University of Cape Town
Faculty of Humanities
Department of Social Anthropology
VOICES AT THE FAR EDGE
OF THE WORLD
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation
of Endangered Indigenous Cultures
Student name:
Matthew Wayne Schroeder
Student number:
SCHMAT013
Course name:
Ethnographic Problematiques
Course code:
AXL5407S
Course convenor:
Francis Nyamjoh
Due date:
04 November 2013
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acknowledged through citation and reference.
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
Photos:
Phil Borges
1
Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
ABSTRACT
Humanity today is facing a cultural crisis at a scale never witnessed in the history of our species.
We are living in a time where much of the intellectual, social and spiritual legacy of culture - borne
especially of indigenous peoples across the globe - is being severely eroded. Indigenous languages
are disappearing at an unprecedented pace. With language loss, unique visions of the world are
also lost. The extinction of language does not necessarily entail the wholesale extinction indigenous
cultures, yet it is the most salient indicator of the rate and magnitude of the reducing ethnosphere.
Are indigenous cultures destined to blend in with modernity – assimilated by inevitable globalization
– or should we be taking this crisis more seriously?
Cultural change is inevitable. Endangered indigenous cultures – what I call fringe ethnoscapes –
like all cultures throughout history have always adapted and transformed, developing alternate geosocial modes of relating, ways of thinking and being, as the world around them changes. But it is not
change or transformation that threatens the ethnosphere, it is power, the crude face of domination;
discourses and relations produced and perpetuated by governments, bureaucracies and
corporations. In the main, giant multi-national companies, wealthy banks and nation states – both
developed and developing - coalesce into global corpratocracies, expanding industrialization,
urbanization and modernization further and more intensely than ever before, presaging the
destruction and exploitation of the biosphere, and concurrently the threatening and transformation of
endangered indigenous cultures.
I argue that preserving endangered indigenous ethnoscapes – what has been referred to as
‘salvage anthropology’ - may serve to perpetuate commodification, museumification and
naturalization of cultural difference. Such cultural preservation may moreover play into the hands of
modern discourses on ‘progress’ and ‘multiculturalism’, which so often mask and legitimize the
exploitative, forceful agendas of global corporatocracies, bureaucracies and governments , the most
dominant agents of power at work in eroding not only the ethnosphere, but also the biosphere. The
crux of preserving the ethnosphere – and in particular fringe ethnoscapes – pivots on mitigating the
attendant aphorias, while attempting to protect and inspire valuing of the legacy of culture.
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
Key terms
Ethnosphere
As Wade Davis defines it, the ethnosphere is ‘’the full complexity and complement of human
potential as brought into being by culture and adaptation since the dawn of consciousness. This is
humankind’s greatest legacy, symbolizing all that we’ve achieved, and all that we can achieve as a
wildly creative species. It is the sum total of all thoughts, and dreams, intuitions and myths,
ambitions brought into being by human consciousness. An organizing principle under which we can
begin to think of the human legacy in different ways’’ (2001:4-5). What Davis also refers to as ‘’the
topography of spirit’’ (2001:6).
Fringe ethnoscapes
The suffix ‘scape’ signifies ‘’transnational distributions of correlated elements whose display can be
represented as landscapes. For example, transnational arrangements of financial, technological,
media and political resources can be seen, respectively as finace scapes, techoscapes,
mediascapes and ideoscapes’’. ‘’Ethno’’ refers to people, rather than strictly to ethnicity (Appadurai
1996).
For the purposes of this essay, this refers to societies – described as indigenous - that have been
described as endangered. Such peoples comprise some 5000 distinct geographic societies, totalling
around 350 million people worldwide (UNESCO 2012). They exist in remote regions like the
Amazon basin, Arctic circle, Saharan desert, and Polynesian archipelagos, but also in many
countries in the developing world. Half of the languages of these societies are threatened with
imminent extinction – within the next couple of generations - the places they call home infringed
upon, often completely transformed by governments and corporations, and their ways of life
compelled to negotiate stark changes (Davis 1999 & 2001; Borges 2010; Hume 1999; Miller 1993,
Pallamary 2001, Piddington 2001; Raibmon 2002, Tattersal 2001; Turin 1997; Schwartz 2001;
Wurm 1991).
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
Endangered languages
These refer to languages spoken by indigenous cultures, considered by UNESCO to be threatened
according to different bands of endangerment.
Safe: language is spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted
Vulnerable: Most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g.,
home)
Definitely endangered: children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home
Severely endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the
parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves
Critically endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the
language partially and infrequently.
Figure 1:
Overview of Vitality of the World’s Languages
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
A Rendile elder enveloped in silence. One of the last speakers of an ancient tongue.
Photo: Wade Davis
A hindu sadhu offering libations to the gods on the banks of the Ganges river.
Photo: Phil Borges
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
1.INTRODUCTION
Margaret Mead, the great American anthropologist said that her greatest fear was
that as we drift toward an increasingly amorphized generic worldview, not only
would see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a narrower and
narrower modality of thought, but that we would awake from a dream one day and
have forgotten that there are even other possibilities (cited in Davis 2011).
