25 January 2010 Wellington, NZ
Tyler speaking.
At the risk of stirring up a hornet's nest, I'm going to record some thoughts about tribal cultures, ancestor veneration, anthropologists, and racism.
The Maori people seem to be thoroughly integrated into New Zealand contemporary culture, and yet there is a strong and growing emphasis on Maori traditions, language, and heritage. This emphasis is supported widely throughout the country, in politics, and in the public mind. In general I think this is good for all New Zealanders. For one thing, it gives NZ a distinctive, marketable image in the world. But lest we get all dewey eyed about the indigenous traditional culture and values, let's think about some of the features of this tribal culture - features that it shares with most other tribal cultures, including (as one exhibit at Te Papa museum pointed out) the clan system of Scotland.
The Maori put great stock in their "whakapapa", their lineage or genealogy. The chiefs and other leaders can recite a line back 19 generations. Now, remembering and appreciating our ancestors is a very natural sentiment among most people. But at some point doesn't it come to resemble racist thinking? If I am proud because I'm a son of Jacob and Isaac and Abraham, how is that different from being proud because I'm white and not black? If I think that I would be doing the world a favor by having my sperm stored cryogenically so that my superior genetics can be passed on more widely, is that not a type of racist thinking? How about the concept of royal blood, nobility, inherited right to rule? There's a failed experiment we humans have repeated over and over in many societies.
Racism has at least two angles that I can think of. A traditional definition of racism is the belief that all members of a race share certain characteristics, either favorable or unfavorable. But another way of putting it is to estimate an individual person according to one's beliefs about the group to which he belongs. If I accord greater respect to one man because his whakapapa includes many famous chiefs and great warriors from past generations, rather than because of his own achievements, refinement, education, and personality, is that not racist thinking? In recent western society the ideal has been personal merit - - that opportunities should be open for all, but greater rewards will accrue to those who work harder, who are smarter, who are more capable, who make better choices, and (regrettably) who are lucky.
I suspect that anthropologists have a blind spot regarding a lot of this. Being academics, they are, of course, liberals and "progressives". (How's that for an example of racist generalization?) And yet tribal cultures are profoundly conservative and resistant to progress. Indigenous tribal neolithic peoples and cultures are the darlings of anthropologists, and they may not recognize how profoundly racist such cultures are. In a previous post I related the history of the 1835 genocidal massacre of the Moriori people of Chatham Island by a gang of New Zealand Maori. Both their behaviour and recorded comments after the event indicate that the Maori had no difficulty dehumanizing the Moriori in order to exterminate them like rats. I know that we English-speaking Europeans and Americans have our own atrocities to answer for. I bring up these issues with regard to the Maori simply to counter a tendency to idealize their past culture and traditional values.
Comments, rebuttals, and expansions are welcome.
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