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Civilization and Its Discontents
By: Katharine Milton
From: Natural History, March 1992
J. Geffen
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1.
For more than a decade now, I have led a double life. I spend part of my time in
the United States, living in an apartment in Berkeley and teaching anthropology
classes at the University of California. The rest of my time is spent in the Amazon
Basin, where I live in the company of recently contacted Indian groups, studying their
traditional ecology and features of their tropical forest environment. On returning to
the United States after one of these extended stays in the jungle, I always experience
culture shock as I strive to regain control of my possessions, which I have totally
forgotten about.
2.
Usually my first act is to retrieve my dust-covered car, which has languished for
some six to eighteen months in a garage. The battery must be charged, and then I must
wash and vacuum the car, fill it with gas, and check out its many parts. Once I am
mobile, I rush to a large supermarket to stock up on cleaning supplies and food. My
first few days are completely taken up with chores; there never seems to be a moment
when I am not contemplating some type of home repair or new purchase.
3.
And then there is my body. What a job it is to live up to what is expected of the
average American. I must visit the dentist – often more than one kind of dentist – to
be sure my teeth are performing at top level. The doctor must be seen for a checkup;
my eyes must be examined, glasses and contact lenses adjusted, and so on. I begin to
wonder how my friends in Berkeley manage to have any free time at all, since I have
fewer possessions than they do – I own no television set, no stereo or compact disk
player, no video machine, home computer, food chopper, or any number of other
items my friends seem to dote on. I don’t even own my apartment.
4.
Plunged back into life in Berkeley, I see myself as a slave of material
possessions, and I notice that I deeply resent the time and energy required to maintain
them. Nothing could be more different from the life I have been leading with huntergatherers deep in the rain forests of Brazil, where people have almost no possessions,
and those that they do have are made from local forest materials and are entirely biodegradable.
5.
The groups I have visited live far from any cities, towns, or commercial enterprises. They include the Mayoruna and Maku from Amazonas State; the Arara,
Parakana, and Arawete from Pará State; and the Guaja from Maranhão State – peoples
so remote and little known that few outside their immediate geographic area have
heard of them. Often I am one of the first nonindigenous females many members of
the group have ever seen. With my pale skin and hair I am a truly terrifying apparition
to younger children, who sometimes scream with fear when they first see me.
Civilization and Its Discontents / 2
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6.
All these peoples have been recently contacted: only a few months or, at most,
years have passed since the Brazilian Indian Bureau (FUNAI) managed to establish a
formal relationship with them. Previously, these groups avoided or were strongly
hostile to outsiders, but with contact, they have permitted a few Indian Bureau
employees to live with them, to assist them, and at times, protect them in dealings
with other Indian groups or members of the wider Brazilian society. Living with these
people has given me the chance to see how even modest changes in their traditional
lifeways – the introduction of something as innocent in appearance as a metal cooking
pot or ax, a box of matches or some salt – can be the thin edge of a wedge that will
gradually alter the behavior and ecological practices of an entire society.
7.
These people typically live in small villages of fewer than a hundred
inhabitants, in some cases in groups of only fifteen or twenty. Most practice slashand-burn agriculture on a small scale, complementing crop foods with wild game and
fish, forest fruits and nuts, and occasionally, wild honey. For some months life may
revolve around the village, but sooner or later every group I have worked with leaves,
generally in small parties, and spends weeks or even months traveling through the
forest and living on forest products.
8.
Throughout the forest there are paths that the Indians know and have used for
generations. They travel mainly when wild forest fruits and nuts are most abundant
and game animals are fat, but families or small groups may go on expeditions at other
times of the year as well. They trek a few miles, make a temporary camp, and then
hunt, gather, and eat several meals in the area before moving on to a new site. At
certain times of the year, many groups relocate to the borders of large rivers where
they obtain turtle eggs or other seasonal river foods.
9.
The accumulation of possessions would be an impediment to this seminomadic
life style. Whenever individuals go on a trek, they carry everything they need.
