Notes on Sources
[301]
(a) Destructive culture contact is not primarily an economic phenomenon.
Most native societies are now undergoing a process of rapid and forcible trans-
formation comparable only to the violent changes of a revolution, says L. P. Mair.
Although the invaders' motives are definitely economic, and the collapse of prim-
itive society is certainly often caused by the destruction of its economic institu-
tions, the salient fact is that
the new economic institutions fail to be assimilated by
the native culture which consequently disintegrates without being replaced by any
other coherent value system.
First among the destructive tendencies inherent in Western institutions stands
"peace over a vast area," which shatters "clan life, patriarchal authority, the mili-
tary training of the youth; it is almost prohibitive to migration of clans or tribes"
(Thurnwald,
Black and White in EastAfrica; The Fabric of a New Civilization, 1935,
P- 394)- "War must have given a keenness to native life which is sadly lacking in
these times of peace...." The abolition of fighting decreases population, since war
resulted in very few casualties, while its absence means the loss of vitalizing cus-
toms and ceremonies and a consequent unwholesome dullness and apathy of vil-
lage life (F. E. Williams,
Depopulation of the Suan District, 1933, "Anthropology"
Report, No. 13, p. 43). Compare with this the "lusty, animated, excited existence"
of the native in his traditional cultural environment (Goldenweiser,
Loose Ends,
P-99)-
The real danger, in Goldenweiser's words, is that of a "cultural in-between"
(Goldenweiser,
Anthropology, 1937, p. 429). On this point there is practical una-
nimity. "The old barriers are dwindling and no kind of new guiding lines are
offered" (Thurnwald,
Black and White, p. 111). "To maintain a community in
which the accumulation of goods is regarded as anti-social and integrate the same
with contemporary white culture is to try to harmonize two incompatible institu-
tional systems" (Wissel in Introduction to M. Mead,
The Changing Culture of an
Indian Tribe, 1932). "Immigrant culture-bearers may succeed in extinguishing an
aboriginal culture, but yet fail either to extinguish or to assimilate its bearers"
(Pitt-Rivers, "The Effect on Native Races of Contact with European Civilization,"
in
Man, Vol. XXVII, 1927). Or, in Lesser's pungent phrase of yet another victim of
industrial civilization: "From cultural maturity as Pawnee they were reduced to
cultural infancy as white men"
(The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game, p. 44).
This condition of living death is not due to economic exploitation in the ac-
cepted sense in which exploitation means an economic advantage of one partner
at the cost of the other, though it is certainly intimately linked with changes in the
economic conditions connected with land tenure, war, marriage, and so on, each
of which affects a vast number of social habits, customs, and traditions of all de-
scriptions. When a money economy is forcibly introduced into sparsely populated
regions of Western Africa, it is not the insufficiency of wages which results in the
fact that the natives "cannot buy food to replace that which has not been grown,
for nobody else has grown a surplus of food to sell to them" (Mair,
An African Peo-
ple in the Twentieth Century, 1934, p. 5). Their institutions imply a different value
[
302 ] Notes on Sources
scale; they are both thrifty and at the same time non-market-minded. "They will
ask the same price when the market is glutted as prevailed when there was great
scarcity, and yet they will travel long distances at considerable cost of time and en-
ergy to save a small sum on their purchases" (Mary H. Kingsley,
West African
Studies, p. 339). A rise in wages often leads to absenteeism. Zapotec Indians in
Tehuantepec were said to work half as well at 50 centavos as at 25 centavos a day.
This paradox was fairly general during the early days of the Industrial Revolution
in England.
The economic index of population rates serves us no better than wages. Gold-
enweiser confirms the well-known observation Rivers made in Melanesia that cul-
turally destitute natives may be "dying of boredom." F. E. Williams, himself a mis-
sionary working in that region, writes that the "influence of the psychological
factor on the death rate" is easily understood. "Many observers have drawn atten-
tion to the remarkable ease or readiness with which a native may die." "The re-
striction of former interests and activities seems fatal to his spirits. The result is
that the native's power of resistance is impaired, and he easily goes under to any
kind of sickness"
(op. cit., p. 43). This has nothing to do with the pressure of eco-
nomic want. "Thus an extremely high rate of natural increase may be a symptom
either of cultural vitality or cultural degradation" (Frank Lorimer,
Observations
on the Trend of Indian Population in the United States, p. 11).
Cultural degradation can be stopped only by social measures, incommensura-
ble with economic standards of life, such as the restoration of tribal land tenure or
the isolation of the community from the influence of capitalistic market methods.
"Separation of the Indian from his land was the ONE
death blow," writes John Col-
lier in 1942. The General Allotment Act of 1887 "individualized" the Indian's land;
the disintegration of his culture which resulted lost him some three quarters, or
ninety million acres, of this land. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 reinte-
grated tribal holdings, and saved the Indian community,
by revitalizinghis culture.
The same story comes from Africa. Forms of land tenure occupy the center of
interest, because it is on them that social organization most directly depends.
What appear as economic conflicts—high taxes and rents, low wages—are almost
exclusively veiled forms of pressure to induce the natives to give up their tradi-
tional culture and thus compel them to adjust to the methods of market economy,
i.e., to work for wages and procure their goods on the market. It was in this process
that some of the native tribes like the Kaffirs and those who had migrated to town
lost their ancestral virtues and became a shiftless crowd, "semi-domesticated ani-
mals," among them loafers, thieves, and prostitutes—an institution unknown
among them before—resembling nothing more than the mass of the pauperized
population of England about 1795-1834.
(b) The human degradation of the laboring classes under early capitalism
was the result of a social catastrophe not measurable in economic terms.
Robert Owen observed of his laborers as early as 1816 that "whatever wage they
received the mass of them must be wretched...."
(To the British Master Manufac-