Hunter gatherers

[Johnny Canuck3]

Yes but not in a really meaningful way, you might as well start talking about hierarchies of humour, beauty, kindness or intelligence etc etc.

This article is about the patrilineal inheritance of the chieftainship amongst the Miwok, a hunter gatherer society in California.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=Q3x...yMjZAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZxW...oJ3KAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

This article is about the social divisions and rankings amongst the Haida, a coastal people inhabiting the coastline of central BC, as well as parts of coastal Alaska.


http://books.google.ca/books?id=vtj...ubXtAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2

This article talks about the hereditary chieftainship of the Yankton Sioux, part of the Missouri River group of Sioux nations; who were also hunter gatherers.

The peoples of the Northwest Coast had abundant and reliable supplies of salmon and other fish, sea mammals, shellfish, birds, and a variety of wild food plants. The resource base was so rich that they are unique among nonagricultural peoples in having created highly stratified societies of hereditary elites, commoners, and slaves. Tribes often organized themselves into corporate “houses”—groups of a few dozen to 100 or more related people that held in common the rights to particular resources. As with the house societies of medieval Japan and Europe, social stratification operated at every level of many Northwest Coast societies; villages, houses, and house members each had their designated rank, which was reflected in nearly every social interaction.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked...-American/57803/Native-American-culture-areas

 

[Jonti]

socialisation isn't brainwashing

Heh, I don't know about 'proper' anarchist, but it's my general leaning...the obvious point that paimei misses of course is that all cultures, including his precious tribes, 'brainwash' people, in the process called socialisation.

As for the comment that no one in a tribe ever had to do something they didn't want to do...in all of human history...well...

the scare quotes aound "brainwashing" are certainly needed, otherwise one may as well say "heh, yu iz all sheeples innit" ...

Surrendering the self to a fanatical cult is the steep price thousands of Americans have been willing to pay for a sense of high purpose and security. During times of uncertainty and confusion, people are even more susceptible to the compelling -though dangerous-claims of these pseudo-religious groups.

Americans first heard the term "brainwashing" in the 1950s in connection with indoctrination methods used in some Korean prisoner-of-war camps. That frightening introduction was not to be our last encounter with thought reform.

Since then, scientists have researched its effects, sociologists have hypothesized its probable role in modern life, and novelists Richard Condon and Anthony Burgess have given us a glimpse of characters whose lives were altered drastically by mind control.

http://www.allentwood.com/articles/mindcontrol.html

 

[kyser_soze]

Yes but not in a really meaningful way, you might as well start talking about hierarchies of humour, beauty, kindness or intelligence etc etc.

If it's practical effect is that it can cause someone to do something they wouldn't otherwise do at the behest of another it's a meanginful hierarchy.

If we lived in a society where those who told the best jokes were able to order people around, that would be a meaningful hierarchy.

 

[Idris2002]

Christ on a bike, what a thread.

Look no serious anthropologist today believes in either the 'noble savage' idea or in the Hobbesian idea of h/g societies forcing people to lead lives 'nasty brutish and short'.

I don't have time to give this attention it deserves, but I may come back to this thread later. . . if you're good.

 

[revol68]

All of which exist and have existedand are as meaningful as each other.

Are they stratified in a systematic manner? Are they as problematic as hierarchial relations based on control of resources, land and knowledge?

Attempting to compare these kind of informal and subjective hierarchies with hierarchies in the political and economic sense is childish at best or ideological apologism for real class societies.

 

[revol68]

If it's practical effect is that it can cause someone to do something they wouldn't otherwise do at the behest of another it's a meanginful hierarchy.

If we lived in a society where those who told the best jokes were able to order people around, that would be a meaningful hierarchy.

Is this ordering systemtic and structured? Is there some mechanism that means funny fuckers can simply order someone to do as they are told, rather than simple societal pressure of a funny or intelligent person being able to influence someone by their personality, then yes that is a hierachy.

I don't have a problem with funny, intelligent or good looking people being able to exert influence, only pathetic losers have would have a problem with that.

 

[revol68]

This article is about the patrilineal inheritance of the chieftainship amongst the Miwok, a hunter gatherer society in California.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=Q3x...yMjZAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

I wasn't claiming real hiearchies didn't exist in native american tribes, I was simply pointing out that people having greater influence because of personality traits isn't the same as structured,stratified and reproducing hierarchies.

