies of European powers-like the former Belgian Congo. The Belgians moved in, and set up a local government (staffed by Belgians) they built schools and hospitals, roads and railroads, ports and facilities. Most of this activity was directed toward the extraction of local resources (gold, rubber, bauxite, cobalt, etc.) for export to Belgium. The small local (African) elite was trained by the belgians to be Belgian-so much so that their objective was to emigrate to belgium-not to stay and build up the Congo.
Now, 50 years after independence, the Congo has been a collection of failed states (mostly corrupt dictatorships). the mineral wealth has been siphoned off, and the society is still primitive-what went wrong?
I explicitly only attempted to answer the second question in the OP, not the first (which you are referring to; and which I agree is probably the more interesting one, if only because Diamond has me convinced we pretty much know the answer to the second!)
It may be worth pointing out that very few true hunter-gatherer societies survived into the 20th Century. One of the few in Africa were the Bushmen (aka San). Pygmies also engaged in hunting and gathering but had a close relationship with nearby agriculturalists.
Almost all the “primitive” societies one sees depicted on National Geographic or other such programs are small-scale agriculturalists (e.g. New Guinea tribesmen, Amazonian Indians) or pastoralists/herders (Masai, etc.).
Development of a complex civilization depends in large part on intensive agriculture, which provides a storable surplus on which specialized occupations can be supported. Technological development is accelerated by the amount of contact with other civilizations and the exchange of ideas. “Primitive” cultures have survived largely in places where intensive agriculture was not possible (e.g. deserts, rainforests) or in places isolated by geography or other factors from other cultures.
In many places “primitive” cultures have survived because people took refuge in remote places and isolated themselves from invading “higher” cultures that attempted to dominate or enslave them. For example, here in Panama indigenous groups with traditional cultures survive mainly in places where their ancestors took refuge from Spanish invaders, and actively resisted imposition of the foreign culture. These were places that were generally less suitable for intensive agriculture such as mountains or jungles.
Today these people continue with what appears to be a “primitive” lifestyle partly out of tradition, but perhaps more importantly due to poverty. In Embera villages in the Darien, people live in thatched huts and farm small plots of rice, bananas, and other crops. They have radios, plastic plates, outboard motors, sometimes chain saws. If they don’t have other modern conveniences, it’s usually because they can’t afford it, or because it’s not suitable for their environment (e.g. cinder-block houses) as their traditional ways. As for health care, while the government has built clinics in some areas, it can be difficult to get doctors or nurses to remain there.
I don’t think so. First of all, Diamond’s hypothesis in GG&S can be overrated-- it is, really, just an hypothesis and is not in any sense a generally accepted scientific theory. There has been a lot of criticism directed towards his hypothesis as can be found in the wikipedia article about that book. Secondly, as I said in my post, you can find h/g societies in close proximity with agricultural societies so why didn’t the h/g societies “develop” just like the agriculturalists-- at least taking the step from h/g to agriculture, if not the step toward full-blown civilization? Or, why didn’t they apopt that lifestyle once it was introduced into those areas where it wasn’t historically common? I don’t think we really know the answer to that.
Didn’t say his answer is definitive, just that he’s convinced me (Maybe because I read the book recently so haven’t had time for the main themes to really settle in my head and bring on the nitpicking thoughts that usually come a bit later)
I agree, and I again re-iterate that I was not attempting to answer that part of the question, only the more general second part of the question as to why societies in certain parts of the world developed – as a whole – more slowly than in other parts.
OK. One thing I’ve found on this board is that there are more than a few people who take Diamond’s hypothesis as scientific fact. I enjoyed reading his book, and I think he’s got a lot of good ideas, but I’m not ready to put him up there with Darwin, Newton, and Einstein yet.
Yeah, the available resources do very considerably, and it’s hard to imagine, for example, a polar culture like the Saami or the Eskimo developing agriculture. We also don’t know all that much about pre-Columian America, and one hypthesis being floated around these days is that what Erupeans found to be extant at the time of their arrival in large numbners (especially in N. America) was a popultaion that had already been devistated by disease from earlier, smaller exploration attempts. Many of the “primitive” societies seen in the 1600s and later were simply the survivors of earlier, more advanaced societies that had lost the capacity to sustain those societies due to rapid depopulation.
You might want to read 1491 if you haven’t already. It makes a good follow-on to GG&S.
Say you’re a member of a rainforest tribe. You know your environment. You know the plants and animals of the forest, and which uses each on has in your traditional culture. Your culture is totally adapted to your immediate environment. What’s more, each hillock and river, each cheetah and jungle vine, has its own identity and meaning in your tribe’s mythology, which is the way humans feel themselves as part of their environment. It looks like modern Westerners have collectively forgotten what it’s like to feel part of one’s environment instead of opposed to it.
Would you feel comfortable to trash everything you know about your world and replace it with a system controlled by strange rich people in faraway places that you know nothing about? What happens when a people do that? What benefits of modern science do they actually get? What does a capitalist or socialist economy do to their culture?
Originally, they were a people on their own, defined on their own terms. Once they give up their indigenous heritage, they become incorporated into the larger modern society – as the lowest socioeconomic stratum. They get to live in slums and shantytowns, wear secondhand clothes instead of leaves and skins, and a lot of them wind up alcoholic because the mental coherence of their world has been dismantled. What do we give them to replace it with? Christianity?