This essay is inspired by research and explorations into ‘cultures at the far edge of the world’ by
anthropologists and adventurers Phil Borges, Mark Turin, Michael Pallamary and Keith Harrison,
and amongst them especially Wade Davis. As I read of ethnographies in exotic places, I became
increasingly interested in engaging with and attempting to get a grasp with radically alternate ways
of thinking and being, such as those brought into life by the myriad of indigenous societies around
the globe. What is it really like to think, as the Cogi of the Sierra Madre do, that it is their prayers
and thoughts alone that maintain the cosmic balance of the universe, and that all life exists to pay
homage to the Great Spirit? Or like the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, that time does not exist, no
reference is made to the past, the present or the future, there is only the eternal, experienced in the
dreamtime.
I aim to address the following questions:
1. What are the implications of language loss and transforming fringe ethnoscapes on the
shape of the ethnosphere in the contemporary world?
2. What levels and configurations of power are implicated both in the endangering – through
persuasion and force) and conservation (through archiving and protecting) fringe
ethnoscapes?
My focus is on the evaporating ethnosphere - endangered languages and fringe ethnoscapes - in
particular, and the politics and challenges of preserving the cultural diversity represented and
embodied by indigenous peoples in contemporary times. Am I advocating a revival of what has
been called ‘salvage anthropology’? Depending on how you would define ‘salvage anthropology’, in
some sense I probably am. Mead’s ominous fear strikes a chord in me, stirring engagement. This
ethic, although pervasive through its imperativeness, is not my central focus here. Why, how and
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
what anthropologists research must be as holistic and diverse as its ethnographic ambit strives
toward.
I look at endangered cultures, and the ways in which they have and are negotiating changes
wrought by the spectre of modernity, and the domineering forces of frenetic urbanization and
capitalism. As the forces of globalization seep into contemporary indigenous societies – what I call
fringe ethnoscapes - their habituses (Bourdieu 1990) are changing, transforming, hybridizing, losing
and keeping aspects of their cultures, as well as absorbing aspects from other cultural heritages.
What also changes are worldviews, epistemes (Foucault 1970), and concomitant moralities. The
Penan, the Cogi, and the Ariaal alike all represent particular ways of viewing the world and living in
it and form part of the repertoire of culture that constitutes the ethnosphere.
I argue crucially that it is neither change nor transformation that threatens the ethnosphere, but
power, exerted by bureaucracies, banks, corporations and governments. Cultures around the world
have always been engaged in a dance with change compelled by new influences and interactions.
Rather, the issue pivots on the forceful irreverence with which these conglomerates of power are
asserting themselves; in the name of urbanization and modernity, and increasingly more often at the
expense of fringe ethnoscapes – endangered cultures – and the ecospheres they have called
‘home’ for thousands of years. Here, power is enacted through different relations and discourses.
Most significant and insidious are the discourses that the earth’s resources should be unremittingly
exploited to fuel western-style modernization – ‘progress’ -, and that the so-called ‘primitives’ of the
world - those behind the times – must inevitably join the ‘modern world’. These discourses at once
legitimize this march toward progress and control that typifies the west, the iron cage of capitalism
and monolithic industrialization and urbanization. Insidiuously, the spread of western modernity is
forcing the endangering of indigenous cultures, and thus the totality of the ethnosphere (Eli 2013:4).
Radically altering the lives of endangered societies, by turning rainforest into rubber plantations,
mountain valleys into dams and at the same time impinging on their land and lifestyle, is justified by
the promises of opportunity and comfort that market economies and western education might bring.
What this effectively means is that ways of life that have remained deeply rooted in tradition and in
topography for thousands of years, from the Arctic to Australasia, of the Inuit and the Aborigine, are
being (and have been) threatened by the onslaught on modernity. The issue is then whether to
assume that the endangering of indigenous cultures is an inevitable consequence of change and
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
civilizational progress, or to realize that it is something that needs to be seriously considered and
engaged with.
As crucial as it is to protect, preserve and learn from the rich diversity of the ethnosphere, this
potentially perpetuates commodification, naturalization, patronization and museumification of
endangered ethnoscapes, indigenous cultures (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Baba 2002).
Preservation may moreover play into the hands of modern discourses on ‘progress’ and
‘multiculturalism’, so often masking the exploitative, forceful agendas of global corporations,
bureaucracies and wealthy nation states. The crux of preserving the ethnosphere – and in particular
endangered ethnoscapes – rests on mitigating the attendant aphorias, while attempting to protect
and inspire valuing of the legacy of culture.
A Jaguar Shaman of the Brazilian
Amazon. Ancient spiritual
practices of these seers of the
rainforest are under threat as their
homes are destroyed.
Photo: Wade Davis
A band of Kogi travel through
Andean alpine valleys on a
sacred pilgrimage to the Sierra
de Santa Marta, what they call
the ‘birthplace of the world’.
Photo: Wade Davis
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
Figure 2: Geography of Endangered Languages
Figure 4:
Endangered languages by degree of endangerment and by number of
speakers (the y-axis represents number of languages, the x-axis the number of speakers)
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
2. The Contemporary Crisis of Vanishing Languages and
Endangered Cultures
Just to know, that in the Amazon, Jaguar Shaman still journey beyond the Milky
Way, that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that the
Buddhists in Tibet still pursue the breath of dharma, is to remember the central
revelation of anthropology; the idea that the social world in which we live does not
exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality (Davis
2009:1).
