Из страны оджибуэев, из страны дакотов диких
Самой древней религией Дюркгейм считает тотемизм, лучше всего сохранившийся у австралийских аборигенов (хотя само слово «тотем» позаимствовано из языка оджибве). Тотемизм неразрывно связан с клановой структурой общества. Примечательно, что членов клана связывает не кровное родство, а общее название, налагающее на них те же обязательства по ( Read more... )
А то, что изоляция обычно приводит к деградации, вроде бы хорошо документировано. Джозеф Хенрич приводит в качестве примера еще каких-то "полярных инуитов":
"They are the northernmost human population that has ever existed. Sometime in the 1820s an epidemic hit this population of hunters and selectively killed off many of its oldest and most knowledgeable members. With the sudden disappearance of the know-how carried by these individuals, the group collectively lost its ability to make some of its most crucial and complex tools, including leisters (figure 3.1), bows and arrows, the heat-trapping long entry ways for snow houses, and most important, kayaks. With the loss of kayaks, the Polar Inuit became effectively marooned, unable to maintain contact with other Inuit populations from which they could relearn this lost know-how.
As noted by the Arctic explorers Elisha Kane and Isaac Hayes, who encountered the Polar Inuit while searching for Sir John Franklin (see chapter 3), these technological losses had a dramatic impact, leaving the group unable to hunt caribou (no bows) or harvest the plentiful Arctic char from local streams (no leisters).
The population declined until 1862, when another group of Inuit from around Baffin Island ran across them while traveling along the Greenland coast. The subsequent cultural reconnection led the Polar Inuit to rapidly reacquire what they had lost, copying everything, including the style of Baffin Island kayaks. Decades later, with their population again increasing, and with ongoing contact with other Inuit in the rest of Greenland, the style of Polar Inuit kayaks gradually shifted back from the large beamy kayaks learned from the Baffin Islanders to the small sleek kayaks of western Greenland".
Тот же вывод следует и из исследований жителей тихоокеанских островов:
"Sure enough, islands or island clusters with larger populations and more contact with other islands had both a greater number of different fishing-tool types and more-complex fishing technologies. Figure 12.2 shows the relationship between population size and the number of tool types. People on islands with bigger populations had more tools at their disposal, and those tools tended to be more sophisticated".
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