Abstract
I analyze the logic of certain arguments from the aboriginal rights movement (“aboriginalism”) directed against the Western academy. Some emphasis is placed on the New Zealand Maori who drove many megafauna species into extinction well before the advent of European colonialism in the islands. I argue that the efforts of the indigenous oppressed there and elsewhere to preserve and advance indigenous culture are hindered by the idealization of native life ways, particularly as they existed prehistorically. Further damage to the aboriginal rights movement, I maintain, is done by the representation of Westerners as monolithic and inhuman oppressors. While grievous errors of both thought and deed have been committed by the West, I caution against confusing these errors for a present incapacity for clear, objective study. I argue that in fact efforts of the indigenous oppressed to preserve and advance their cultures stand to gain valuable assistance from the Western academy. At the same time, following Mill, I repeat the call to ensure that the voices of oppressed indigenous peoples are heard. Lastly, I urge all concerned parties to observe a principle of good faith. Academics and activists alike should recognize the humanity in each other and work to promote and preserve it in both.
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Notes
- 1.
For an extensive discussion of the many commonalities in human experience, see (Brown 1991).
- 2.
Compare the view advanced more recently by Henry Kissinger, who represents our cultural and political world in polar terms of the developed and the undeveloped. The developed West, on this account, “is deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data – the more accurately the better.” This notion, deriving for Kissinger from Newton, is to be contrasted with that characterizing the undeveloped cultures of the world: “Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer.” This entails that “empirical reality has a much different significance for many of the new countries than for the West because in a certain sense they never went through the process of discovering it” (Said 1979: 46–47).
- 3.
Consider, here, observations such as that of George Orwell, who describes a more visceral response to the foreign other, a response contributing to colonialist chauvinism: “When you walk through a town like this – 200,000 inhabitants, of whom at least 20,000 own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in – when you see how the people live, and still more, how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces – besides they have so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They arise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil” (quoted in Said 1979: 252–3).
- 4.
- 5.
It is notorious, of course, that for all of his eloquent expression of the human right to dignified self-determination, Jefferson himself kept slaves and our society today still struggles to apply this principle equitably and universally. These facts, however, speak precisely to my point that the complexity of human being cannot be ignored, and that our testaments and pilgrimages toward our ideals are not thereby to be discounted. Also noteworthy in this context is Bartolome de Las Casas’ History of the Indies. Written in 1527, this review of Columbus’ discovery and the subsequent Spanish conquest of America contains a passionate defense of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the New World and a scathing condemnation of their brutal treatment by their Spanish conquerors (Las Casas, 1971).
- 6.
As Paul Tillich has observed, “[t]hat which is the true ultimate transcends the realm of infinite reality infinitely. Therefore, no finite reality can express it directly and properly. Religiously speaking, God transcends his own name. This is why the use of his name easily becomes an abuse or a blasphemy. Whatever we say about that which concerns us ultimately, whether or not we call it God, has a symbolic meaning. It points beyond itself while participating in that to which it points. In no other way can faith express itself adequately” (Tillich 1957: 44–45). That is, while human cultures employ their various myths to express their religious beliefs, it is a blasphemy – as well as an intellectual error – to suppose that the sacred thus expressed exists in this world, taking a finite physical, temporal form. The capacity for critical understanding of one’s religion is yet another hallmark of a sophisticated culture; in this instance, one of the great products of the Western intellectual tradition.
- 7.
Cf. also Kunnie: “In terms of environmental rights, Indigenous cultures are instructive for understanding and practicing the harmonization of human beings and the rest of creation” (Kunnie 2006: 264).
- 8.
The cases of the African and Asian continents, including Europe, are evidently different. Here, we find little archaeological evidence of mass exterminations of species, in accordance with a “filter principle”: “the farther back in time the first human-induced wave of extinction struck, the lower the extinction rate today” (Wilson 2002: 96). Biologists speculate not that the prevailing human attitude toward the environment was in these places more beneficent, but that the more prolonged presence of humans in the evolving ecosystem produced a more balanced relationship between humans and the local megafauna (Wilson 2002: 98).
- 9.
This concept is to be distinguished from the more narrow sense of rationalism as opposed to empiricism. The latter two doctrines concern the dispute over the primary means by which we acquire knowledge. Both may be said to assume the truth of rationalism in the broader sense that there are truths to be known by the reasoning mind.
- 10.
The remark is Galileo’s.
- 11.
That there exists a borderline between sense and nonsense serves only to illustrate the point, and to provide the occasion for some of our most delightful amusement, such as that found in the work of Lewis Carroll:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
… (Carroll 1946: 18)
- 12.
Again, Kunnie: “The Akan of Ghana say, ‘All human beings are children of God; no one is a child of the earth,’ substantiating the view that human value is immeasurable and that human beings can never be a means to an ends [sic.], but are the ends, can never be objects for exploitation and commodification, but are always creative subjects” (Kunnie 2006: 266). No less than in the West do we find well-developed recognition of the moral status of human individuals, even as that moral status is continually violated.
- 13.
Where Mill writes of the majority opinion, I here of course have in mind the opinion and actions of the geo-politically superior West with respect to the world’s indigenous, the subject of this essay.
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Oakes, M.G. (2012). The Logic of Indigenous Voice. In: Chacon, R., Mendoza, R. (eds) The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1065-2_18
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