 

[kyser_soze]

Is this ordering systemtic and structured?

Yes, if this is a punchline.

Boom-tish

 

[Kizmet]

I wasn't claiming real hiearchies didn't exist in native american tribes, I was simply pointing out that people having greater influence because of personality traits isn't the same as structured,stratified and reproducing hierarchies.

The heirarchy is the heirarchy... upon what criteria it's based doesn't matter.

You're fixating on heirarchies based on control of resources as if that's all there is/has ever been.

That's wrong.

a) Different forms of heirarchies exist within other forms and are just as meaningful.

b) Control of resources can only become the basis of a structure if resources are scarce. This hasn't always been the case.

c) You're confusing personality traits with the heirarchies of deed.. ie the strongest, wisest, killer of the previous chief.

d) Heirarchy infers control as much as requires it.

 

[revol68]

The heirarchy is the heirarchy... upon what criteria it's based doesn't matter.

You're fixating on heirarchies based on control of resources as if that's all there is/has ever been.

That's wrong.

a) Different forms of heirarchies exist within other forms and are just as meaningful.

b) Control of resources can only become the basis of a structure if resources are scarce. This hasn't always been the case.

c) You're confusing personality traits with the heirarchies of deed.. ie the strongest,wisest, killer of the previous chief.

d) Heirarchy infers control as much as requires it.

for hierarchies to be self reproducing and stratifying they need to bestow control on resources, be that access to things or knowledge. If resources are freely available to all then it's simply a natural leadership based on traits or deeds of a person. If I want to get my broken leg sorted I go to someone with the best ability to do that, if i want advice on a personal matter I go to someone with a bit of wit.

Reducing hierachy to difference in abilties, traits or talents is meaningless and only serves as apologism for those that hold hierarchy as a natural and eternal. Got a problem with capitalism, well there have always been hierarchies so shut up etc etc

 

[Kizmet]

for hierarchies to be self reproducing and stratifying they need to bestow control on resources, be that access to things or knowledge. If resources are freely available to all then it's simply a natural leadership based on traits or deeds of a person.

Why jump to that conclusion..? all a heirarchy needs to be reproducing is the reproduction of whatever that heirarchy is based on.

Reducing hierachy to difference in abilties, traits or talents is meaningless and only serves as apologism for those that hold hierarchy as a natural and eternal. Got a problem with capitalism, well there have always been hierarchies so shut up etc etc

A heirarchy is a structure... that's all. One of several types of structure but one that is flexible and can cope with large or small numbers of people and scarce or bountiful resources. And easy to maintain.

But like any structure it's open to abuse.

It's the desire for structure that can be considered as natural and eternal... not heirarchy.

However just because one heirarchy based on capital is pants doesn't mean another based on something else will also be.

False logic.

 

[revol68]

yes a hierarchy is a structure but do you think beauty, intelligence, funniness, stylishness, athleticism are structured in a current society, do they represent a stratification or are they not subjective traits that may or may not bestow advantages but not in a structured manner.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I wasn't claiming real hiearchies didn't exist in native american tribes, I was simply pointing out that people having greater influence because of personality traits isn't the same as structured,stratified and reproducing hierarchies.

The peoples of the Northwest Coast had abundant and reliable supplies of salmon and other fish, sea mammals, shellfish, birds, and a variety of wild food plants. The resource base was so rich that they are unique among nonagricultural peoples in having created highly stratified societies of hereditary elites, commoners, and slaves. Tribes often organized themselves into corporate “houses”—groups of a few dozen to 100 or more related people that held in common the rights to particular resources. As with the house societies of medieval Japan and Europe, social stratification operated at every level of many Northwest Coast societies; villages, houses, and house members each had their designated rank, which was reflected in nearly every social interaction.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/...-culture-areas

 

[littlebabyjesus]

A point about plenty. Abundant resources don't necessarily lead to egalitarian societies. Quite the reverse, in fact. A harsh environment promotes mutual aid and reduces competition between individuals in the face of the imperative to cooperate or die. I'd expect a flatter, less hierarchical structure among the Inuit than among those living on fertile plains.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

A point about plenty. Abundant resources don't necessarily lead to egalitarian societies. Quite the reverse, in fact. A harsh environment promotes mutual aid and reduces competition between individuals in the face of the imperative to cooperate or die. I'd expect a flatter, less hierarchical structure among the Inuit than among those living on fertile plains.