Leaving possession behind in a thatch-and-pole hut, to be retrieved later, is not an
option, since the humid climate and voracious insects would quickly destroy them.
Great numbers of insects often live inside Indian dwellings, principally jungle
cockroaches that hide in the roof thatch by night. Indians seem oblivious to them,
letting them run about on their bodies and even crawl on the food so long as they are
not perched on the next bite.
10. Granted, these are generally soft-bodied, small jungle cockroaches and not the
tough, large roaches of our urban areas, but even so, I found it difficult to adjust to
them. My frantic efforts to remove cockroaches from my body and clothes were
regarded as strange by my Indian hosts. At one site, I resorted to storing my clothing
each night in a heavy plastic bag, which I sealed shut and suspended from a piece of
plastic fish line tied to a roof pole. Otherwise, at night, the roaches covered my shirt
and pants so thoroughly that often the fabric could not be seen. Although the roaches
would be gone the next morning, they would leave a musty smell; further, just the
Civilization and Its Discontents / 3
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idea of wearing garments that I had seen coated with cockroaches gave me a squirmy,
unclean feeling.
11. On the forest treks, the women are invariably the most burdened, something
Western observers often find difficult to understand or accept. A woman will walk for
hours carrying a toddler, a large palm basket containing fifty or more pounds of
animal or plant foods, hammocks, a cooking utensil or two, a machete, and the family
pets, such as parrots, monkeys, and young puppies. In all the groups I have observed,
the women’s legs and feet are deformed by the pigeon-toed walk they adopt to give
them added traction and stability on the slippery, narrow forest trails. The feet of adult
men turn in only slightly, because men usually carry nothing heavier than a bow and
arrows (ostensibly to be free to take advantage of any hunting opportunities).
12. The most important possession the Indians carry with them, however, is
knowledge. There is nothing coded in the genome of an Indian concerning how to
make a living in a tropical forest – each individual must become a walking bank of
information on the forest landscape, its plants and animals, and their habits and uses.
This information must be taught anew to the members of each generation, without the
benefit of books, manuals, or educational television. Indians have no stores in which
to purchase the things they need for survival. Instead, each individual must learn to
collect, manufacture, or produce all the things required for his or her entire lifetime.
13. Because people differ in their talents, the pool of community information and
abilities is far greater than its component parts. Individual men and women have their
own areas of expertise, as well as their share of general knowledge. Members of the
group know whom to consult for special information on hunting practices, the habits
of particular game animals, rituals, tool manufacture, crop varieties, and the like.
14. Tropical-forest Indians talk incessantly, a characteristic I believe reflects the
importance of oral transmission of culture. When I lived with the Maku, I slept in a
hammock inside a small communal palm shelter. If a Maku awoke in the middle of
the night, he usually began to talk or sing in a very loud voice – apparently without
any thought that anyone might object to this behavior. It was considered normal, what
you do when you wake up in the middle of the night and aren’t sleepy. Others learn,
as I did, to sleep through it or, if they aren’t sleepy, to listen to it. Vocal expression
apparently is expected and tolerated in Maku culture, no matter what the hour, an
indication to me of how it is valued.
15. Unlike our economic system, in which each person typically tries to secure and
control as large a share of the available resources as possible, the hunter-gatherer
economic system rests on a set of highly formalized expectations regarding cooperation and sharing. This does not mean hunter-gatherers do not compete with one
another for prestige, sexual partners, and the like. But individuals do not amass a
surplus. For instance, no hunter fortunate enough to kill a large game animal assumes
that all this food is his or belongs only to his immediate family.
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16. Quite the reverse is true; among some forest peoples, the hunter cannot eat game
he has killed or is restricted to eating only one specific portion of his kill. Game is cut
up and distributed according to defined patterns particular to each group and based in
large part on kinship and marriage obligations. A hunter may have amazing luck one
day, moderate luck on another, and no luck at all on a third. But he can usually expect
to eat meat every day because someone bound to him in this system of reciprocity
may well make a kill and share the meat.