Around the world it’s the same story but with different faces; age-old cultures besieged by modern
pressures. Worldwide some 350 million people, roughly 5% of the global population – constituting
some 5 000 societies (National Geographic 1999) - still retain a strong identity as members of an
indigenous culture, rooted in history and language and attached by myth and memory to a particular
place. Yet increasingly their unique visions and ways of life are being compromised in a whirlwind of
change.
In Brazil a gold rush brings disease to the Yanomami, killing a quarter of the population in a decade,
leaving many of the 8 500 survivors destitute. In Nigeria pollutants from the oil industry saturate the
delta of the Niger River, homeland of the Ogoni, impoverishing the once fertile soils. In Tibet 6 000
monuments and monasteries, ancient temples of wisdom and veneration, are reduced to riprap by
the Chinese (Davis 2011:43). Multinational corporations continue to extend their insatiable reach,
marginalizing indigenous societies and jeopardizing their ways of life through vectors such as
commercial agriculture and fishing, deforestation, mining, industrialization, amongst others.
These are not isolated events but rather elements of a global contemporary phenomenon – the
radical erosion of the ethnosphere - that will no doubt be remembered as one of the hallmarks of
this century, and indeed of the modern, industrial era. One of the central issues is whether
endangered cultures will be free to change on their own terms, adopting beneficial aspects of the
modern world while rejecting forceful intrusions and stark transformations that can only harm their
spirit and heritage, and in turn the anthology of human culture.
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
Anthropologists and linguists underscore the erosion of the ethnosphere by flagging the staggering
rate of language loss (Turin 2005; Borges 2006; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010). Today, just as plants
and animals are disappearing in what biologists recognize as an unprecedented wave of extinction,
so too languages are dying at such a rate that they are leaving in their wake no descendants. Within
a generation or so nearly half of the world’s languages are predicted to be extinct (Davis 2009;
Harrison 2010). Of these languages on the brink of extinction, the majority of them are only orally
transmitted, some clinging to existence by a handful of last speakers each. Along with the dramatic
erosion of the biosphere, we are witnessing as a species the equally dramatic evaporation of
ethnosphere – the key indicator being language loss - at an unprecedented rate.
Of the world’s approximately 6000 languages, 43%, roughly 2500 are classified as endangered
(UNESCO 2012). Around 2000 of these are spoken by societies with less than 10 000 speakers
each – many with less than 1000 and hundreds with fewer than 100 - marking them as severely and
critically endangered (UNESCO 2012). Representing far more than just grammatical and lexical
structures, languages are snapshots into different worldviews (Harrison 2010), flashes of the human
spirit (Davis 2009), the vehicles through which culture comes into existence (Turin 1997). They are
not just a means of communication but symbolize the very fabric of cultural expressions (Pallamary
1999), the carriers of knowledge and belief about the natural and supernatural world (Borges 2011).
Language endangerment does not necessarily entail that peoples will not maintain aspects of their
culture; however in many cases what we are seeing is the beginning of a slippery slope towards
assimilation and acculturation and, in some sense, annihilation (Davis 2009;89).
As languages are lost, the repository of culture is swiftly slipping away, different ways of thinking
and being are disappearing, and so too does our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges
that confront us as a species. It is estimated that roughly every fortnight and elder dies and carries
with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue (Borges 2011; Davis 2011;
Harrison 2011). What this essentially means is that within a generation or two, we will be witnessing
the loss of half of humanity’s social, cultural and intellectual legacy (Turin 1997; Davis 2009;
Harrison 2010; Borges 2011). This legacy represents, as Davis puts it, ‘’the rich, complex
topography of the human spirit’’ (2009:6).
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
Here are some vitals on the status quo of contemporary language loss around the globe:

Some 3,500 languages are kept alive by 0.25% of the world’s population.

About 97% of the world’s people speak about 4% of the world’s languages, and conversely,
about 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by 4% of the world’s people.

80% of the world’s population communicates with one of just eighty-three languages.

At least 50% of the world’s 6000 languages are losing speakers.

About 90% of the world’s languages may be replaced by dominant languages by the end of
the 21st century.

10 languages are the mother tongues of more than half of humanity.

There remain only 300 languages that have more than a million speakers each.

Over six hundred have fewer than a hundred speakers.
(UNESCO 2012)
What of the poetry, songs and knowledge encoded in other voices then, in endangered cultures that
are the guardians and custodians of 98.8% of the world’s linguistic diversity (Davis 2009:6)? MIT
linguist Ken Hale argues that ‘’when you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a
work of art’’ (Hale cited in Davis 2009). It is important to remember that whether a thousand people,
a hundred thousand people, or a million people speak a language, every language represents a
particular intellectual and spiritual lineage that goes back to the dawn of time (Harrison 2007).
