Identity loss and suicide rates in Maoris

As I explained, "Stone Age" is not an insult or an attack. It is a perfectly accurate term for the early stage of development of human societies, when all their tools were made of stone, wood, shell, and other natural materials. Of course "Paleolithic," "Mesolithic" and "Neolithic" are "nicer" words but they have two disadvantages: A) They are too precise and sometimes we need a word that spans all three periods of prehistory, and B) Very few laymen know what they mean. If you'd like to coin a politically correct euphemism for "Stone Age," feel free. Many of you people are not anglophones. What do you call this important, multi-million year period of human progress in your languages?

• It's not an ad hominem attack because it's an accurate description of their culture and applies indiscriminately to all people who are members of those cultures.
• As for "ignorant," I could accuse you of an ad hominem attack. I know more about premodern peoples (a term I have seen used, perhaps it's the one you'd like to popularize) than perhaps most of our members, if only because I'm a linguist and when you study the history of language you can't help taking in an enormous volume of information about the cultures that shape languages.
• As for "dismissive," I'm sorry you jumped to that conclusion and I'll try to word my comments more carefully in the future to prevent it. I have often expressed respect for polytheistic cultures--ancient or modern--because of my familiarity with Jung's archetypal model of the human "spirit." (I freely use these words as metaphors but I'll put them in quotes to stress that point.) A psychological analysis of history suggests that the polytheistic model is an exact manifestation of 23 separate dimensions of our personality. The Abrahamic, monotheist one-dimensional model compresses all of that richness into a pathetic scale of good-versus-evil, and the result is that gigantic portions of our "spirit" are shoved down into our "shadow" where they "fester and turn dark," ready to "explode" into violence and hatred every few generations: which is a fairly good description of Abrahamist cultures.

What places are you talking about? I see an inexorable spread of the monotheisic model because:

• Christianity and Islam both include a "God-given" duty to evangelize us "heathens" for our own good because they love us in order to save us from going to Hell. As a result the percentage of the human race who are members of one or another sect of those religions grows every year.
• Even as the older communities of Christianity and Islam become less fundamentalist over time, their cultures have been shaped by the one-dimensional model of the human spirit, and so they still see the world in "black and white"--absolute "good and evil." The rise of digitization as the defining technology of the Post-Industrial Era only serves to exacerbate this. As a simple example, compressing conversations into 140-character text messages and "tweets" does not promote nuanced thinking. I'm hardly the world's greatest thinker and I couldn't possibly compress a thought into 140 characters.

Don't be so quick to dismiss our philosophers as "immature." Jung has taught us as as much about the human spirit as Aristotle, Jesus or Mohammed. Besides, like every other field of endeavor, philosophy has been democratized in the West. The collective widsom of our poetry, songs, plays, novels, editorial essays and other literature is powerful. It demands a critical reading that was generally not encouraged in previous eras--except by the Jews--and helps to turn every person into a philosopher.

As for "fear of intimacy," I have spoken on this subject at length. Homo sapiens is pack-social by instinct, like all the other species of apes except orangutans, as well as dogs, lions, dolphins and many others. When you live in a small extended-family unit whose members you have known since birth, it naturally creates a strong sense of intimacy. This is our nature. However, the history of our species is a constant endeavor to transcend nature. We started by turning rocks and sticks into tools and taming fire, then living in the first voluntary non-symbiotic multi-species community with dogs to improve our security and hunting prowess; these efforts overcame the limitations of external nature.

But then we developed the technologies of agriculture (farming and animal husbandry), which further overcame the limitations of external nature by creating the first food surplus in history. But agriculture also forces us to overcome our inner nature by living in permanent villages among people outside our own pack--in other words sacrificing a little intimacy for a full belly, as well as security against the elements and other marauding tribes.

Each successive Paradigm Shift brought us more rewards, but at the sacrifice of more intimacy. Civilization in particulare (literally, "the building of cities") forced us to live among total strangers. The rise of the nation-state, then of huge nations with hundreds of millions of citizens, and finally of today's transnational hegemonies, requires us to live in harmony and cooperation with totally anonymous strangers so distant that they are nothing but abstractions.

We continue to accept this loss of intimacy in exchange for the benefits of civilization because we appreciate those benefits so greatly. I have argued that Homo sapiens is rebuilding itself as a herd-social species living like zebras who give each other a certain minimal respect in exchange for collective strength.

But we have done something zebras don't do: We have deconstructed intimacy and reconstructed it by isolating its components. We don't have large families but we invite people from work, school and other parts of our lives--new "pack mates"--to our family gatherings. We join clubs with other new "pack mates"--who share our interests, and have candid conversations with them about what we love and hate. We go to rock concerts and sporting events where we are crammed, sweating, shoulder to shoulder with new "pack mates" who scream in unison.

We join internet forums where we feel free to speak frankly and even insult each other, just the way pack-mates do.

All of this is our transcendence of our own inner nature in action. I would say that the drive to overcome our nature is part of our nature.

Huh??? We have tons of rather detailed archeological and sociological evidence going back to the Neolithic Era, and lots more, in less detail, going further back. Their tools, their art, their graves and their trash dumps tell us a great deal about their migration patterns, religions, family lives and recreation. A flute carved from a mammoth tusk tells us that 30,000 ago we already had remarkably sophisticated music, and fertility goddesses in the absence of fatherhood figures caused Jean Auel (in her Clan of the Cave Bear series of historical novels) to speculate that early man did not quite understand the relationship between sex and reproduction or between fathers and their children. All of these glimpses into their lives give us very good insight into their ways of thinking.

