Har de har har, No Room For George...
Loss of the Mashco Piro one of the last Stone Age Tribes
by designs 66 Replies latest social current
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No Room For George
Har de har har, No Room For George...
LOL
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Band on the Run
IMargaret Mead was one of my profs. The class was overflowing. I wanted a decent grade so I did not join most classmates who wrote that all Western involvement was wrong. She showed films of her field work before and during WWII. How did such tribes understand the bombs falling on them? She was furious with the main drift of the class. She became all worked up and told us that people starving to death while we destroyed food in the US to maintain market prices was not romantic. She also cited the high percentage of blindness from easily preventable contamination of water sources.
When I read accounts of cultural anthropology from the British Museum and the Museum of National History in NY, their sins were so great. The academics were not bad people. They thought what they were doing was correct. Recently, I watched a documentary on PBS about antrhopolical discoveries near the North POle. They brought an Artic native family to NY. Only one survived. It reminds me of zoo animals on display.
Star Trek, particular Capt. Picard, always focused on not messing with the culture unless they had warp drive. Capt. Kirk must have messed up many native peoples. It also provided an opportunity to see the crew in native garb rather than Star Fleet uniforms.
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james_woods
re Margaret Mead - You were aware that her accounts of the sex culture on the South Sea island have been completely discredited, Band on the Run?
Followup research discovered that the stories attributed to the two girls she interviewed were total fabrications.
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dgp
Maybe these people were living in total isolation, or not. I think that is irrelevant. The rest of the world should try to stay away from them in the sense that we could give them diseases they cannot fight. Their culture deserves respect, yes, but their lives are the primary concern here. However, why should we get to decide whether they should live as they have until now? Should one of them want to travel the world, marry someone from outside, whatever, who are we to tell them? If they, out of their own free will, were to decide to abandon their old ways, should we have a say in that matter?
I think the idea of the zoo comes to mind when we, in the outside, decide that we want to keep someone just as they have been until now.
Say they believe that the world is ruled by demons. Should we tell them otherwise? Say their leader is despotic and cruel. Should we tell them life can be otherwise?
It is obvious that I think it is for them to choose, but I believe these are all open questions.
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sir82
why not try to help them out to have better lives?
"Better"? From whose perspective?
I'm sure the tribe is quite content with the lives they have and have absolutely 0 desire for flush toilets and Big Macs.
I thought the "let us, the privileged elite of the world, improve the lot of the poor brown-skinned savages" mindset died out in the Victorian era.
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designs
How do we tell a people whose ancestors have lived on Lands for centuries that its now ours and not just ours but to bulldoze it and open up mining, how do we do that.
Kitamaat.
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lisaBObeesa
It is ethoncentric and incorrect to think that our own culture is better than another culture. Western culture just is one of the many thousands of human cultures in the world today.
The fact is, NO ONE wants to have their culture destroyed and replaced by an invading culture.
No one. The original culture ALWAYS fights to maintain itself, because our culture is who we ARE as human beings. You take a way a person's culture and you take away their identity, their past, their traditions, their values...you destroy something precious.
Western culture though, has as part of its own culture to steamroll smaller cultures and assimilate them.
What a barbaric culture we are part of here in the West...
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Band on the Run
She would expert her field work to be revised by following generations. It is an academic process. If she were so totally discredited, it would make the news.
She revised the work of her teachers. Mead would never think that the science stops with her. Cultural anthropoly is very subjective. Her teachers at Columbia and the Museum of Natural History did awful things from our present perspective. None of what you allege without any credible sources negates that she did field work for many years. It does not negate a view of seeing individuals she knew suffer from unncessary illness and famine. She and her then hubby, Gregory Bateson were one of the first to film almost everything. I saw the people with my own eyes. Also, the Museum of Natural History would never have promoted her if her work was a fraud. Mostly male anthropolists would have loved to discredit her.
I can tell you in the area of law, abstract concepts such as the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Establishment Clause, almost every broad topic are subject to changes in judicial perspective. Such is the work of academia. History no longer believes that individuals have much impact. If Geo. Washington never existed, social forces would have created another leader of the same stripe. Give it enough time and Great Leaders will return.
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botchtowersociety
She would expert her field work to be revised by following generations.
How do you expert someone's field work? Is that some sort of Columbia terminology or something?