The catastrophic loss of language of our times marks a watershed in the topography of cultural
diversity, of the ethnosphere of Earth. Not only are languages – to varying degrees - endangered,
mythologies, metaphysics, arts and ancient pharmaceutics – alternate ways of thinking and being –
are also threatened. Peoples throughout history have come into contact with other cultures,
threatened and influenced each other; yet never before have indigenous societies been more
endangered by foreign forces (Tattersall & Schwartz 2001). Cultures have evolved in response to
contact for thousands of years, but the pace is changing at an unprecedented rate.
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
3. Ethnoscapes, Cultural Entropy and Evolution
Societies have undergone changes big and small since the dawn of humanity. Our species, homo
sapiens have existed for some 200 000 years, a mere moment in universal time. About 40 000 we
outlasted our distant cousins the Neanderthals and became the only human species on the planet,
setting off out of Africa around this time, a hegira that would spread our kind across the globe. Since
the end of the last ice age – some 10 000 years ago- the human population has increased from a
mere 10 million to over 7 billion today1. As an amazingly creative and curios species, the diversity of
cultural manifestations brought into being during this time is astonishing. And yet it is the victors –
the societal giants - that have written cultural history, powerful civilizations, empires and nations
from 3000 BC, shunting minority cultures to the margins of collective imagination.
It may be asked, ‘’what does it matter if these cultures fade away?’’ The answer is simple. When
asked the meaning of being human, the peoples of the world respond in thousands of different
voices. These voices are part of the overall repertoire of humanity; our cultural legacy and reservoir
for coping with the challenges that confront us. As we drift toward a more and more blandly
amorphous, generic world - as Margaret Mead feared - as cultures dissolve and disappear and life
becomes more uniform, we as a people and a species, and Earth itself, will become deeply
impoverished.
There is a tendency for those of us in dominant Western culturescapes to view traditional people—
even when we're sympathetic to their plight—as quaint and colourful, but reduced to the sidelines of
history, while the real world, which of course is our world, continues moving forward. These peoples
are seen as failed attempts at modernity, as if they're destined to fade away by some natural law, as
if they cannot cope with change. This is simply not true. Change is the one constant in history. All
societies in all times and in all places have constantly adapted to new possibilities of life. It is neither
change nor technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, but relations and discourses
of power (Turin 1997; Borges 2001; Davis 2001 & 2009; Harrison 2010).
We (Westerners) reflexively think of ourselves as the cutting edge of history. And if the measure of
success is technological wizardry, we would no doubt come out on top. But if the criteria shifted, for
example, to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable manner, in harmonious coexistence with
nature, the Western way of life would come up short. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history
1
http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_2.htm
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the
civilized, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement
that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited
(Turin 2005; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).
Consider for a moment how we might appear to someone looking at our culture from the outside.
One thing we often forget is the way in which the personal freedoms and social values we cherish
might appear to someone from another culture. We, for example, celebrate the individual at the
expense of family and community. We take this for granted, yet in most of the world the community
still prevails, for the destiny of the individual remains inextricably linked to the fate of the collective
(Davis 1995; Turin 1997). Thus, what we see as freedom may appear to another as chaos. The
rugged individualism and Protestant work ethic of the west are starkly contrasted to the harmonious
communitarian and egalitarian socio-scapes of many indigenous cultures (Appadurai 1996). Around
the world many indigenous groups have over centuries or millennia successfully sustained
economies in one particular place and ecosystem. The co-adaptation of people with other elements
of their ecological systems has meant that the integrity and functioning of these systems has been
sustained even as the communities' culture developed and changed historically (Berkes et al 1995).
Think for a moment about our social structure. An anthropologist looking at us from the outside
would see a culture that reveres marriage, yet allows half of its marriages to end in divorce; that
admires its elderly, yet permits grandparents to live with grandchildren in only 6 per of its
households; that loves its children yet embraces a slogan—24/7—that implies total devotion to the
workplace at the expense of family (Davis 2011).
Think about the manner in which we impact the natural world. Our technological sophistication and
wizardry is balanced by embracing an economic model of production and consumption that
compromises the life support systems of the planet. And as our machine-dominated world runs on,
we do little to curtail the industrial processes that are threatening to transform the very biochemistry
of the planet. This is not to say that such western modalities are wrong, but rather to suggest
humbly that our way of life, brilliant and inspired in so many ways, is by no means the pinnacle of
humanity's potential. It is merely one possibility. Endangered cultures represent other possibilities,
alternative ways of thinking and being. They are not failed attempts to be western, modern, or
techno-savvy capitalists; they are unique manifestations of human culture.
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
Typified by frenzied accumulation and consumption of mass-produced commercial goods and
played out by the precept that ‘money is power’, the domineering culture-scape of the west is
overshadowing minority endangered cultures more pervasively and significantly than ever before,
legitimizing its geo-social command through its dominance and self-substantiating relations and
discourses of authority. In the erosion of the ethnosphere – most critically of fringe ethnoscapes politics of persuasion and force are enacted through powerful states and transnational corporations,
who are at the helm of the deforestation, industrialization, and urbanization that plague the
ethnosphere and the biosphere at the same time. For many indigenous groups, the advent of
globalization threatens the sustainability of their economies by making their land and knowledge
valuable targets as commodities in a globalized economy (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009).
