The Language of Civilization

[cloudy]

I found this article interesting, especially in light of a certain denizen's constant statements that Native Americans weren't civilized.

The language of ‘civilization’
Words and contexts through history, and what they mean to Indian peoples
By The Editors, Indian Country Today, March 13, 2007

What do the terms ''savages'' or ''barbarians'' imply in the context of contemporary understandings of civilization, and how have Indian peoples come to be described by these expressions? Double-edged words like savage and barbarian have changing meanings and often carry with them social and political agendas, especially as those agendas relate to the assimilation of Indian people and communities.

Savage, a word from old French, means wild or uncivilized. French colonists and traders applied the term to the Indian people of North America, but with an understanding that American Indians were a people with a culture different from theirs. In this expression, Indians were savages because they did not live by and adhere to French cultural understandings and ways of life.

This French colonial expression of Indians as savage is very similar to the contemporary understanding of the ''other.'' Other is a group of people who are outside one's own community of social and cultural relations. In the French expression of savage, the term does not necessarily imply inferiority, but the word translates into English as different, wild and primitive. The French expression, however, recognized that North American Indians had distinct communities, cultures and institutions, and they sometimes spoke highly of Indian social and political processes.

Scholars note that American Indians are sometimes viewed as noble savages when we are seen living by honorable ideals and ways that are considered ''traditional.'' But more often Indians were, and continue to be, dehumanized and seen as wild savages and enemies of the State. In either usage, the expression implies people who are of a different culture and do not live according to the notion of Western culture or urban ways.

The expression ''barbarian'' has roots among the ancient Greek and refers to people of a different language (and by default, people from non-Greek culture). Similarly, the expression ''outlander'' or ''outlandish'' is often translated from classic Greek texts, and means something akin to foreigners; people of a different non-Greek culture and language. The Romans used ''barbarian'' to describe peoples or tribes that did not live according to Roman, Greek or Christian culture. The concept of civilization referred to people who live an urban life and who practice the lifeways of the Greek, Roman or Christian nations. Those described as barbarians were considered primitive, rural, and could be civilized only by adopting the dominant society's culture and ways of life.

During the early centuries of the colonization of the Americas, Western nations believed that Christian nations were civilized and individuals were civilized if they lived an urban lifestyle, pursued individual economic accumulation of wealth and were faithful subjects of a Christian kingdom. According to this view, few American Indian nations or individuals lived in a civilized way.

Our ancestors lived in hundreds of different political, cultural and economic arrangements that usually bore little resemblance to Western cultural patterns. In this old view of civilization, there is an inherent sense of social and cultural evolution or progress and an assumption that all rational people gravitate toward a similar cultural form of civilization. Western nations, churches and individuals sought to Christianize and civilize Indian peoples in order to bring them into Western civilized life.

Today, the idea of one culture claiming civilization, while viewing all other cultures as primitive or uncivilized, is considered ethnocentric. The word ''civilization'' now is applied to many non-Western cultures, and has come to mean an empire or nation with enduring rules, order and institutions. This contemporary understanding of civilization is applied (by others) to our Indian cultures, in the sense that we have order, continuity, rules and enduring institutions.

A distinct policy of the United States - and the notion of much of American society - is that Indian tribes and nations should assimilate and become part of the mainstream. From the Civilization Acts passed by Congress in the 1790s, through to the termination era of the 1950s, American policy sought to ''save'' Indian peoples from savage or barbarian cultures and move them as individuals into civilized American society.

At the beginning of the 21st century, many American Indians have a high school education and live in urban areas. Many pursue economic livelihood through government or market-based employment, and are reasonably comfortable with dual tribal and U.S. citizenship. By historical Western standards, most American Indians are considered civilized.

However, continuing efforts by Indian peoples to reclaim traditional languages, religions and cultures suggest that communities and individuals are choosing cultural and community pathways that are not based on or even similar to American culture and ways. By drawing on community culture and values, many Indian communities seek political, educational and economic solutions to contemporary issues that build on their own institutions and values.

If Indian nations succeed in their goals to build a future that draws upon traditional community institutions and lifeways, then they will uphold cultural, political, economic and community institutions that will continue to differ significantly from American society and the Western vision of civilization.

The absence of common cultural ground between Indian communities and mainstream American culture will remain a defining characteristic affecting political, legal and cultural relationships on many levels. Most likely, many of us will continue to resist assimilation and, in the absence of more modern terminology, will consequently remain as ''other'' to American culture and civilization. Perhaps a new term such as indigenous civilization may become increasingly meaningful and necessary to give expression to American Indian nations that participate in contemporary markets for livelihood while maintaining government-to-government relations, and preserving community and values.

 

[cantdog]

Kitto says (in The Greeks, which is one of the world's best books) that the derivation of the word "barbarian" was that the barbarians did not speak Greek, but just went "bar-bar-bar-bar."