17. Despite the way their culture traditionally eschews possessions, forest-living
peoples embrace manufactured goods with amazing enthusiasm. They seem to
appreciate instantly the efficacy of a steel machete, ax, or cooking pot. It is love at
first sight, and the desire to possess such objects is absolute. There are accounts of
Indian groups or individuals who have turned their backs on manufactured trade
goods, but such people are the exception.
18. When Cândido Rondon, the founder of the Indian Protection Service in Brazil,
began his pacification efforts in the early 1900s, he used trade goods as bait to attract
uncontacted Indians. Pots, machetes, axes, and steel knives were hung from trees or
laid along trails that Indians frequented. This practice proved so successful that it is
still employed (see “Overtures to the Nambiquara,” by David Price, Natural History,
October 1984).
19. Whether they have been formally contacted or not, forest-living groups in the
Amazon Basin are probably well aware of steel tools and metal cooking pots. After
all, such goods have been in circulation along trade routes in these regions for
centuries, and an Indian does not have to have seen a non-Indian in order to acquire
them. However, such manufactured goods are likely to be extremely scarce among
uncontacted groups. When the Arara Indians were first approached in 1975, they fled
their village to escape the pacification party. Examination of their hastily abandoned
dwellings showed that stone tools were still being used, but a few steel fragments
were also found.
20. Since they already appreciate the potential utility of manufactured goods,
uncontacted Indians are strongly drawn to the new and abundant items offered to lure
them from isolation. Once a group has been drawn into the pacification area, all its
members are presented with various trade goods – standard gifts include metal
cooking pots, salt, matches, machetes, knives, axes, cloth hammocks, T-shirts, and
shorts. Not all members of the group get all of these items, but most get at least two or
three of them, and in a family, the cumulative mass of new goods can be considerable.
21. The Indians initially are overwhelmed with delight – this is the honeymoon
period when suddenly, from a position in which one or two old metal implements
were shared by the entire group, a new situation prevails in which almost every adult
individual has some of these wonderful new items. The honeymoon is short-lived,
however. Once the Indians have grown accustomed to these new items, the next step
is to teach them that these gifts will not be repeated. The Indians are now told that
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they must work to earn money or must manufacture goods for trade so that they can
purchase new items.
22. Unable to contemplate returning to life without steel axes, the Indians begin to
produce extra arrows or blowguns or hunt additional game or weave baskets beyond
what they normally need so that this new surplus can be traded. Time that might, in
the past, have been used for other tasks – subsistence activities, ceremonial events, or
whatever – is now devoted to production of barter goods. In addition, actual
settlement patterns may be altered so that the indigenous group is in closer, more
immediate contact with sources of manufactured items. Neither of these things, in
itself, is necessarily good or bad, but each does alter traditional behavior.
23. Thus, the newly contacted forest people are rapidly drawn into the wider
economic sphere (even into the international economy: for example, the preferred
glass beads for personal adornment come from Czechoslovakia). The intrusion of
every item – mirrors, cloth, scissors, rice, machetes, axes, pots, bowls, needles,
blankets, even bicycles and radios – not only adds to the pressure on individuals to
produce trade goods, but also disrupts some facets of traditional production.
24. Anthropologist Paul Henley, who worked with the Panare, a forest-based people
in Venezuela, points out that with the introduction of steel tools, particularly axes,
indigenous groups suffer a breakdown in the web of cooperative interdependence. In
the past, when stone axes were used, various individuals came together and worked
communally to fell trees for a new garden. With the introduction of the steel ax,
however, one man can clear a garden by himself. As Henley notes, collaboration is no
longer mandatory nor particularly frequent.
