Imperialist Expansion and Fourth World Anthropology

Anthropologist John Bodley (Victims of Progress, 4th ed., Mayfield, 1999, p.7) writes:

“The real problem facing indigenous peoples who desire to maintain cultural autonomy is that their cultural heritage is the anthithesis of global scale culture”

I think Bodley here is simply expressing the truth; and expressing it crisply. Today the traditional cultural and civil structures of autochthonous peoples are threatened first and foremost by the extreme incongruity and asymmetry between such structures and those of (capitalist, neoimperialist) ‘global scale culture’.

The root of the problem that Bodley puts his finger on: the vast chasm between the values and ways of expressing those values that the two kinds of societies respectively hold. Juxtaposing contemporary commercial culture with traditional indigenous lifeways sheds light on many profound contrasts. Most significant are those between the mechanisms through which resources (both natural and human) are organised and material goods distributed.

Stark cultural polarities don’t just reflect themselves in phenomena like art, music, ritual or even decision-making. These cultural and social conventions never occur in a vacuum. As Marx observed, they necessaarily reflect economic structures. And so just as fusion of small-scale aboriginal and global-scale mechanised systems of agrarian production is nigh impossible. It can’t be carried out without becoming inefficient (in Western terms) or ultimately just subsuming traditional indigenous co-operative practices and customs.

For time and again historical and anthropological research has documented cases where the confluence of subsistance-based  conventions of small-scale communal production and large-scale corporate agri-enterprises has resulted before too long in the expulsion and dispossession of occupying native communities. Disposession menaces tribal peoples at the frontier of rapacious neocolonial expansion. But such dispossession can be hastened at times by the collective actions of individual settlers. It’s not only corporate enterprises who drive native peoples from their lands. Bodley (pages 32-36) cites examples of aboriginal peoples being ejected from their lands or even killed off simply in order to expedite the settlement of a group of mobile and ambitious settlers. And, en masse, this activity leads to to even sometimes constitutes or leads to genocide or even ethnocide, the complete extinction of an ethnic group.

And whereas in past times these acts have been carried out by colonial powers and their pioneering companies and settlers, at today’s frontier native peoples struggle very valiantly to retain their traditional culture, society and way of living in the face of corporate incursion into their territory for the exploitation of its resources and ultimately for pure pecuniary advantage. And this neocolonialism can take place because our colonial forebears have established processes and institutions of government in the lands they conquered patterned closely after those of the societies from which they hailed. As the main raison d’etre of the expansionist drive is the “bottom line” it follows logically that imperialist powers will seek to usher in private ownership of lands and goods, and establish mercantile economies.  And they will need to do this under the precepts of Western jurisprudence, commitment to which will often make indigenous societies look backward and static.

But this feeling cuts both ways. Native peoples are often not attuned to the Western imperialist economic and social structures. Consequently in the main they become subordinate within the economy with which the industrialised envelop them into. This happens once they become rendered uncompetitive and hence superfluous in the global marketplace. In the 2001 film Life and Debt, one Jamaican farmer succinctly put it thus:”They have machine, we have machete. How can the machete compete with the machine?”

And then native peoples, immersed in and sidelined by the global market for commodities find themselves disproportionately blighted by the malignant aspects of a ‘progressive’ capitalist industrial society; unemployment, social decay, crime, low haelth status and general despair.

Here in New Zealand, as elsewhere, we find criticism of these indigenous communities; and they’re ubiquitous. The peoples are taken to be solely culpable for their own problems. This view often is implicitly accompanied by an almost Social Darwinian view of tribal peoples’ acculaturation into industrial society as a merited endowment of the glories of progress on a primitive and unresponsive culture of savages. The low socioenomic status of the indigenous is seen as further proof of their backwardness and lesser industry and self-sufficiency. 

Cultural hubris like this is self-reinforcing. From the economic effects of indigenous integration into Western society comes the justification for seeing native peoples as less advanced; the very viewpoint which enabled industrial penetration into native-occupied territory to take place in such a forceful way in the first place. Ethnocentrism justifies infiltration, dispossession and assimilation of indigenous peoples into industrial society in numerous ways. Firstly, and most fundamentally, it allows expansionists to think that the yardstick of their activities’ success- finnacial profitability- is correct and proper. On contact, indigenous peoples, as Bodley notes, were often appraised as having unfruitful or less productive systems of economic production. So they were labelled as “inefficient” notwithstanding their sustainable utilisation of natural resources, symbiotic co-existence with the ecosystem and their non-contaminating lifestyles. By Western imperial lights, it can be easy to see indigenous peoples as so ungainly in their use of their habitat, that industrial development around them can only be positive: exponentially increasing local production. 

The propagation of Western culture is also validated by the idea that all societies fall somewhere on a continuum which runs of savagery to civilisation. This is less self-serving; but the attitude that in the absence of sovereign government native peoples lack order and social structure can have dangerous effects, as I’ve noted. Likewise, many thought that native peoples could be elevated from ungodly paganism to civilised Christianity.