Ethnocentrism is deep in these words, but 'civilized' is also a technical term in the disciplines of history and anthro, meaning 'city-dwelling.' Cities are an invention following closely upon the invention of agriculture.

The argument has been made that one-plant fields, monoculture, was one of the biggest missteps made by mankind. But the effect of it upon the societies who practiced it was nearly always to increase the robustness of the society's food security, and also, with concomitant animal husbandry, to increase the available total food.

On the whole, that is. Monoculture is fragile. An attack of a disease or a pest insect can be spread very quickly through a field planted with only one species, particularly if other species-- weeds-- are removed.

If societies that have taken up a practice-- like agriculture and settlements (civilization, in the technical sense)-- border societies which have not adopted those practices, on the whole the advantage lies with the agronomists. Whether the 'advance'-- that is, the practice conferring greater ability to project power-- is a natural way of organizing human lives or not, the more efficiently a society can fight, the more population it can support, the more it can destroy or absorb the societies close to it who are less efficient in those narrow aspects. This holds true not just for cities, but for gunpowder, for conscription, for the rudder, for the compass, for thousands of cumulative 'advantages.'

Even fascism.

In the end, men and women find themselves constrained to live very unnatural lives, in cities of millions, in a constant schizoid state of anomie. But the societies which opted for a more natural (but less efficiently powerful) way of life are destroyed or absorbed into the other cultures who were not concerned so much to live well.

It's one of the motors of history.

 

[cloudy]

bumping for those who may not have seen it.

 

[Somme]

Kitto says (in The Greeks, which is one of the world's best books) that the derivation of the word "barbarian" was that the barbarians did not speak Greek, but just went "bar-bar-bar-bar."

Ethnocentrism is deep in these words, but 'civilized' is also a technical term in the disciplines of history and anthro, meaning 'city-dwelling.' Cities are an invention following closely upon the invention of agriculture.

The argument has been made that one-plant fields, monoculture, was one of the biggest missteps made by mankind. But the effect of it upon the societies who practiced it was nearly always to increase the robustness of the society's food security, and also, with concomitant animal husbandry, to increase the available total food.

On the whole, that is. Monoculture is fragile. An attack of a disease or a pest insect can be spread very quickly through a field planted with only one species, particularly if other species-- weeds-- are removed.

If societies that have taken up a practice-- like agriculture and settlements (civilization, in the technical sense)-- border societies which have not adopted those practices, on the whole the advantage lies with the agronomists. Whether the 'advance'-- that is, the practice conferring greater ability to project power-- is a natural way of organizing human lives or not, the more efficiently a society can fight, the more population it can support, the more it can destroy or absorb the societies close to it who are less efficient in those narrow aspects. This holds true not just for cities, but for gunpowder, for conscription, for the rudder, for the compass, for thousands of cumulative 'advantages.'

Even fascism.

In the end, men and women find themselves constrained to live very unnatural lives, in cities of millions, in a constant schizoid state of anomie. But the societies which opted for a more natural (but less efficiently powerful) way of life are destroyed or absorbed into the other cultures who were not concerned so much to live well.

It's one of the motors of history.

And just when the oil may run out?

 

[Tom Collins]

I'll never understand why people think the American Indians weren't civilized. Technology does not a civilization denote, though it will define one. So what if many of them were still in the nomadic hunter/gatherer stage? That was mostly because there was so little population pressure that they weren't pushed to evolve technologically. Many of the tribes were also farmers and herders because they dwelt in a more populus portion of the country.

I mean, honestly, who's more civilized, the person who wars by slaugtering as many enemy as they can, or the one who wars by whacking the enemy with a stick to count coup and essentially defeating them via humiliation...proving you could have killed them, but are above it?

 

[CharleyH]

I found this article interesting, especially in light of a certain denizen's constant statements that Native Americans weren't civilized.

I don't even need to read an article to discuss the civilized ... I know that Europeans stank and did not bathe (hence gringo) and know that natives did bathe ... that in itself is civility. As for the rest, well I am certain natives welcomed the dirty European, but somehow? Europeans thought themselves superior and made America ... it still stinks to the rest of the world, but such is American narcissism.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

The Algonquians, Iroquois, Hurons, just for examples, knew better how to cultivate the land and maintain a functioning society when the Puritans and Pilgrims, not to mention the Jamestown colony, were all still struggling with internal civil and religious strife and wasting time on pointless pursuits like prospecting. Not to mention that the natives were far more socially mobile than say, the Dutch colony of New Netherland, which had the patroon system. It wasn't far removed from feudalism. Even slaves in native societies had better social mobility than peasants in New Netherland.

So, more civilized....that's a matter of perspective. The longhouses were a perfectly practical system of social organization for the native societies of the time. The loose confederacies made more sense than blind allegiance to colonial governors, proprietors, and potenates on another continent.