Primitive culture

Iowa Indians in London in 1844

The term primitive culture was used in older anthropology texts and discussions of the 17th, 18th and 19th century by European explorers and anthropologists to describe indigenous societies, particularly those of North, South America the Caribbean, Africa and Oceania. While the term is no longer used due to its inherent racist and ethnocentric undertones, anthropologists nonetheless recognize these groups of people in its categorization of the differing evolution of human societies.

Etymology

Early anthropologists believed that the cultures encountered in the new world preserved in a state unchanged since "stone age" paleolithic or neolithic times, and hence labeled them as primitive, which comes from the Latin "prīmitīvus" meaning "first of its kind"..

Early Anthropological Thought

Early contact with indegiounes tribes of people by the first European explorers created a serious interest in the minds of both the public at large and the scholars of Europe about other societies and cultures. Early anthropologists and sociologists used the term Primitive Culture to describe the newly contacted societies that often lacked major signs of economic development or modernity, such as the lack of a written language or advanced technology. Often times these societies also had limited and isolated populations. Some of these scholars and academics held that these types of societies were essentially inferior to those of Europe, hence the label of primitive. Many of their customs and beliefs were viewed as savage, animalistic and non-Christian.

Other early sociologists and other writers portrayed primitive cultures as noble—noble savages—and believed that their lack of technology and less integrated economies made them ideal examples of the correct human lifestyle. Among these thinkers were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is most frequently associated with the idea of the noble savage based on his Discourse on Inequality and Karl Polanyi, who in The Great Transformation praised the economic organization of primitive societies as less destructive than the market economy.

Many of these writers assumed that contemporary indigenous peoples or their cultures were comparable to the earliest humans or their cultures. Some people still make this assumption. This assumption has proved to be false as hunter-gatherer bands have just as much accumulated innovation as do "modern" civilised cultures. The differences are because most of the cultural innovation in hunter-gatherer or shifting horticultural cultures is in areas of ceremonial, arts, beliefs, ritual and tradition which usually do not leave cultural artefacts, tools or weapons. The assumption too that hunter-gatherer bands and shifting horticultural tribes have more in common than they have with more complex urban or civilised societies is also denied by many modern archaeologists. Close examination of differences in culture show that these types of cultures are as different as they are from modern urban and civilised cultures. Though belief in the "noble savage" has not disappeared, describing a culture as primitive is often considered factually incorrect and offensive today. Use of the term, especially in academic settings, has thus diminished.

Different Types of Primitive Cultures

Nomadic

Nomadic people, also known as nomads, are communities of people that move from one place to another, rather than settling down in one location. Nomadism is distinguished from migration, which involves a major and permanent move from one location to another. Nomads, on the other hand, move periodically or cyclically, usually returning to their original location at various times. Many cultures were traditionally nomadic, but the development of modern agriculture, industrialization, and national borders has changed their lifestyle. Nomadism has become a minority lifestyle for modern people. Those who dwell in stable fixed societies often look at nomadic people with suspicion. Nomadic people have historically developed strong ties within their communities, creating a strong sense of identity which enabled their culture to survive despite numerous interactions with others. Today, however, nomads of all kinds are facing problems in preserving their cultural heritage. As human achievements have advanced in recent times, bringing all people into greater contact with each other, the nomadic lifestyle has become endangered. Yet, those who continue to live this way often have knowledge and traditions that are of value to humankind as a whole. Efforts to preserve and include these in world-wide understanding have been initiated.

Hunter Gathers

The nature of the available food supplies leads hunter-gatherer societies to develop different specializations. Some hunt big game, or trap animals, while others may fish in lakes, rivers, or along the coast. An older term found in Scandinavian countries is hunter-trapper instead of "gatherer," signifying their use of complex trap systems involving holes in the ground to catch elks, reindeer, etc. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to have very low population densities. Only a limited number of people can congregate without quickly exhausting the local food supplies. In climates that can support agriculture, farmland will support population densities 60 to 100 times greater than land left uncultivated. Nomadic hunter-gatherer societies usually have non-hierarchical social structures, unlike higher-order horticultural, pastoral, and industrial societies. The group usually consists of a small number of family units, often related, comprising a tribe. Typically, men are responsible for hunting and women for gathering. The male puberty rite of passage often receives greater emphasis in hunter-gatherer societies than the other three ritual occasions celebrated in all human societies (birth, marriage, and death). Their puberty rites, which may take as long as a month, generally include instruction in adult responsibilities, rituals dramatizing changes in relationships between boys and girls and with their mothers, and physical ordeals that often involve hunting.

Hunter-gatherers are foragers, dependent upon the natural availability of food. Consequently, they are relatively mobile, moving on as their food supplies become exhausted. This nomadic lifestyle, in which all possessions must be carried, leads hunter-gatherers to rely on materials available in the wild to construct simple shelters. There is rarely any elaborate building of permanent housing or development of cities in such societies. Their mobile lifestyle generally means that there is no possibility of storing surplus food and thus the society remains at a subsistence level. Specialization of labor does not develop beyond the division of responsibilities between men (hunting) and women (gathering and domestic). Each family acquires only enough food for its own needs and has no surplus to share or trade with others. Thus, full-time leaders, artisans, or other specialists are rarely supported by pure hunter-gatherer societies. However, in cases where food is abundant and reliable, a hunter-gatherer group may become sedentary. In such cases, a combination of hunting and gathering with agriculture or horticulture, animal husbandry, or herding is common. Moving from the subsistence level to creating surplus provides support for societal development. The existence of surplus relieves individuals, or family units, from the burden of having to procure sufficient food for their needs every day. This frees them to develop skills and talents in ways that benefit others, who in return can share surplus food or other products. In this way, using flour from acorns and smoke-dried salmon for food, natives of the American Pacific Northwest, such as the Haida, were able to become skilled artisans, famous for their woven clothing and elaborately carved items.

Horticultural Societies

he origins of horticulture lie in the transition of human communities from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary or semi-sedentary horticultural communities, cultivating a variety of crops on a small scale around their dwellings or in specialized plots visited occasionally during migrations from one area to the next. (such as the "milpa" or maize field of Mesoamerican cultures). In forest areas such horticulture is often carried out in swiddens ("slash and burn" areas). A characteristic of horticultural communities is that useful trees are often to be found planted around communities or specially retained from the natural ecosystem.

Horticulture sometimes differs from agriculture in (1) a smaller scale of cultivation, using small plots of mixed crops rather than large field of single crops (2) the cultivation of a wider variety of crops, often including fruit trees. In pre-contact North America the semi-sedentary horticultural communities of the Eastern Woodlands (growing maize, squash and sunflower) contrasted markedly with the mobile hunter-gatherer communities of the Plains people. In Central America, Maya horticulture involved augmentation of the forest with useful trees such as papaya, avocado, cacao, ceiba and sapodilla. In the cornfields, multiple crops were grown such as beans (using cornstalks as supports), squash, pumpkins and chilli peppers, in some cultures tended mainly or exclusively by women .

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, Transaction Publishers,U.S. 1987, ISBN 087855582X
• Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society. Transformations of a Myth , Taylor & Francis Ltd. 2005, ISBN 0415357616
• Farb, Peter (1968). Man's Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State. New York, NY: E. P. Dutton.

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