‘Indigenous culture’ is little more than a fashionable, academic catchphrase. But the idea that ‘indigenous culture’ signifies something both unique* and inherently good persists. And by now – particularly in certain academic circles, namely Anthropology, Cultural/American studies, and Women’s Studies – it is an absolute orthodoxy that ‘indigenous cultures’ offer something critically distinctive from the West, something inherently valuable, and something worth saving.
But ‘indigenous culture’ is far from monolithic and, apart from abject poverty, the phrase does not signify a universally shared set of values, norms, or practices. Diplomad (hat tip to Betsy Page) rightly argues that the far Left’s obsession with preserving ‘indigenous culture’ – even at the expense of concrete progress (like life-expectancy and immunizations) - fails to distinguish exactly which characteristic, if any, is worth preserving. A squalid, subsistence-level existence scraped out of the dirt and junk piles hardly seems to be a culturally conditioned practice worth saving. And appeals to a vague concept of ‘authenticity’ notwithstanding, the far Left has failed to justify their belief that Western culture (a generic catch-all for concepts like technological progress, industrialization, market reforms, scientific method, rule of law, etc…) actually disadvantages indigenous peoples. As Diplomad states:
"indigenous culture" really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It's a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.
Diplomad goes on to write:
I am struck, for example, by how much effort "pro-indigenous activists," often themselves urban upper-class types or foreigners, expend on "land reform." Instead of working to develop an economy where land ownership does not determine whether one lives or dies, the activists seek to chain the "indigenous" to, at best, a brutal life of scratching out a living on postage stamp-size plots of land. Often land reform involves "giving" the rural poor these plots but without the right to sell or use them to secure loans from banks. The poverty and hopelessness increase.
In fact, I would supplement Diplomad’s assertion by arguing that in privileging the ‘Wretched of the Earth’, the anthropologists and culturalists actually do them a grave disservice: they simultaneously patronize and deify at the expense of recognizing the humanity of the people with whom they purportedly share solidarity. Distinguishing a culture as inherently good solely on the basis of its distance from Western practices and beliefs is to reflexively and stupidly privilege the ‘other’, and it betrays a barely-concealed animosity toward Western culture and institutions. Similarly, arguing that the progress and benefits of modernity corrupt and rob certain populations of their savage nobility is to relegate entire groups to the scrap heap.
The urge to both deify and patronize has its roots in the politics of envy; and however the various academic subsets would like to dress it up, they are simply peddling an unsophisticated variant of zero-sum Marxism: wealth is a finite resource that Western industrialized nations horde, mostly at the expense of the poor. Diplomad correctly asserts that, despite the seemingly fractured state of the far Left, they bear a common ideological enemy:
Despite their seemingly different concerns, all these sub-sets shared much in common, to wit, at their core lay anti-capitalist, anti-American and increasingly anti-Semitic emotions disguised as analytical constructs. Over the past fifteen or so years, we have seen these different strands re-meld into what we now call the Anti-Globalization Movement (AGM). While it doesn't have the military force behind it of the old Marxism, nor has it yet formulated a clear vision of the world with which it seeks to replace the current world (there is no AGM Das Kapital), it shares with old-time Marxism a reliance on pseudo-science and a vanguard elite. Also from Marxism come much of its language and tactics, as well as the goals of disrupting economic development of the capitalist kind and bringing down the United States and the global order it dominates.
Diplomad’s summary is largely correct, but I think the seemingly disparate movements may be congealing faster than he thinks. The anti-globalization protest marches host a panoply of anti-Western fringe groups, and those groups are now beginning to find common cause (if not outright unity) in both their hatred of the West and their antipathy toward free markets, a hostility cloaked in the rectitude of third world theories and anti-imperialism concerns . And while it is no Das Kapital, - and is too boringly dense and impenetrable to ever be widely read – Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment can be seen as a rallying cry for anarchists, anti-globalizationers, and other ne’er-do-wells. Tomes like Dialectic of Enlightenment are too incoherent to provide an ideological wedge against the ideals of the West; but the rejection of rationality and productivity - along with the predictable embrace of violence and ‘revolution’ – mirror Foucault’s fashionable anti-political screeds and needs no philosophical foundation. Violence never has. And if the protest marches of the last eight years are any indication, mindless violence and mayhem are all this crowd has to offer, which is what many of us had suspected all along.
(*Obviously cultures have differences. I use unique in the sense of having something relevant, or of fundamental difference, to say. To claim that a culture is unique is to make the rather banal observation that different cultures – by definition – have different practices. To find relevant political import to those differences is another matter – and that is what the anthropologists and cultural theorists (along with their auxiliary arms – the student protestors) have failed to do.)
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