If you're going to dismiss entire disciplines of science--psychology, anthropology, sociology, archeology--with a quick personal insult, in a place of science and scholarship, you need to provide supporting evidence. Don't do it again.

I'm sorry if you consider "Stone Age" to be an insult, but the aboriginal peoples (another more accurate academic term that is REALLY considered rude in vernacular speech) of Australia, Oceania, Africa, the Americas, and northeastern Asia (not all of the peoples in those regions, just the aboriginal ones) used stone tools until their conquerors brought them metal. That is a textbook definition of "Stone Age." Duh.

I don’t mean to disparage your sensitivity, but you’re in a place of science rather than a church or a TV talk show, and you’re expected to be comfortable with clinical discussions. If you don't like the term, which was not meant as an insult, then instead of hurling back another insult and starting a flame war, why don’t you direct your efforts into helping the English-speaking world devise a more policitically correct word or phrase? If you think that’s easy, it’s not, and this is why the old terms so often survive. For example, the American Indians I've met hate the term "Native American." They say that I'm a "native American" since I was born in Chicago. Apparently most of them would just rather be called "Indians" and put up with the ambiguity. My people have spent the better part of a century trying to find a neutral-sounding name for Americans of African ancestry—colored, negro, Afro-American, black, African-American—and each one lasts for a generation before someone finds it offensive.

It’s there but not nearly as prominent. As noted earlier, Westerners have a much stronger sense of individual identity and a much weaker sense of group identity. Who we are is inside us, and does not have so much to do with where we are. Since my family moved out of Chicago when I was eight, I have lived in three places: Arizona, California and the Washington region. In each of those places, the ratio of natives to immigrants from elsewhere (Americans and foreigners) is down around 25%. We move around a lot and take our sense of place with us.

I don’t mean to categorically underestimate the sophistication of Stone Age cultures. I’m speaking specifically of the kind of sophistication that allows or even encourages adjustment to new cultures. The less exposure one has to those cultures, the less easier one will find the juxtaposition, much less an immersion.

The difference is in degree. Certainly it would expand one’s worldview to encounter people whose way of living is noticeably different from one’s own. But there is such a thing as “Maori culture” and even such a thing as “Plains Indian culture” of which a large portion is comfortingly recognizable between tribes or clans.

As I keep stressing, to run into people from the other side of a Paradigm Shift is like running into people from the future or from another planet. It almost takes a scholar to identify the commonalities, and they are so transformed by the shift that there is little comfort in them. Look at the way many suburban Americans “take care of” their children, one of the most important tasks in any culture. They go off to a school where they’re in the care of employees of an institution called “the government” with an unfathomable depth of hierarchy, then they come home to the care of a nanny who doesn’t speak their language, spend their evenings watching tiny images of strangers in strange places doing strange (and often violent) things on a box, and do “homework” to learn subjects of which many are incomprehensible and some are downright offensive. Where is the commonality of humanity for a person from a premodern culture to connect with?

It’s quicker than that. I never developed an attachment to Arizona with its magnificent motherfucking “landscape” and couldn’t wait to escape. I then quickly developed an attachment to Los Angeles, yet now that I’m in Washington I love this place just as much. We have a saying here: “Bloom where you’re planted.” A corollary to that should be, “And if you’re transplanted, bloom again.”

Yet many people feel just as strong an urge to leave. As a musician and former folksinger I’d say that in America we have roughly as many songs about getting away as we have about staying. It’s particularly common for children to want to put a great distance between themselves and their parents. Getting out of range of random encounters with an ex-spouse and mutual friends is also a strong motivator. We may have ties to the land, but our urge to break our ties with the people who live there is stronger.

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Well lookie here. Sam is beginning to get a glimmer of understanding of the power of the Collective Unconscious. Will wonders never cease.

Huh??? Lebensraum is a Nazi term for the alleged manifest destiny of Germany to expand by taking over the territory of neighboring peoples, and to regard those peoples as rubbish to be cleared as efficiently as possible. It has been generalized to mean additional room any nation believes it requires for expansion, especially at the expense of its neighbors. It is an entirely “Western” notion. How are you using it here in reference to premodern peoples???

Again, huh??? We fought the bloodiest war in history against the architects of Lebensraum. Obviously America and several other large countries are the products of past exercises in the pursuit of Lebensraum, and we’re struggling with that guilty history. In America we let the people we stole the land from build casinos. In China they put them in prison, in Russia they just shoot them, and in Brazil they intermarry with them.

 

Doreen:

Fraggle is absolutely right on this one.

Even within New Zealand the Maori culture is identified as a stone age culture (up until the arrival of the Europeans) generally classed as Neolithic at the time of the arrival of the europeans.

http://history-nz.org/maori.html

http://www.maori.info/maori_society.htm

You're crusading for something that doesn't need a crusader.

 

You could learn a lot from that second website.

This discussion stopped being about the Maori some time ago.

The simple fact of the matter is that irrespective of who developed the classification, Maori culture was Neolithic, arguably the Maori industrial revolution occured with the arrival of the Europeans, but, Maori still practice their traditional ways and methods (not all maori, everywhere, however, I'm sure you understand what I mean).

The point that you're missing is that trying to make this about european values, and european values regarding percieved values is to try and shove Fraggle Rocker and other Europeans into a box that is very obviously a hundred years out of date.

I'm fairly sure I could dig up some maori scholars describing the maori culture at the time of the arrival of the europeans as being stone aged if I wanted to, but, what would be the point.

 

Again, you're shoving things into boxes that are 50 years out of date.

Or do you think that "Maori cultural revival" means "Wiping maori culture out".

Did you know that the Maori seats in the New Zealand parliment were established in 1876?