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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Non-primitives would never use such absurdly inefficient systems as song-lines, prodigious memories and suchlike. |
Sorry to be unclear, Mick, but on my planet, there is a theory that the Aborigines and others like them still live the original, primitive human way of life... that everyone's ancestors lived that way... But some invented agriculture... and the idea caught on... and people eventually settled down... and eventually began village life... and then town life... and eventually city life... which led ultimately to the technologically advanced modern world.
But this is bogus. Aborigines and others like them are famed for travelling over long distances to very specific locations to find food, water and shelter. Ray Mears was talking about it again only last night. Hours and days walking... and sometimes not just to find a tiny water hole, but to have to dig several feet to uncover a "well". He also said Aborigines are used to finding people on the edge of death and know how to coax them back to life.
It may be traditional to gut a goanna with a stick rather than a knife, but the knowledge required is very sophisticated. And since the knowledge is a matter of life and death, they can not have acquired it suddenly: it can only stem from a secure setting where trial and error is not life-threatening.
Ultimately, that means a sedentary setting from which an itinerant/nomadic off-shoot can spring: it doesn't work the other way around. The paradigm has to be backwards: the sedentary, city-life is primal and developed into the modern, technological, agricultural world; and also budded off a number of bushmen, the only people with the specialisms necessary to live in crappy places. But these budded-off societies are non-developmental and could never have lead to the maps-and-GPS type of society that also navigates the Outback nowadays (not always successfully).
Non-primitive does not mean "as advanced as us"; but does mean "not mankind's State of Nature".
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Why is it that westerners view this area of knowledge as "primitive"? |
See above.
| they fail to see that primitive is merely a technical term. |
See above.
It is not a natural progression from their life-style to ours (the opposite is nearer the mark). Vide the dearth of Aborigine professors, lawyers and politicians.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | It is not a natural progression from their life-style to ours (the opposite is nearer the mark). Vide the dearth of Aborigine professors, lawyers and politicians. |
I like this thinking.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| Ishmael wrote: | | DPCrisp wrote: | | It is not a natural progression from their life-style to ours (the opposite is nearer the mark). Vide the dearth of Aborigine professors, lawyers and politicians. |
I like this thinking. |
So do I.
The concept of primitive is purely a subjective perception based on our modern perspective.
True Knowledge is what we learn through trial and error. Far more is remembered through our senses of sight, sound, touch and particularly taste and smell than can be garnered from any written text. That is the reason why ancient 'Gnostic Cults' placed so much emphasis on not learning to read or write. It dulled the centres of the brain that enabled memory recall.
Excellent literacy and tertiary education has not endowed professors, lawyers or politicians with a superior knowledge. The opposite is more the case.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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So everyone is a confirmed Jacobs-Crispian? Cool.
| The concept of primitive is purely a subjective perception |
As bandied about in the High Street and Hallowed Halls, perhaps... but there is (what seems to me) a clear, objective and unassailable logic to it when considered properly.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Komorikid wrote: | | The concept of primitive is purely a subjective perception based on our modern perspective. |
That. I don't agree with. I also don't believe in oral histories and memorized epic poetry. Never happened. It's a myth.
I do like Dan's notions (pace Jacobs) that apparent "primitives" are likely offshoots of urban communities, the pre-existence of which enabled parallel forms of sustenance. The logger who lives in the woods or the whaler who lives at sea can do so only because their produce is required by pre-existing urban communities.
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Tatjana
In: exiled in Germany
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| Ishmael wrote: | | I also don't believe in oral histories and memorized epic poetry. Never happened. It's a myth. |
WHAT?! You do not believe in oral history ????
Why ever not?
I believe only in oral history.
_________________
-Gory at thasp, keener fortha karabd-
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Tatjana wrote: | WHAT?! You do not believe in oral history ????
Why ever not? |
Nobody cares about history. Nobody ever cared about history.
It's that simple.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You're all talking complete bollocks. The whole point of being non-primitive is precisely because we have non-expert systems. It takes enormous personal skill to follow a song-line, but it's a piece of piss following megalithic leylines or a compass.
You can be as stupid as you like as a White Australian and you can still take a full part in 'civilised' society. But if you're an aboriginal Australian you can be as intelligent as you like and still quite likely sit about in an alcoholic stupor in a mudhut. It's all got very little to do with the individual, we are all buoyed along by our particular culture. And some cultures are primitive, some ain't.
PS. And Jacobs doesn't seem to work in Australia since there are no agricultural communities of aborigines. They started off 'primitive' and stayed 'primitive'.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| The logger who lives in the woods or the whaler who lives at sea can do so only because their produce is required by pre-existing urban communities. |
Ditto the farmer that lives in the countryside. But then there are other matters of fact as to whether the "transplanted people" can survive on their own when their markets and supplies are cut off.
