We know that humans who lived here for millions of years did so in a sustainable fashion. We know that civilization has caused the one of the largest mass-extinctions in only a few thousand. We know that the thousands of cultures that did not practice agriculture and create civilizations lived in this other sustainable way. We know that a lot of those cultures had civilized contamination by the time our cultures anthropologists wrote about them. Fortunately, enough writing on less-touched cultures exists so we can estimate how much contamination a certain culture experienced before we wrote about it, by understanding the baseline of indigenous cultures. For example when someone argues that rape/spousal abuse existed in indigenous cultures, we can often link that behavior only to post-contact.
This all means to say that when I use the terms horticulturalists, hunter-gatherers, indigenous peoples, primitive peoples, native cultures, wild peoples or animist cultures, I generally mean those cultures that lived for millions of years in a sustainable way and had little to no contamination from civilized culture. When I use the terms agriculture, incipient-agriculture, European agriculture, civilizationists, civilized, or agriculturalists I refer to our culture that does not live in a sustainable or desirable way.
Respecting indigenous traditions & cultural appropriation, I look at these cultures from a systems analyst perspective, not at their particular dogmas or ceremonies. I often generalize because I speak of the over-whelming similarities in systems approach to participating with the land and among each other. I generalize because the evidence says I can. The exception usually reflects some form of contamination by civilization (as in my rape example), or a cultural difference (like group sex or circumcision) that has nothing to do with the principles behind rewilding and only work as strawmen to distract the fundamental unsustainability of civilization from coming to light. If you have trouble understanding this, please see my rewilding resources appendix.
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One response to “Generalization Vs. Rewilding”
I’ve been given that argument, too (“some indigenous cultures have rape/abuse”) and all I could say in return was the following: I don’t study enough anthropology to be able to debate whether those accounts were exceptions or norms or the result of contact with civilization, or what really went on in those cases. What I *can* say is that a culture without rape and a culture without exploitation of human “resources” or the environment are compatible, and I seek the confluence of both. There are people out there who have learned how not to rape or abuse, and they don’t, and they won’t, ever (and/or ever again). It is a learned behavior, and any new society that I help to build will teach people *neither* interpersonal brutality/hierarchy *nor* institutional brutality/hierarchy.