25. Indians often begin to cultivate new crops, such as coffee, that they feel can be
traded or sold easily. Another is rice, which the Indian Bureau encourages forest
peoples to plant because, of course, all “real” Brazilians eat rice every day. Rice is an
introduced crop both to Brazil and to forest Indians. Traditional crop foods, the
successful cultivation of which has been worked out over generations in the forest
environment and which are well suited to the soil conditions in particular regions,
may become scarce, with the result that the Indian diet becomes unbalanced.
26. Indians who traditionally plant manioc as a staple crop may be encouraged to
increase the size of their fields and plant more manioc, which can then be transformed
into farinha, a type of cereal that can be sold in the markets. Larger fields mean more
intensive agricultural work and less time to hunt – which also affects the diet. The
purchase of a shotgun may temporarily improve hunting returns, but it also tends to
eliminate game in the area. In addition, shotgun shells are very expensive in Brazil,
costing more than $1 U.S. apiece. Dependence on the shotgun undermines a hunter’s
skill with traditional hunting weapons, such as blowguns and bows and arrows, as
well as the ability required to manufacture them.
27. Clearing large areas for fields can also lead to increased risk from diseases such
as malaria and leishmanaisis, because cleared areas with standing water of low acidity
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permit proliferation of disease-bearing mosquitoes and flies. New diseases also
appear. Anthropologist-epidemiologist Carlos Coimbra, Jr., for example, has shown
that Chagas disease, which is transmitted to humans by trypanosome-carrying assassin
bugs, apparently does not yet affect Indian populations in lowland areas of the
Amazon Basin. Only when Indians cease their seminomadic way of life and begin to
live for prolonged periods in the same dwellings can Chagas-carrying bugs adjust
their feeding behavior and begin to depend on human hosts rather than small rodents
for their blood meals.
28. The moment manufactured foods begin to intrude on the indigenous diet, health
takes a downward turn. The liberal use of table salt (sodium chloride), one of the first
things that Indians are given, is probably no more healthful for them than it is for
Westerners. Most Indians do not have table salt; they manufacture small quantities of
potassium salts by burning certain types of leaves and collecting the ash. Anthropologist Darrell Posey reports that the Kayapo Indians of Brazil make salt ash from
various palm species and use each type for specific foods.
29. Sweets and other foods containing refined sugar (sucrose) are also given to
Indians, whose wild fruits, according to research by botanists Irene and Herbert
Baker, contain primarily other sugars, such as fructose. Indians find that foods
containing sucrose taste exceptionally sweet, and they tend to crave them once
sampled. While a strong, sugary taste in the natural environment might signal a rare,
rich energy source, the indiscriminate consumption of canned goods, candies, and
gums containing large amounts of refined sugar contributes to tooth decay and can
lead to obesity and even health problems such as diabetes.
30. Results of dietary change are often difficult to anticipate. Anthropologist Dennis
Werner found that the Mekranoti of central Brazil, who did not make pottery,
traditionally roasted most of their food. But the introduction of metal cooking pots
allowed them to switch to boiled foods. This, in turn, allowed nursing mothers to
provide supplemental foods to their infants at an earlier age. Werner found that the
average nursing period in the Mekranoti had dropped steadily from 19.7 months prior
to 1955 to 16 months in recent years, which corresponded to the period of steady
increase in the use of metal cooking pots in the village.
31. One of the first things the Indian Bureau doctors generally do after contact is try
to protect the Indians from the Western diseases that may be communicated to them
during their first prolonged interaction with outsiders. The doctors give them
immunizations and may also hand out drugs to prevent or eradicate dangerous
malarias. Pregnant women, infants, and preadolescents often receive massive doses of
antibiotics. Antibiotics and antimalarial drugs, although helpful in some respects, may
also have detrimental effects. For example, individuals exposed to antibiotics in utero
or when young generally have teeth that are abnormally dark and discolored. Some
drugs are reputed to interfere with fertility among women in recently contacted
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groups. If this lack of fertility combines with a drop in population size due to deaths
from new diseases, a population can fall to a precarious low.