Your point is made by the cite in my post, directly above yours.

 

[two sheds]

Don't know about the rest of it, but i have read that hunter/gatherers had loads more free time than neolithic peoples - who had to prepare the ground, sow, water, tend and protect, harvest and then process their food.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Your point is made by the cite in my post, directly above yours.

So it is. I only read the bit in bold – sorry.

A point worth making though, I think. It appears counter-intuitive to many people that plenty breeds conflict while scarcity breeds cooperation.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Don't know about the rest of it, but i have read that hunter/gatherers had loads more free time than neolithic peoples - who had to prepare the ground, sow, water, tend and protect, harvest and then process their food.

Yes – a 15-hour week by some estimates, and no clocking in or out.

I don't think anyone has disputed that. Problem is, there are rather too many of us to live that way now – even if we had the skills to do so, which we don't.

 

[two sheds]

Yes – a 15-hour week by some estimates, and no clocking in or out.

I don't think anyone has disputed that. Problem is, there are rather too many of us to live that way now – even if we had the skills to do so, which we don't.

Well you have to update it, obviously. I assume they used to gorge themselves on the food that they happened to come across and kill when they could find it so i pay homage with packets of chocolate biscuits.

 

[kyser_soze]

So it is. I only read the bit in bold – sorry.

A point worth making though, I think. It appears counter-intuitive to many people that plenty breeds conflict while scarcity breeds cooperation.

Yeah, but scarcity also leads to low populations and smaller groupings which have a greater immediate survival imperative and while you'll still get conflict and politics within a small group it's going to be easier to find a consensus with a band of 100 people than it will with 200. And while I'm not about to ake any statements about unconcious drives in societies, I suspect that times of plenty lead to a tendency to hoard, and a subsequent drive to want to hoard more...once you institutionalise and create a narrative to justify this (and also to associate say, direct distribution of resources with primitivism and the exchange of ration tokens for resources for sophistication) you get savage levels of competition...

 

[revol68]

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/...-culture-areas

Yeah, likeI said how many times, I'm not arguing that there wasn't hiearchies in native tribes based on the reification of persoanlity traits. Simply that greater influence inferred by such traits alone does not make them a hierarchy.

This was in reference to Kizmet's to claim that hierarchies of humour, beauty, kindness and intelligence exist in as meaningful a way as anyother hierarchy, which of course is utter balls, other wise my bad self wouldn't be going to sign on the dole today.

 

[paimei01]

Ancient people never did anything they did not want to do. I am sure of this. Children grew and played - imitating the adults. Then nobody hired them for 8 hours a day. What they did to survive came as naturally as breathing. We cannot imagine people doing something to survive - without seeing it as "work" ?

And ancient wars are nothing compared to our wars. Even ancient fighters like the knights or the samurai saw "dishonor" in fighting with a gun. Why ? Were they not terminators, killing machines ? Is life not about efficiency and survival ? Seems not. "Civilization" imposes these machine ideals on us. Then we wonder why so many people fighting in modern wars come home with mental problems.
But most people don't think, they have been assimilated. The machine ideals are their own. All is OK.

http://www.primitivism.com/nature-madness.htm

But none of them ever worked. And everyone knows it. The armored Christians who later
“discovered” these communities knew that these people did no work, and this knowledge
grated on Christian nerves, it rankled, it caused cadavers to peep out. The Christians spoke of
women who did “lurid dances” in their fields instead of confining themselves to chores; they
said hunters did a lot of devilish “hocus pocus” before actually drawing the bowstring.

These Christians, early time-and-motion engineers, couldn’t tell when play ended and work
began. Long familiar with the chores of zeks, the Christians were repelled by the lurid and
devilish heathen who pretended that the Curse of Labor had not fallen on them. The
Christians put a quick end to the “hocus pocus” and the dances, and saw to it that none could
fail to distinguish work from play.

