What year is this again?

[mrissa]

I have just quit reading a Native American history published in 2010, because in the first five pages, it directly equated civilization with white people at least five times and referred to the First Nations people in question as "primitive" at least twice

Comments

[auriaephiala]

"Primitive" is such a loaded word when used to refer to societies -- and so unclear as well -- that I think it should just be dropped completely.

You could refer to a society's level of technology, for example, or what type of political organizations it has, or the level of hierarchy or equality among classes and between genders, or how it treats the disabled or children or the elderly -- and base that on actual observation.

But that would require work and analysis. rather than just making an overarching value judgment like "primitive".

[fidelioscabinet]

As well as I can recall, (I finished as an undergraduate over 30 years ago), among anthropologists, "civilization" is a term of art, and is a descriptor for human cultures that have become urbanized. Therefore, the Aztecs, however unsettling their religious practices and however limited their metal-working, were a civilized society. So were the Incas and the Mayas and the folks at Cahokia. The Germans Tacitus wrote about, the Mohawk confederation and the various groups of Sioux were not. I realize that not all the social sciences share term definitions, but I've found the relatively moral-value neutral anthropological usage helpful. "Civilization" /= "nice people Justlikeus"; "civilization" = "people who have a society based around urban areas". This book sounds like the sort of thing Francis Parkman committed, except that in Parkman's time it was imperative to justify the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in case anyone decided it might be time to stop killing, robbing, and otherwise abusing the Indians. Also, Parkman

[fidelioscabinet]

Also, I have examined a Clovis point, and while it is a stone tool, it cannot, in the course of lithic tool design, be considered primitive. The Cahokia mounds took some thought as well.

[hbevert]

I went to the Cahokia mounds last weekend. Reading about them ahead of time, I found out that they are not just large grassy hills (what they look like now) but that they were constructed in layers of different types of earth for a good balance of water drainage and moisture retention so they would keep their shape well over time.

[mrissa]

Do you have a sense of why anthropologists choose to use a loaded term in this way rather than using "urbanized"? Do they use "urbanized" for something different? Is is that they want the noun civilization and then the other forms of the word follow? I know that technical usage often has a very good internal reason that is opaque from outside the field, so I don't want to assume that there isn't a reason just because I don't know it.

[orbitalmechanic]

Seriously. It is 2011 now.

Okay, but that book was probably composed back in 2008!