32. Perhaps the most critical disruption suffered by these groups, however, concerns
how detailed information on features of the forest environment is diluted and
forgotten. This is the pool of shared knowledge that traditionally has been the
bedrock, the economic currency, the patrimony of each of these nontechnological
forest societies. Manuel Lizarralde, a doctoral student at the University of California,
Berkeley, who has done ethno-botanical work with the Bari of Venezuela, reports that
in just a single generation there was a staggering loss of information about the identity
of forest trees and their uses.
33. Despite this tale of disruption, disease, and destruction, many of the indigenous
forest cultures are proving to be far more resilient than might be expected. The
indigenous peoples remaining today in the Amazon Basin are true survivors who have
successfully resisted the diseases, explorers, missionaries, soldiers, slave traders,
rubber tappers, loggers, gold miners, fur traders, and colonists who have persistently
encroached on them during the past five centuries.
34. Anthropologist Bill Balée, for example, has found that the Ka’apor Indians of
Maranhão State, in peaceful contact with outsiders since 1928, still maintain many
features of their traditional economy, social organization, and ritual life. He attributes
this to the continued integrity of the nuclear family and the persistence of specific
ritual duties between husband and wife that prohibit certain foods at different seasons
or life stages. Such ritual practices have not only spared red-legged tortoises and other
wild resources from being overharvested but have also diffused hunting pressures
over a large area, thereby contributing to the persistence of the traditional economy.
35. Unfortunately, cultural persistence will do indigenous peoples no good if their
tropical forest habitat is destroyed. Deforestation is primarily the result of outside
influences, such as lumbering, cattle ranching, and colonization, that are permitted by
government policies. Some estimates suggest that all remaining tropical forests will
be destroyed by the year 2045.
36. Once the technological roller coaster gets moving, it’s hard to jump off or even
pause to consider the situation. Some say, so what? We can’t all go back to the jungle,
we can’t all become forest-living Indians. No, we can’t. But as I stand in my apartment in Berkeley, listening to my telephone’s insistent ring and contemplating my
unanswered mail, dusty curtains, dripping faucets, and stacks of newspapers for
recycling, I’m not sure we wouldn’t be far happier if we could.
Civilization and Its Discontents / 8
Answer in your own words.
1.
2.
3.
Answer the question below in English.
What particular characteristic of life in the Amazon communities causes our
writer to experience a culture shock upon returning from her long stays with the
Indian groups?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What, according to paragraphs 2-4, is the main distinction between the average
American community and its Amazonian counterpart?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
Why do the younger Amazonians find anthropologists so terrifying?
(Generalize)
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
4.
Describe the Indian’s way of life as indicated in paragraphs 6-8 and compare it
to that of average modern communities.
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
5.
Answer the question below in English.
Paragraph 9 would suggest that practices long cherished in our communities
might turn out to be irrelevant or even undesirable in the Indian communities;
why?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
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6.
7.
8.
Answer the question below in English.
Provide the information – paragraphs 9-10 – that would suggest that discomfort
is a relative term.
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What practices prevailing in those Indian communities would a modern feminist
find objectionable?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What serious disadvantage do these Indians suffer from in handing down their
heritage to their offspring and how is that related to their incessant chatter?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
9.
What thesis would the information provided in paragraphs 15-16 reinforce?
(Generalize)
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
10.
11.
Answer the question below in English.
How does the introduction of manufactured goods – paragraphs 17-26 – affect
the life style of these Indian communities?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What is the purpose of introducing these manufactured goods and handing them
out free of charge to the Indians?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Civilization and Its Discontents / 10
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
12. What thesis does the information concerning the introduction of steel tools in
forest-based communities in Venezuela – paragraph 24 – illustrate? (Generalize)
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
13. Describe in detail how the change in the indigenous diet – paragraphs 28-30 –
will adversely affect the Indian’s health.
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
14.
Answer the question below in English.
What is the greatest threat these forest communities are likely to face in the
foreseeable future?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
15. On what note does the author finish this passage?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
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