Most of us fail to become as mature as we might. In that respect there is a continuum from simple deprivations to traumatic shocks, many of which act on fears and fantasies of a kind that normally haunt anxious infants and then diminish. Such primary fantasies and impulses are the stuff of the unconscious of us all. They typically remain submerged, or their energy is transmuted, checked, sublimated, or subordinated to reality. Not all are terrifying: besides shadows that plague us at abyssal levels with disorder and fear, there are chimeras of power and unity and erotic satisfaction. All send their images and symbols into dreams and, in the troubled soul, into consciousness.

In our time, youthfulness is a trite ideal, while the idealization of youth becomes mischanneled into an adulthood of simplistic polarities. Adolescent dreams and hopes become twisted and amputated according to the hostilities, fears, or fantasies required by society. Retarded in the unfolding of his inner calendar, the individual is silently engineered to domesticate his integrity and share the collective dream of mastery. Changing the world becomes an unconscious, desperate substitute for changing the self. We then find animal protectionism, wild-area (as opposed to the rest of the planet) preservation, escapist naturism, and beautification, all of which maintain two worlds, hating compromise and confusing complicated ecological issues with good and evil in people.

---

The child is free. He is not asked to work. At first he can climb and splash and dig and explore the infinite riches about him. In time he increasingly wants to make things and to understand what he cannot touch or change, to wonder about that which is unseen. His world is full of stories told; hearing of a recent hunt, tales of renowned events, and epics with layers of meaning. He has been bathed in voices of one kind or another always. Voices last only for their moment of sound, but they originate in life. The child learns that all life tells something and that all sound, from the frog calling to the sea surf, issues from a being kindred and significant to himself, telling some tale, giving some clue, mimicking some rhythm that he should know. There is no end to what is to be learned.

 

[Belushi]

Even ancient fighters like the knights or the samurai saw "dishonor" in fighting with a gun. Why ?

Because a Swordsman takes decades to train, you can teach a Peasent to shoot a gun in ten minutes. Japan isolated itself from the rest of the world for Centuries because outside technology uncermined the elites ability to control the population. There was nothing 'honorable' about it.

 

[kyser_soze]

Then we wonder why so many people fighting in modern wars come home with mental problems.

And how do you know that soldiers from pre-modern wars weren't similarly damaged?

And ancient wars are nothing compared to our wars.

In what way? Less brutal - definitely not; you couldn't kill people at long range, you had to get in close and personal to kill someone with a pike or sword.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Good grief. The Samurai were a warrior caste in a feudal society, able to dedicate their lives to war because they had weary peasants toiling in the fields and workshops to provide for them. And a Samurai warrior did exactly what his clan leader told him to do.

Dear me.

 

[paimei01]

Because they did not have 2 rules "killing is bad" , "go kill". They did not have the second rule for sure. Only if they wanted to go raiding they did. To prove they are brave. See the counting coup thing.
The first rule - was self understood. You can't keep living among your group - of friends after you just killed one. About killing people from another tribe - there was nobody telling them that was bad. So no mental problems.

 

[kyser_soze]

Because they did not have 2 rules "killing is bad" , "go kill". They did not have the second rule for sure. Only if they wanted to go raiding they did. To prove they are brave. See the counting coup thing.
The first rule - was self understood. You can't keep living among your group - of friends after you just killed one. About killing people from another tribe - there was nobody telling them that was bad. So no mental problems.

Wow, you're already at the point where you manage to contradict yourself in a single post...

 

[Jonti]

a warrior class of killer buddhists

.

Both Rinzai and Soto Zen Buddhists study koans and practice Zazen. The differences are in the relative importance in day-to-day practice. To say Rinzai "stresses" koans over Zazen would be inaccurate.

It is accurate to say that Soto Zen considers the practice of Zazen to be the sole means of realization. But Soto Zen has never discarded the koan. Soto teachers lecture on koans and their students study koans outside the practice of Zazen. Soto Zen practices Zazen as awakening itself to the already realized koan. In Rinzai Zen practice, a koan is examined while sitting in order to deepen insight.

Rinzai Zen was popular in Japan amongst the Samurai, the warrior-class.

http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/renzai-soto.html

 

[paimei01]

How ? Killing people from the same tribe - bad, but not impersonal bad. Just self evident. How can you live among them after ? It was not like our society where you can kill a stranger from the same country as you. They had no strangers. Killing other tribes - go ahead, if you like, bravery was respected.