Younger generations of Penan,
face inextricable changes some more stark than others as Borneo is transformed by
extensive
deforestation
and
industrialization.
Photos: Wade Davis & Keith
Harrison
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
4.THE TOPOGRAPHY OF POWER
4.1 State and Corporate Power: Politics of Persuasion and Force
More than 5,000 distinct indigenous societies continue to exist today. The majority of these are
clustered in North America, South America, Africa, the Far East and Polynesia (Dietzsch 2009).
Most are eager to retain their ancestral lands, sovereignty, governance systems, and economic,
cultural, and spiritual practices (Miller 2007), if not separate, at least not threatened by the
rampages of commercial agriculture, industrialization and urbanization. Many indigenous peoples
around the world have for centuries - since the Portuguese Conquest of Cueta in 1415 - have been
impacted by the global reach of colonizing powers.
Yet all now face an ever more aggressive effort by global corporations, bureaucracies and
governments which seek access to the resources and lands that indigenous peoples have protected
for millennia, and on which they depend (Turin 2005; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011). The
Ainu of Hokkaido for instance, who fought for the armies of imperial Japan for a thousand years,
and over the last century have – under the hand of the Japanese government - lost the right to fish
in their rivers, been conscripted as forced labour, and even banned from speaking their own
language. A policy of extinction by assimilation. In Kenya, Canadian corporate Tiomin Resources,
the World Bank, and Kenyan government mining operations evict Digo and Kamba groups from
their homes, stripping ancestral lands of all vegetation, as logging industry and road construction
threaten their livelihoods2.
Notable among the impacts on indigenous societies are incursions mainly by global corporations;
exploiting forests, mineral and fossil fuel reserves, fish, wildlife, constructing dams, roads and
factories in the process and thus affecting the viability of the livelihoods of these people. The
development of giant infrastructures like pipelines, dams, waterways, ports, and roads bring
environmental damage to the lands where many indigenous peoples have lived for thousands of
years (Pallamary 1999; Miller 2007). Such vectors of power force displacement of native
populations to make way for large-scale commercial agriculture and widespread industrialization.
Most of such projects have been encouraged or financed by such institutions as the World Bank,
IMF, WTO, or by development banks and export credit agencies (UNESCO 2012). These
2
International Forum on Globalization, Indigenous Peoples’ Project.
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered
Indigenous Cultures
Matthew Schroeder
bureaucracies – in the name of and legitimized global trade and development interests - invariably
result in the forceful separation of indigenous peoples from control of their lands and resources.
While indigenous peoples in all regions of the world live on lands and territories that contain a great
wealth of natural resources, they remain some of the most vulnerable people on earth due to
centuries of marginalization and discrimination, which has gained increasingly speed over the last
50 years (Tattersall and Schwartz 2001). Many of the as yet unexploited traditional lands of
indigenous peoples are viewed by governments and corporations as opportunities for economic
growth. However indigenous peoples’ special relationships with their lands – a fundamental element
of their cultural and physical survival – are often at odds with these interests. Indeed, the history of
relationships between indigenous peoples, governments and corporations is one fraught with
conflict and characterized by the exploitation and violation of fundamental freedoms and human
rights, including rights to lands, territories and resources (Ricoeur 2006; Miller 2007). What results
are commercial agriculture, biopiracy, cattle grounds, fisheries, mining, oil plants, road construction,
shipping, logging, militarization, nuclear sites, and pollution, all operating to severely impact
endangered indigenous peoples.
The Bayaka community in Central African Republic is destroyed by logging. The Dinka and Nuer in
Sudan see their lands taken over for oil reserves. The Wichí in Argentina face a major highway
through their territory. The Miskito of Nicaragua watch as gold mining ravages once pristine
rainforest. The last of the aborigine peoples witness tourism and road works on their ancestral
lands. The Jharkhand tribal peoples of Indian are displaced due to a massive megadam project.
Industrial plantations destroy tropical forests on which the Dayak people of Indonesia depend.
Large-scale coffee plantations and commercial agriculture evicts Montangards from their homeland
in Vietnam. Uranium mining and resulting toxic waste contaminates the ecosystem on which the
Dene and Cree in Canada rely. Overfishing jeopardizes survival of the Chukchi and Eskimo in
Russia. Mining on North American Indian lands, including the Western Shoshone, Quechan Nation,
Mohawk, and Zuni peoples, transform the landscape into a world of machines and smoke3.
Particularly serious challenges to indigenous peoples are then generated by mega-projects, such as
mining, oil, gas and timber extraction, monoculture plantations and dams. The impact of such
projects includes environmental damage to traditional lands in addition to loss of culture, traditional
knowledge and livelihoods, often resulting in conflict and forced displacement, further
3
International Forum on Globalization, Indigenous Peoples’ Project
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Voices the Far Edge of the World
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marginalization, increased poverty and a decline in the health of indigenous peoples (UNESCO
2012).
