• Have all been re-shaped by colonialism & capitalism
• There is no un-touched, “pristine” society
• People we have studied have been changed by 4 major processes:
• Genocide (Mayan peasants)
• Ethnocide (!Kung, Yanomami)
• Assimilation (Native Americans, Bakairí)
• Resistance (Mayans, Kayapó)
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• 1519: Conquest & territorial domination of
Western Hemisphere
– Complete by 1600
– Native populations reorganized by Spanish, Portuguese
– Indigenous labor used in mines (Tío), plantations (Mench ú), haciendas (Mexican peasants)
3

• 1519: 25 ML 1600: 1 ML
• Yanomami: 1980—10,000;
1988 —1/4 died
• 16-19th C. African Slave Trade
– Colonial powers turned to Africa for labor
– 10 ML slaves shipped to America
4

• Congo: 8 ML died in 25 years as result of genocide & slavery
• German settlers in SW Africa
– War of extinction vs. Herero if they did not surrender their lands
– Resistance: 1500 troops with machine guns surrounded & massacred 500 Herero (genocide)
– Poisoned water holes
• !Kung San: Boers, British,
South Africa, reservations
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• Europe assumed military, political,
& economic dominance
• 1885: Imperialist powers partitioned
Africa into colonies
– “To bring the benefits of civilization to primitive peoples & end their barbarous customs”
• This constituted an internationally approved mandate for ETHNOCIDE
6