And not all off-shoots are necessarily deliberately transplanted in order to serve a particular market. They will have been interacting with the market to begin with... and they might be venturing off with a view to tapping new resources... but having developed self-sufficiency in a particular environment, such as the Outback, they might become isolated by default.
Microscopically, this is part of the city's dynamics: "I don't need you for this, I'm making my own now." In limited cases, it's possible to say "I don't need you for anything anymore", but the key thing for palaeoanthropology that you can only reach that position by building slowly on a secure basis.
Come to think of it, there is an important element of inorganicness here. Low crappiness and city life can support organic expansion (not quite geographic expansion, remember), but there could be a number of 'bottlenecks' where people said e.g. "we're not following them into Australia: the place looks like a shit hole. Leave it to them." There are geographic/crappiness discontinuities all over the place and they'll have a bearing on the genetics. So let's get that Acacia Avenue Syndrome stood up in the right place.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Nobody cares about history. Nobody ever cared about history. |
Some people seem to care only about history and ancestors... (I don't think I've heard anyone making the point that they will be ancestors themselves in the future.)
If no one was interested in history/legend/mythology before writing came along, how and why were they suddenly invented? What happened to "what is is what was"?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| The whole point of being non-primitive is precisely because we have non-expert systems. It takes enormous personal skill to follow a song-line, but it's a piece of piss following megalithic leylines or a compass. |
This is the same as the difference between a high-tech and a low-tech company: they have the same complexity, precision and technical demands, but they are apparent in the former and hidden in the latter.
Buying parts for aeroplanes is easy: everything is worked out and specified already. Rolling out a new part into the automotive spares market is easy: the vast information network is ready and waiting. We've had people from these backgrounds who found it challenging to have to think of influences and ramifications and courses of action on the fly.
The highly developed systems have distributed expertise, as it were {Is the size of the population dependent on the culture or the culture dependent on the population?} so each individual is a small, specialised cog in a large machine. City-life is massively inter-dependent. What makes a city a city is the constant unfolding and integration of tiny systems.
I suppose the non-developmental mentality is
"teach them what we know so they can do what we do"
while the developmental mentality is
"teach them what we know so they can do something that hasn't been thought of yet".
Both occur in city-life, but the latter is not applicable everywhere.
| It's all got very little to do with the individual, we are all buoyed along by our particular culture. And some cultures are primitive, some ain't. |
Quite so. But that is relative in the ranking sense, not in the genealogical sense.
| PS. And Jacobs doesn't seem to work in Australia since there are no agricultural communities of aborigines. They started off 'primitive' and stayed 'primitive'. |
Earth to Mick, Earth to Mick: agriculture is not primitive either: it is technology transplanted from cities that turned wilderness into ruralness. And by itself, an agricultural lifestyle is just as non-developmental as the Aboriginal one.
City-life first.
But Jacobs doesn't discuss general cultural genealogy in The Economy of Cities: only the supposed relationship between agriculture/villages/towns/cities-as-we-know-them and actual economic processes, whether growing or stagnating.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | Some people seem to care only about history and ancestors... |
No Dan. Ancestry instead of history. That's what they care about.
| What happened to "what is is what was"? |
We have writing. Still no one cares about history. We didn't have writing. No more people cared then.
Certainly not enough to devote lifetimes to rote memorization.
| If no one was interested in history/legend/mythology before writing came along, how and why were they suddenly invented? |
Are you suggesting writing was invented for the purpose of recording history/legend/myth? I think not.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| The whole point of being non-primitive is precisely because we have non-expert systems |
Our education system takes years; 'twas ever thus, it's just that education has extended beyond the ranks of the rich and privileged and ecclesiastical and is a legal requirement nowadays. It isn't literally a matter of life or death whether exams are passed but with "resources" (employment) in short supply the amount of time spent improving skills is supposed to increase chances of a better life. Is our society regressing?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Education is utterly irrelevant. True it takes reading skills to follow the signs from Sidney to Ayers Rock but that's easier to acquire than song-line expertise. Anyone, whether educated or not, can take a full part in Australia's non-primitive society.
| Is our society regressing? |
It is interesting that every educated generation is convinced that it is. All that is really happening is the continuing process of making previously difficult skills acquirable by everyman. It's always called 'dumbing down' but actually it's the way progress is made. And unlike primitive societies, it's exponential (though exponentiality is not a necessary component of non-primitive societies: see my treatise on empires).
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