Indigenous peoples are on the cusp of the crisis in sustainable development (UNESCO 2012). Their
communities are concrete examples of sustainable societies, historically evolved in diverse
ecosystems. Today, they face the challenges of extinction or survival and renewal in a globalized
world (Miller 2007). Industrial and urban development and other processes of globalization and
modernization do not only entail and perpetuate the marginalization for indigenous peoples; these
vectors invariably constitute a multi-pronged threat to the very foundation of their existence and
livelihoods (Turin 1997; Davis 2001; Borges 2001. Indigenous people throughout the world sit on
the "frontlines" of modernity’s expansion; they occupy the last pristine places on earth, where
resources are still abundant, forests, minerals, water, and genetic diversity. All are ferociously
sought by global corporations, trying to push traditional societies off their lands ((Turin 2005; Davis
2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).
Recently, new advances in technology, the reorientation toward export-led development, and the
imperatives of expanding global financial markets are all driving forces in the extermination of
countless indigenous societies which stand in their way (Dietzche 2009; Harrison 2010). Traditional
sovereignty over hunting and gathering rights has been thrown into question (Davis 2009; Borges
2011) as national governments bind themselves to multi-billion dollar global economic contracts with
international corporations and bureaucracies, Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, the World Bank the IMF. New
trade and investment agreements, which are opening up previously inaccessible territory to
industrial extraction of natural resources, has forced indigenous peoples to defend their homelands
under an invasion of unprecedented rate and scale. Big dams, mines, pipelines, roads, energy
developments, military intrusions all threaten the lands of thousands of indigenous peoples
(UNESCO 2012). Global rules on the patenting of genetic resources via the WTO have made
possible the privatization of indigenous peoples’ genomes, the biological diversity upon which they
depend, and the very knowledge of how that biodiversity might be used commercially. National
governments making decisions on export development strategies or international trade and
investment rules do not consult native communities (Bateson 2004).
The reality remains that without rapid action, these native communities may be wiped out, taking
with them vast indigenous knowledge, rich culture and traditions, and any hope of preserving the
natural world, and a simpler, more holistic way of life for future generations. Humanity today is
facing a cultural crisis at a scale never witnessed in the history of our species. We are living in a
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time where much of the intellectual, social and spiritual legacy of culture - borne especially of
indigenous peoples across the globe - is being severely eroded. Indigenous languages are
disappearing at an unprecedented pace.
Cultural change is inevitable. Indigenous - like all cultures throughout history – have always adapted
and transformed, developing alternate geo-social modes of relating, ways of thinking and being, as
the world around them changes. But it is not change or transformation that threatens these peoples,
it is power, the crude face of domination; discourses and relations produced and perpetuated by
governments, bureaucracies and corporations. In the main, giant multi-national companies, wealthy
banks and nation states – both developed and developing - coalesce into global corpratocracies,
expanding industrialization, urbanization and modernization further and more intensely than ever
before, presaging the destruction and exploitation of the biosphere, and concurrently the threatening
and transformation of endangered indigenous cultures.
4.2 Anecdotes of Endangered, Indigenous Cultures
Fringe ethnoscapes – endangered indigenous peoples - represent different faces, caught within
borders, and in no-mans’ lands between borders (Gupta & Ferguson 1992), in many instances
tenuously holding on to the survival of their old ways. Here are some anecdotes of some of the
indigenous peoples documented by anthropologists engaged in such ethnography.
The Kogi
The Kogi are descendants of the
ancient Tairona civilization that once
carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain
of Colombia. In the wake of the
conquest and the madness that
ensued, these people retreated into
the peaks of the Sierra Nevada de
Santa Marta, a vast volcanic massif
that rises to 20,000 feet from the Caribbean coastal plain. In a blood-stained continent, these
people were never conquered (McFadden 2000).
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To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood. The training for the priesthood is rather
astonishing. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of two or three,
sequestered in stone huts in a world of darkness and shadows for eighteen years (two nine-year
periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spent in their natural
mother’s womb) so that they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. During that entire
time, they are indoctrinated in the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that
their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic or ecological balance. At the end of this
arduous initiation, they suddenly are let out by the priests, the mamas, and before first light,
suddenly, in that crystal moment of awareness of their first dawn, everything they have learned in
the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory as they see the sun rise over the flanks of the Sierra
Nevada. The priest sort of steps back and with his body language says, ‘’you see it is as beautiful
as I said, it is that wondrous, it is yours to protect as the elder brother’’ (Davis 2009;154).
The Kogi continue to symbolize resistance to the force and speed of modern change. They cling
determined to their old ways of life and cultural legacy, wary of the insidious, pervasive effects of the
extensive industrialization wrought by corporations, bureaucracies and governments.
The Penan
The Penan live in northern Borneo, at
the head of the rivers that flow away into
the South China Sea. The rivers are the
domain of the Dyak head hunters, who
traditionally preyed on the Penan. The
Penan
themselves
fled
into
hinterland they knew so well.
aspect
of
their
life,
through
the
Every
their
traditions and their generations, was based on manipulation of the natural world around them. From
childhood to old age, the forest counted for everything. They depended on the forest for every
single aspect of their material wellbeing (Davis, McKenzie & Kennedy 1995).
