From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Population growth and cultural destruction (Re: Nasty ...
Distribution: world
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 92 02:05:19 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1992Dec10.184439.8324@vexcel.com> dean@vexcel.com writes:

 > Such cultural mechanisms never get the opportunity to "stretch" to this
 > task because they are destroyed as part of the whole process.  It is
 > unclear, and certainly unproven, that they couldn't deal with the
 > population problems in cultures that are modernizing.  The paragraph
 > above implies that health care is the primary factor in population
 > growth in such societies.  I challenged this earlier and listed some
 > other factors that contribute to the problem.  If health care is just
 > one component of the problem, then the removal of other culturally
 > destructive practices that accompany "modernization" would certainly
 > help alleviate population problems.  

Well, I have to agree with Dean on the basis of Steinn's rigidly one-
dimensional theory that it is improved health care which has led to
population growth, which is so obtuse as to be meaningless. The facts
are that women everywhere had access to sophisticated cultural norms,
social organisation, sexual mores and knowledge of herbs and medicines
that they did not bother having so many children to start with.

There is simply no evidence from contemporary societies which can be
extrapolated back into the no-longer existent prehistoric societies by
any valid comparison with the wild chimpanzee infant mortality rates,
particularly given the overwhelming evidence on the positive effect of
social domination on family size among dominated peoples. Perhaps some
suggestion for the idea has arisen from the fact that the dominating
British Empire had practiced a high level of health care, but such a
model does not explain such massively increased family size among the
peoples dominated by societies with poor medical tradition, nor indeed
among those dominated by the British to whom British health care was
withheld.

It is relevant hat it was the British who also invented evolutionary
theory, which arose exclusively among the wealthy landed dilettanti of
the Midlands who pursued the natural sciences as a hobby and pastime,
rather than as a economic or national priority requiring the pursuit
of facts and reliable analysis.

But I also have problems with Dean's notion of "culture" which serves
no more purpose in this thread than to fuel Steinn's replies.

Dean, the processes taking place are of *social* destructiveness, not
cultural; that is, the stresses placed on a group make reasonable and
coherent *association* among them difficult, and the first thing that
happens is that people start drifting apart in their efforts to have
their increasingly primary needs met.

I have argued with you before that cultures are sticky in the extreme
and almost impossible to destroy until the *whole* society is either
wiped out or completely indoctrinated over a period at least exceeding
five full generations. All you have to do is overlook one old granny
who has passed her cultural forms on to her daughter, who passes them
on to her daughter in turn, in order for the whole society to actively
reconstitute their entire culture within only *one* generation of their
renewed association.

To destroy a culture, that is, either every single individual must be
killed, or every single individual must be imprisonned separately and
subjected to *total* indoctrination in a sustained program carried out
over about 150 years. No dominant society has ever achieved that; quite
to the contrary such efforts are known to create such a global outcry
of revulsion that the actual effect is to strengthen and invigorate the
culture instead. The Jewish peoples represent the classic example.

Even the burning of 9 million witches over three hundred years during
the Dark Ages failed to wipe out witchcraft.

--
Gil Hardwick                          Internet:  gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                  Fidonet:  3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                         Voice:  (+61 9) 399 2401
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