Of course to many Christians and even Christian evangelists today the truths of faith may be imperfectly reflected in the doctrines and practices of other religious traditions- such colonial zeal is theologically utterly deviant. And it’s widely recognised that Victorian anthropology of religion failed to “get behind” the language and practices embedded in the religious traditions of many indigenous groups; taking their worship at face value: as  merely a naive, primitive and utterly inefficacious method of manipulating future natural events. (For more on this see D Z Phillips, Religion Without Explanation).

Some colonial missionaries, nonetheless, engaged in systems of proselytisation were both agents of and contributors to insidious broader  practices of wide schemes of cultural modification. There are many documented historical cases from around the globe where children were forcibly removed (notably those belonging to Australia’s “Stolen Generation”)  from their parents’ custody into often austere and barbaric  boarding schools. The motivating aspiration of those masterminding these schemes was to ingrain white culture into the next generation of natives. Deviant Christian theology may have had a part of play in creating this colonial hubristical attitude, for sure. But, after Darwin, the influence of those who sought to “Darwinian” evolutionary models of human social interaction inevitably could regard the indigenous as “backward” or “less-developed”. So the causes of such an attitude are manifold and complex.

I think that we ought to look at how this kind of view still has vestiges operating in our own present cultural environment. How often do we uncritically accept the products of science and technology without placing them in their economic- and hence political- context? And it’s equally important to note that Social Darwinism had its antecedents well before Darwin even existed. Thinkers down the centuries have maintained that various human races have in some sense been fundamentally distinct from one another; with humanity as a whole progressing along a historical trajectory from civilisation to savagery. (Note that New Zealand historian James Belich (Paradise Reforged) has argued that only 50 years ago New Zealand European culture implicitly emphasised the value in New Zealand’s becoming a ‘better’ (ie., more civilised) Britain.)

These reflections shed light on how political, cultural or religious cultural modification manifests the more covert, unobstrusive and inconspicuous means that can be employed toward the end of acculturation. In invoking the idea of “cultural autonomy”, Bodley cannot escape begging the question as to what such autonomy involves in our current Western milieu.  At one point he (p.70) details the Thai government’s Mobile Development Programme of the 1960s which consisted of the construction of model villages built with all the trappings and contrivances of an industrialised town such as reticulated water and electricity. These programmes were designed so as to garner the loyal support of the indigenous in order to inure them to absorption of their culture into the wider Thai economic and cultural system in the face of native guerrilla resistance. Here, I think, we have a microcosm of the wider phenomenon of governments’ viewing native peoples as needing indoctrination as a way of “educating” them into a “higher” life form practiced by those immersed into the dominant (but to the indigenous alien) dominant culture.

World Bank economist Robert Goodland (“Tribal peoples and Economic Development: The Human Economic Dimension” in Tribal Peoples and Development Issues, J Bodley (ed), Mayfield, 1988, pp.390-404) identifies four prerequisites for cultural autonomy. These are “territorial rights”, “protection from introduced disease”, “time to adapt to the national society”, and “self-determination”. But it’s a totally inconsistent suggestion that peoples require self-determination and also “time to adapt” to Western capitalist culture, as if acculturation was an inevitable progression. Here much more recently we again see a recent writer viewing indigenous peoples as backward savages who will inevitably be merged into the wider nation that exists around them. To Goodland, the major problem with neo-colonialism is that it’s foisted  on the indigenous too hastily. But such a historicist viewpoint simply perpetuates ethnocentrism’s ill-effects.

Yet, citing Bodley, Goodland argues that concepts of private proprietry of land are insolubly foreign to tribal culture (p.394); noting that government possession of some tribal lands has sometimes been carried under the illusion that they are uninhabited. One can see why this has occurred. But even a cursory glance at a globe will tell you that all the land on Earth forms part of the territory of a sovereign state. Perhaps then the hope- and I believe it is a well-grounded hope- for indigenous peoples is that even within the Western political and legal structure they be afforded the right to exist according to their traditional customs without becoming outcasts or like mere spectacles. Damaging penetration into their cultures must be discouraged. For this to occur ecosystems must safeguarded from plundering of natural resources by large-scale commercial interests; given that resource depletion often leads to ecocide and indigenous communities being forced to sell residual goods for cash, and thus become at the mercy of the global mercantile economy. The relative symbiosis between peoples and earth crafted by the indigenous down the generations must remain intact. It is of course important to respect the monumental gains made by industrial society; for instance in medical science. But tribal peoples can enjoy the fruits of these without subsumption into Western culture. 

Perhaps, then, even Goodland is perspicacious when he says (p.403) that “cultural autonomy stresses…the desirability of maintaining the culture rather than replacing it.”  The question is whether industrial capitalism has developed to a point where this is possible; that is for industrial and small-scale cultures to co-exist as the indigenous do with the planet.