One of the reasons is simply culture-centrism. People say rah rah for the home team because that’s what they heard the first few games they went to.
You know that rednecks in backwoods cabins proudly proclaim the US the best system that ever was. Well they do the same everywhere. When I was in Lesotho, one of the poorest nations, they were simply told since birth how great their country was and why it was superior to their far richer neighbor South Africa. They lived in mud round huts without windows or doors or chairs. Farmed a patch of land that would feed four people, and wove cloth out of horse hair. But their jingoists were as vocal as any other.
As a Anthropologist in training I have to point out that the word ‘primitive’ is highly frowned upon in academic circles when referring to people of different cultural backgrounds to ourselves. Hunter/gatherers are in no way ‘primitive’ they have complex relationships with their kin, neighbours and enemies just as we have. They have come into contact with the rest of the world and they probably think the way we live is rather comical.
Bronislaw Malinowski was the first anthropologist to complete an ethnography based on participant observation and he was looked upon as rather strange by the group he was studying. Read his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific, or Marcel Mauss - The Gift for an insight on how some hunter/gatherer societies lived. These two books are based on the Kula Ring around the Trobriand Islands but there are many more books on different hunter/gatherer socities, for example Yanomamo -by Napoleon Chagnon.
Hunter/gatherers have lived the same way for hundreds of years, as time has gone on they have adapted to a social and environmental changes. To call them primitive as if we’re what they should aspire to be like is a very very old fashioned way of thinking. Early anthropologists thought that there was a linear scale with us as civilised peoples at the end and hunter/gatherer groups as primitive at the beginning.
Maybe log onto http://www.survival-international.org/ this organisation aims to help hunter/gatherer societies live the life they want to. Some groups have been forced out of their ancestral lands and forced into a way of life that is unknown to them and this organisation helps to fight the powers that be and help these societies live the way they want to.
In the vernacular, primitive has a negative conotation, but in science (biology, physical anthropology) it just means “not derived”, or “the ancestral form”. Since all cultures presumably derived from hunter/gatherer societies, there is nothing scientifically wrong with calling those societies “primitive” (the ancestral form of all societies).
Actually I’m a Biological Anthropologist hoping to end up as a forensic anthropologist. So I understand the term from a biological point of view and I don’t see how scientifically calling someone primitive can be accepted either, as primitive to us as human beings would refer to one of our ancestors from whom we evolved.
Which is why I used it mostly in quotes in my post. However, with reference to the OP it is perhaps a convenient shorthand to distinguish these societies from economically more complex ones.
However, in evolutionary contexts too the preferred term is now “basal” (contrasted with “derived”) in preference to “primitive” and “advanced” due to the connotations of the latter terms.
With reference to my previous post, while the Embera would appear to a casual observer to be a stereotypical “primitive” rainforest group (and I am sure would likely be depicted that way in National Geographic) due to the fact that most live in thatched huts and wear minimal clothes, their material culture is really not all that different from non-indigenous Panamanians living in similarly remote areas, who would merely be regarded as poor rather than “primitive.”
To nitpick, neither the Trobriand Islanders nor the Yanomamo are true hunter/gatherers (or were when they were studied) but small-scale agriculturists who also hunted or fished.
Still, there is nothing wrong with calling a certain culture or way of life “primitive”. We’re not saying we derived from that particular way of life, but from that general way of life.
In comparing chimps and humans, for instance, we can say that chimps retain a primitive mode of locomotion since our common ancestor most likely* used that form of locomotion, too-- ie, knuckle walking. But that doesn’t mean we derive from chimps.
*Otherwise we have to assume that modern chimps and modern gorillas both evolved knuckle walking independently, which is highly unlikely.
I thought someone might bring up something like this. I don’t mean to insult these groups, I just really didn’t know of another word that would easily convey my meaning. I don’t think they’re stupid or anything, I know I couldn’t live in the jungle or desert the way they do. I don’t think of development or progress as just the way we’ve done it, rather as better or more efficient ways of getting things done, regardless of what you’re doing.
I don’t get how these societies could be doing things the exact same way for centuries without some kind of positive change in methodology or technology. Why hasn’t someone in their society come up with better ways of doing something, and then someone else come up with an even better way, etc? It’s the stagnation I don’t understand. Why the lack of change?
Depends on what exactly you mean by “better.” Their way of life works perfectly well most of the time for most of these people - or it works at least as well, and perhaps better, than life in “civilized” societies.
As I said, the material life of the Embera is not much different from other impoverished rural Panamanians; it is perhaps culturally richer. They can satisfiy their food needs with little formal education (which most lack) and minimal investment of cash (which they also lack). They can’t adopt a more “modern” lifestyle where they live (there’s no electricity, for one thing). If they moved to a city, they would be just as impoverished, but would need a lot more cash to satisfy their needs, and their quality of life would be far inferior. Why should they?
You also seem to be imagining that most peoples have “invented” technological advances within their own cultures. Instead, most technological advances have been invented in one place and then spread to others as neighboring cultures have adopted it. So isolated cultures - whether isolated physically or culturally - will not have so many technological advances available to adopt.
(Maybe because I read the book recently so haven’t had time for the main themes to really settle in my head and bring on the nitpicking thoughts that usually come a bit later)