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Their houses could be built in a few hours, lived in for as long as a month, depending on the supply
of the various products of the forest itself. The wealth of the society is measured not in objects, but
rather in the strength of the relationships amongst people. These people are a totally non-literate
oral tradition, and what that means is that the total vocabulary of the entire language is
encapsulated in the vocabulary of the best storyteller. As they turn to the forest for inspiration, they
sadly today hear nothing but the sound of machinery (Davis, McKenzie & Kennedy 1995).
In a single generation, the Penan homeland has been ravaged by the most egregious example of
deforestation in probably the history of the world (Davis, McKenzie & Kennedy 1995;12). In a single
generation, the Penan have seen their homeland penetrated by roads, their forests cut down, and
the appearance of acidic red soil that has polluted their rivers. They see the formerly crystal clear
rivers now polluted and silt- laden, carrying half of Sarawak away to the South China Sea, where
the Japanese tankers hang ominously on the horizon, ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped
from the forests of Borneo. Women in settlements serve itinerant loggers as prostitutes and
laundresses, many of whom were raised in the forest. Elders are forcibly brought to settlement
camps to live within structures they believe are carved from the bones of their spirits (Davis,
McKenzie & Kennedy 1995;32).
The Xikrin-Kayapó
The Xikrin live on the Bacaja
River, a tributary of the Xingu
River in the Brazilian Amazon.
Just a few miles from Poti-Krô
village, the Xingu will soon be
home to the third-larget dam in
the world, the Belo Monte.
Despite
over
20
years
of
indigenous, environmental, and local protest, Belo Monte is reaching peak construction this year,
threatening to displace roughly 20,000 people while it converts the power of the Xingu into 11,233
MW of electricity (Broges 2011).
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The Loba
Mustang’s
remote
mountain
geography and political autonomy
insulated
the
area
from
the
cultural reforms that impacted the
rest of Tibet, making it one of the
last pockets of traditional Tibetan
life left in the world. But all of that
is about to change. Now, a brandnew highway in the area has connected Mustang to the modernizing forces of China and lower
Nepal for the first time, bringing eagerly anticipated yet profoundly transformative change to the
area. While many Loba celebrate the arrival of such modern conveniences as electricity and
Western hospitals, many locals also fear that the “old ways” will be lost (Turin 2005).
The Nomadic Herders of
Mongolia
Mongolia is on the fast track for
change, with some of the world’s
largest reserves in coal, copper, and
gold, the country is quickly becoming
one of the fastest growing economies
in the world. But will this change affect everyone positively, and what will be its effect on Mongolian
culture? Mongolian pastoral herders make up one of the world’s last remaining nomadic cultures.
For millennia they have lived on the steppes, grazing their livestock on the lush grasslands. But
today, their traditional way of life is at risk on multiple fronts. Alongside this rapidly changing
economic landscape, climate change and desertification are also threatening nomadic life, killing
both herds and grazing land. Due to severe winters and poor pasture, many thousands of herders
have traded in their centuries-old way of life for employment in mining towns and urban areas. The
ger (yurt) camps that ring the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, house a permanent population of displaced
nomads. There, they live without running water or a tangible use for the skills and crafts that were
practiced on the steppes. The younger generation is no longer learning these essential aspects of
their nomadic heritage (Harrison 2007).
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4.2 Preserving Endangered, Indigenous Cultures
Vanishing cultures must be seen not as anachronistic, as behind the times, but in time, and need to
be understood as being situated within the homogenizing currents of modernity (Raibmon
2002:189). ‘’These cultures do not represent failed attempts at modernity, marginal peoples who
somehow missed the technological train to the future’’, rather, ‘’they are alternative visions of life,
birth, death, and creation itself (Davis 2001:173)…‘’they are unique expressions of the human
imagination and heart (2009:19). Endangered indigenous cultures ‘’are not threatened because they
cannot adapt to modernity, but because the political and economic configurations of global
capitalism deny them control over the degree and pace of change in their lives’’ (Raibmon
2002:194). As Davis writes, ‘’It is not change that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, it is
power, the crude face of domination (Davis 2001:105), and totalizing ideologies and the denial of
human rights (Pinker cited in Davis 2009:16).
Such ethnographers challenge the teleological notions of progress, intending to remind us that
modernity facilitates and produces very particular ways of living in the world, whilst hindering, if not
actually foreclosing others (Davis 2001; Hume 2001; Piddington 2001; Turin 2005; Borges 2011).
The importance of studying vanishing cultures is that they teach us that there are other possibilities,
other ways of thinking, other ways of interacting with and living on earth (Turin 1997; Swartz &
Tattersall 2001; Davis 2009). Will the cultures that these authors have documented fade away
completely? Raibmon argues that this issue cannot be addressed if we admit that the loss of
cultural diversity is a regrettable, but inevitable side-effect of modernity, nor via attempts to preserve
these cultures separate from modernity (2002:152).