“The native tribes must withdraw from the lands on which they have pastured their cattle & so let the white man pasture his cattle on these lands…for people of the culture standard of the South African natives, the loss of their barbarism & development of a class of workers in the service of the whites is primarily a law of existence in the highest degree…this existence is justified in the degree that it is useful in the progress of development”
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• “Customs of native groups, in so far as they threaten European control or offend western notions of morality must be abandoned”
• “Colonial authorities have the right in virtue of their relatively civilized position to savages to enforce abstinence from immoral & degrading practices”
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• Infanticide (!Kung)
• Bride price (Tiv)
• Polygyny (Bakairí)
• Polyandry (Nepal)
• Kinship obligations (Bedouin)
• Extended families (India, Taiwan)
“a drag on economic development & a serious obstacle of economic progress ”
• Initiation rites (Masaai)
• Shamanism (Jívaro)
• Tribal warfare (Yanomami)
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• 1803-76: Tasmanians were extinct within
73 years of contact
• British wanted land for sheep grazing
• Tasmanians were shot down like animals for sport
• Skulls were exhibited in museums
• Truganini—the last Tasmanian
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• 1830s: Trail of Tears
– 4000 Cherokee died
– (1/4 population)
• Villages burned, given blankets infected with smallpox
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• 1889-1909: UMM Boarding School
• Hopi
– Taught language of the dominant culture
– Imposed western dress, English names
– Forbidden to speak native language
• African textbook:
“It is an advantage for a native to work for a white man, because the whites are better educated, more advanced in civilization than the natives and thanks to white men, the natives will make more rapid progress ”
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• Required raw materials & markets
The destruction of indigenous peoples was unparalleled in its scope
• 1780-1930: Tribal populations declined by
30 ML as a direct result of the spread of industrial civilization
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• By the 20 th C.: major dislocations, population decline, reorganization
• World War II was a watershed
• Shift from political to economic domination
• People everywhere are integrated into the world economic system
• Autonomous people within state boundaries are seen as a threat (pastoralists)
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• Progress Brings death to Amazon
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• Oil companies & pacification
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• “The latest victim of a brutal cultural struggle that has pitted a dwindling band of primitive warriors against civilization’s formidable army of oil companies, settlers,
& christian missionaries”
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• “The people who keep taking stuff out of th forest are like shoppers at a closeout sale, rushing in & taking what they can, as fast as they can, before somebody else gets the last piece of goods”
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• Original Twa hunters & gatherers
• Hutu settle area 1000 AD, monarchy dominated Twa
• 16 th C. Tutsi herders enter
Hutu rebels
• 1884 Germans colonize, racist ideology vs.
Hutus
• After WW I Belgium took over colonial control, racist doctrines
• Replace Hutu chiefs with Tutsis
– Ethnic Identity cards
– Allow Tutsis to take over Hutu lands
– Require peasants to grow export crops (coffee)
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• 1950s Tutsis struggle for independence
• Belgians switch support to Hutus
• 1962 independence; Hutu limit Tutsi access to education, government jobs
• 1973 military coup
• 1974 World Bank project for cattle ranches disadvantages Tutsi herders
Tutsi refugees
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• 1989 coffee prices collapsed
(major export)
– Loss of income, famine
• 1990 IMF austerity program impoverished farmers & workers
– Cuts to education, health care
– Malnutrition
• Tutsi refugees invade, French provide military aid to the government
• Death squads emerge, racial hatred toward Tutsis
• Hutu state formed, committed to genocide
– 50,000 Hutus & Tutsis killed
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• 1994 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered by
Hutu-run state
• The causes were carefully obscured
– Based on Western stereotypes of savage Africans
– “Tribal warfare involving those without the veneer of
Western civilization ”
– Genocide not recognized until months later
• As changes are instituted to accommodate capital accumulation, lives are disrupted & conditions created that fuel hatred & violence
• Colonial history, state genocide, global economic integration
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• “World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, visiting a
Rwandan genocide memorial, apologized on
Thursday on behalf of the international community for not trying to prevent the 1994 slaughter”
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• (!Kung, Bakairí, Kayapó, Bedouin)
• Community control of land – replaced by private property
– 1887 Dawes Act
• Corporate kinship groups based on kinship relations – incomprehensible to dominant society
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• Incorporate indigenous people into the capitalist economy--
• Forced labor
• Requirement to pay taxes in cash
– Work on plantations, mines, cash crops
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• (Sudan, horticulturalists):
– Introduction of cotton as cash crop
– 1980s decline of cotton market left Azande in economic ruin
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• Egalitarian horticulturalists, hunting & gathering, fishing, collection of forest products for sale (agroforestry)
• Integrated into European markets since contact, maintained sustainability
– Engaged global economic system without becoming dependent
Mate Yerba
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• Dramatic expansion of agricultural cashcrop production
• Rainforest felled for intensive, industrial agriculture
• Lumbering to extract hardwood for U.S. market
(parquet floors)
• 1970—6.8 ML has.
1984 —2.1 ML has.
• Small-scale producers displaced
• Floral & faunal diversity destroyed
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• Guaraní Cash-crop disappeared, they enter market economy as waged laborers on cotton & tobacco plantations
• 1995: 3 suicides/month
(unknown before)
• Economic development spawned by the needs of the global economy are destroying Guaran í
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• A casualty of the expansion of the culture of capitalism is cultural diversity
• With incorporation into the world market economy “their standard of living is lowered, not raised, by economic progress … This is perhaps the most outstanding & inescapable fact to emerge from the years of research that anthropologists have devoted to the study of culture change”
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• The Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement in the late 1880s in reaction to the destruction of
Native American cultures
• Wovoka died, went to the spirit world, returned as a prophet
• Nativistic Movement
• Told people to return to the old ways, continue dancing & whites would be destroyed, the dead & the buffalo would return
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• Wovoca had told people “You must not do harm to anyone. You must not fight.”
• People believed the ghost shirts they wore made them impervious to bullets
• Army troops arrived, killed 200 Lakota &
Chief Big Foot
• Gen. Sheridan:
“The only good
Indian is a dead
Indian”
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• Milenarian Movements (esp. Melanesia)
• Exposure to whites & material goods during World War II
• Context of rapid social change, foreign domination, relative deprivation
• Tribal people did all the work, whites owned all the goods
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• Converted to Christianity, but cargo did not arrive
• To acquire wealth through ritual means
• Creation of a new world by mimicking Europeans
– Whites knew the secret of cargo
– Whites had stolen cargo from ancestors
• Built airstrips, killed pigs, abandoned gardens, destroyed native wealth
• Ancestors would arrive with cargo in ships & planes
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• “John Frum (messiah) promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him: Radios,
TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”
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• Tribal economies aimed at satisfaction of subsistence needs
– Hunters & gatherers
– Horticulturalists
– Pastoralists
– Peasants
• And the culture of consumption
– (A Poor Man Shames Us All)
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• Communal ownership—land & valued resources can not be purchased
• Distribution through sharing, gift-giving, labor reciprocity reduce need to consume & work for wages
• People are not naturally driven to accumulate wealth
• Conservation strategies make lands less subject to exploitation for profit
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• Capitalism seeks continual expansion, growth to obtain new markets, to promote consumption, increase profits
• Indigenous cultures are thus vulnerable to destruction by capitalist expansion
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• 3000+ U.S. Walmarts sell at lowest cost
– $245 BL sales
– Largest private employer in Mexico
• Acting as Adam Smith’s
“invisible hand”
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• Externalities:
– Forces companies to reduce production & labor costs
– Loss of 1000s of jobs as companies shift to other countries
– Imports 12% Chinese exports, workers earn $32/month
– Environmental damage
– Energy resources for transporting goods around world
• These costs do not appear on the price tag
• Buyers are not saving money; they pass the cost on to someone else
• 1% of the profits of 5 Walmart owners could pay decent wages & health insurance to all of its employees
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• We are all involved:
• Progress is synonymous with having things--Macs, PCs, Cells, DVDs, IPODs
• Other cultures survived 1000s of years without these luxuries; their lives were not
“nasty, brutish, & short” (Hobbes)
• But based on family ties, kinship relations, sharing, cooperation
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– Hypertension, circulatory system, mental stress, diabetes, obesity
– Malnutrition is a hazard of “ progress ”
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• Medicines: anthropologists have catalogued indigenous knowledge
– Malaria: Peru—Quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree (“Out of the Forest”)
– Diabetes, leukemia, Hodgkins disease—
Madagascar periwinkle
– Muscle relaxants—S. America (poison arrows with poison from the chondodendron tree)
– Aspirin: Native Americans—willow bark
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• Slash & burn horticulture (Bakairí, Kayapó)
• Technologies that do not destroy the environment
• Crop varieties selected over 1000s of years
– High protein content: amaranth
(Mesoamerica), Quinoa (Peru), Tepary
Bean (Papago)
• Self-sufficiency
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• The reckless pursuit of “progress” has brought the wholesale destruction of indigenous peoples
• Racism, ethnocentrism, evolutionary ideas about progress justified the atrocities committed against tribal peoples
– AND CONTINUE TO DO SO !!!
Civilization
Barbarism
Savagery
45

• Bt corn in Mexico
– GM foods
– Patents
– Pesticide poisonings
– Contamination of environment
• Progress has brought erosion, overgrazing, deforestation
46

• From hunting & gathering to market capitalism
– Increasing centralization of power
– Increasing concentration of access to wealth, power, prestige
– Shift from egalitarian sharing of resources to increasing gap between elite & poor
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• Hunting & gathering societies – equality
• Industrial nations – poverty, homelessness
(A Poor Man Shames Us All)
ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF BEING
HUMAN SHOULD BE VALUED &
ARE WORTH PRESERVING !
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