>Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 15:35:03 +0000
>From: Andrew <andrewflood at eircom.net>
>Subject: Re: AUT: Hunter gather life expectancy
>To: aut-op-sy at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>
>On 18 Dec 2003, at 15:02, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Very interesting. Do you have some cites on this?
>
>Child mortality rates for modern hunter gatherers
>http://harpend.dsl.xmission.com/pennington/humannature/lectures.fall.2003/hgdemo_nofigs.pdf
>
>Hazda, Kung life expectancy and cause of death
>http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/Papers/NBJ2002.pdf
>
>Causes of death in pre-Columbian America
>http://www.hist.umn.edu/~rmccaa/laphb/27fall97/laphb27a.htm
>
>The books Steel, Germs and Guns has some quite useful material on HG
>populations in Poynesia (where the geography meant thousands of
>micro experiments and Australasia).
>
>Andrew
I'm not qualified to scientifically evaluate analyses of mortality rates, life expectancies, causes of death, etc. in pre-industrial civilizations, so I assume, for the sake of argument, that the analyses presented above are entirely sound.
Posting "facts" like what's found through the above links, however, probably won't make much difference for those who want to romanticize pre-industrial civilizations. A romantic conception of the primitive today is in part rooted in the hegemony of TINA. As we are told that There Is No Alternative to global capitalism, and there is No Future other than a capitalist one, it is no wonder some of those who are not content with The Way Things Are look to the past and romanticize it by exaggerating its virtues, whether the past is pre-industrial American Indian societies, primitive Christianity, philosophical heights of Islamic civilization, the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, the Renaissance, or whatever.
Also, a romantic conception of the primitive in part originates in the desire not to fully identify with the victorious settlers of the conquering civilization, although romanticization, too, is a perspective not originally of the griefs of the conquered but of the anxieties of the conquering:
***** For several centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. . . . The past once destroyed never returns. The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. Today the preservation of what little of it remains ought to become almost an obsession. We must put an end to the terrible uprootedness which European colonial methods always produce, even under their least cruel aspects. We must abstain, once victory is ours, from punishing the conquered enemy by uprooting him still further; seeing that it is neither possible nor desirable to exterminate him.
Simone Weil, _The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind_, quoted in Lilian Friedberg, "Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust," _The American Indian Quarterly_ 24.3 (2000) 353-380, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v024/24.3friedberg.html> *****
Once totally economically and politically marginalized, the conquered, colonized, and oppressed, in turn, often end up having to perform the romantic image of what they are supposed to be in the eyes of the dominant race, literally or figuratively, to entertain them in the tourist industries, for instance. -- Yoshie
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