Genocide, physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned. Yet ethnocide, the
destruction of a people’s way of life, is not only not condemned; in many parts of the world, it is
encouraged and advocated as appropriate policy. Very often the consequence of development
thrusts, industrialization and modernization have the effect of tearing indigenous peoples from their
past, either through coercion or in many cases on their own volition, seduced by the allure of the
modern and persuaded by relations of power and wealth. Torn from the past, these societies are
propelled into uncertain futures, often in very insecure places on the lowest of socio-economic
ladders, lacking political and financial capital to control their lives. Such peoples – on the far edge of
their worlds – inevitably wake up to the realization that there historical life-worlds have been
transformed forever. The issue of how to preserve these peoples thus enters into the conversation.
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Whether or not such engagement is within the ambit of anthropology is debatable and subjectively
justifiable. A more critical question might however be asked; ‘’what is at stake in preserving
indigenous cultures in the face of inevitable development?’’ This is a weighty issue, deserving deep
engagement, and could constitute a sequel to this essay. Preserving endangered indigenous
ethnoscapes – what has been referred to as ‘salvage anthropology’ - may serve to perpetuate
commodification, museumification and naturalization of cultural difference. Such
cultural
preservation may moreover play into the hands of modern discourses on ‘progress’ and
‘multiculturalism’, which so often mask and legitimize the exploitative, forceful agendas of global
corporatocracies, bureaucracies and governments. The crux of preserving the ethnosphere – and in
particular fringe ethnoscapes – pivots on mitigating the attendant aphorias, while attempting to
protect and inspire valuing of the legacy of culture.
Endangerered indigenous societies should not be kept intact like museum pieces or archived in
lengthy volumes on dusty shelves or seldom visited websites. These societies are perfectly capable
of changing. The issue is not about us seeing what should happen to them. Such an assumption
underscores discourses around cultural preservation, yet the issue is far subtler. Rather we should
consider what we as a species need to do to find a way to move to a truly multicultural, pluralistic,
convivial world where the spread of beneficial technology - whether it's medicine or the Internet need not imply the erosion of the cultural diversity of the ethnosphere.
If we think about it, all of these questions are predicated on the assumption that indigenous peoples
want to be western. Many of the younger generations may in fact want this, but this is once again an
effect of relations and discourses of power (Davis, Mkenzie & Kennedy 1995). Elder generations,
the custodians of culture as passed down through millennia, in many instances still cling to their old
ways of thinking and being. They recognize that as the forces of industrialization, urbanization and
modernity at large increasingly impinge on their culturescapes, the very legacy of their cultures are
threatened (Borges 2011; Eli 2013).
In the end however, it is not change that should be feared, but the inability of individuals and
cultures to deal with change. Change, in fact, is the only constant. Indigenous societies only
disappear when they are overwhelmed by forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to (Turin
2005; Davis 2009). The key idea is to allow endangered indigenous peoples to have ways to
maintain their livelihoods, craft their own life-worlds and to make their own choices, without being
threatened by powerful external forces that ostensibly neither value, nor attempt to protect their
culture (Turin 2005; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).
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Commodifying cultural fashion
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5.CONCLUSION
I have tracked the decline and erosion of the ethnosphere, in particular fringe ethnoscapes –
endangered indigenous cultures – and argued that this degeneration portends steadily amorphized,
homogenized, monochromatic global culturescapes, in relation to ways of thinking (episteme) and
being (habitus), and the very fabric of the legacy of human culture. Every view of the world that
fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes the possibility of life (Tattersall & Schwartz
2000; Turin 2005). Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world, but also of realms of the
cosmos, intuitions about spiritual, metaphysical realms (Dietzche 2009). This critically reduces our
cultural repertoire, the reservoir of human consciousness and creativity.
Is the wisdom of an elder any less important simply because he or she communicates to an
audience of one? Is the value of a people a simply a correlation of their numbers? No. To the
contrary, every culture and society is a vital branch and aspect of humanity, a repository of
knowledge and experience, and indeed a source of inspiration and promise for the future. More than
ever, gaining perspective of the crises that face endangered indigenous societies, and the
ethnosphere at large, is required. Such perspective proffer important insights into the diverse legacy
of human culture, the radical ways in which ethnoscapes are changing and transforming, and serve
to develop answers to the challenges that confront us in the 21st century.
History has not stopped; the processes of cultural change and transformation are more dynamic
today than ever, for better or worse. The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist
in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. Which
interpretations of the world prevail, as Nietzsche once said, are not products of truth, but of power.
And it is, as I have argued most crucially, relations and discourses of power, produced, enacted and
perpetuated by governments, bureaucracies and corporations. Giant multi-national companies,
wealthy banks and nation states – both developed and developing – continue to coalesce into
global corpratocracies, expanding industrialization, urbanization and modernization further and
more intensely than ever before, presaging the destruction and exploitation of the biosphere, and
concurrently the threatening and transformation of endangered indigenous cultures.
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What will the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century be remembered for by future
generations? Will it be warfare and technological innovation? Or will it be remembered, as Davis
writes, ‘’as the era when we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the
massive destruction of both the biological and cultural diversity of this planet’’ (2011:45). At risk is a
vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written
language composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen,
midwives, poets, and saints — in short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression of the full
complexity and diversity of the human culture. Quelling this flame, this spreading inferno, and
rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit as expressed by culture, is
among the central challenges of our times (Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).
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