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Overview
“This book should serve as a ‘wake-up’ call to people everywhere.”—Library Journal
In Indian Givers and Native Roots, renowned anthropologist Jack Weatherford explored the clash between Native American and European cultures. Now, in Savages and Civilization, Weatherford broadens his focus to examine how civilization threatens to obliterate unique tribal and ethnic cultures around the world—and in the process imperils its own existence.
As Weatherford explains, the relationship between “civilized” and “savage” peoples through history has encompassed not only violence, but also a surprising degree of cooperation, mutual influence, trade, and intermarriage. But this relationship has now entered a critical stage everywhere in the world, as indigenous peoples fiercely resist the onslaught of a global civilization that will obliterate their identities.
Savages and Civilization powerfully demonstrates that our survival as a species is based not on a choice between savages and civilization, but rather on a commitment to their vital coexistence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307755469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2010 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 310 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
The End of the Modern World
You cannot have both civilization and truth ….
—IRIS MURDOCH
So many broken bones littered the Tibetan field of the dead that I had to dismount from my bicycle to avoid puncturing a tire on one of the sharp, splintered ends sticking up from the dirt and rocks. All around me, strips of worn and faded cloth scattered across the ground in the light breeze; they fluttered like miniature prayer flags from bushes or lay wadded in inert lumps among the rocks. In every direction I saw the broken and shattered remains of human bones that one could barely identify—femur, tibia, rib, and occasionally a smashed skull or jawbone with a few teeth intact.
As I picked my way carefully across the field, I headed for the source of the broken bones and teeth; I moved toward a distant rock that served as the butchering platform where special mourners cut up the corpses and fed the bloody scraps to birds that circled overhead in great numbers. Walking closer to the skyburial site, I could not avoid the thick, sour odor of death. As I started to climb the rock, I strained to find a firm hold for my hands and feet. Despite the worn grooves for hand- and toeholds in the rock, the boulders had a slippery coating of body fat and other liquids that had dripped from the platform for years and coated everything below it.
I found the sky-burial platform and the adjacent field of bones in the northern outskirts of Tibet’s capital city of Lhasa, less than a mile from the Sera Monastery, a major religious center founded at the base of Tatipu Hill in the fifteenth century. For nearly five centuries the Sera Monastery served as a Buddhist university with an unusual mission in a pacifist religion. The monastery trained a special corps of fighting monks whose martial-arts powers made them prized allies of many armies and political causes through the centuries.
The monks do not butcher the bodies of the dead; that task belongs to experienced “body breakers” or domdens. Working at dawn, they skin the body and dissect it, then hack it into pieces and crush the bones, which they mix with tsampa, the staple Tibetan flour made from roasted barley. The domdens then leave the chopped body parts for the hungry vultures, ravens, and kites that live around the field of bones and depend almost exclusively on human flesh for their diets.
Highland Tibet offers few possibilities for the disposal of the dead. Unlike their Hindu neighbors to the south, the Tibetans cannot cremate the dead because most of the country is well above the timberline, and what little wood it possesses has much more important uses. Unlike the Chinese, the Tibetans find it difficult to bury their dead in the ground, because much of the ground is frozen and filled with rocks that make digging extremely difficult.
Even though many traditional cultures around the world once exposed their dead to the elements or to animals, the butchering of the body and sky burial of the Tibetans is unique. Traditionally only wealthier Tibetans or important monks merited burial in a tomb that had to be cut from rock. Sometimes people disposed of the dead by throwing the bodies into the river, but the rivers proved too small, and the bodies floating in them interfered with the daily activities of drinking and bathing. Sky burial proved to be the most efficient way of disposing of the bodies without leaving them to rot or become mummified in the dry, cold wind of the mountains. Tibetans consider sky burial an honorable and generous way for the deceased to perform one more act of earthly good by feeding the birds.
The practice of sky burial over many centuries allowed the development of a sophisticated body of psychological and medical knowledge gleaned from the work of the domdens. Long before Western medicine had sufficient knowledge of the workings of the body, the Tibetans understood such complex phenomena as the operation of the circulatory system and the development of the embryo. This knowledge seems surprisingly akin to modern science in that Tibetans saw the human being as passing through stages as fish and reptiles before becoming human.
Sometimes monks used human bones for other purposes, such as a trumpet used in exorcism, made from the human thigh bone, or a small drum made from a human cranium. Even though these human artifacts had ritual and religious purposes, the monks who used them seemed well aware of their impact to inspire fear in a poorly educated nation of village peasants and nomadic tribes. The Chinese communist government later put these instruments to propaganda purposes and used them to justify their claim of having liberated the Tibetans from their harsh and unjustifiably cruel theocracy.
Religion and politics overlap and intertwine in most societies, but in the history of Tibet, religion and politics have traditionally been the same enterprise. Through the centuries, monks, lamas, and abbots ruled the mountainous nation and guided it through successive religious feuds, purges, revolts, and wars. In the twentieth century, religion has been a major flashpoint in the struggle between the Tibetans and their Chinese rulers.
Religious practices, particularly mortuary rites, have a strong emotional content in most cultures. What we do with our dead constitutes an integral part of our identity as members of a particular cultural and moral group. The act of sky burial became one way in which Tibetans could resist Chinese rule during recent decades. It became a means of emphasizing their Tibetan culture in the face of Chinese culture. Even when the Chinese authorities closed the monasteries, burned the sacred books, destroyed the statues and paintings, razed the buildings, killed the nuns and priests, and forced the people to wear uniformly drab clothes and even made them change their diets, the Tibetans did not surrender their way of disposing of the dead.
Sky burial became a point of great contention between the Tibetans and the Chinese government. The Chinese authorities disapproved of the practice, but, drawn by morbid curiosity, Chinese soldiers and administrators frequently came to watch the butchering of the dead. The Tibetans resented the Chinese for many reasons, but they particularly resented the intrusion on them during a time of grief. In 1985, as tensions mounted between the native Tibetans and the Han Chinese, repeated skirmishes and fights erupted at the sky-burial rituals. The small skirmishes finally resulted in a virtual riot when a large group of mourners raced down the incline from the sky-burial platform and attacked the Chinese by hurling sticks, stones, and, reportedly, even body parts at them.
At the sky-burial site, the Tibetans had reached a point at which they fought back against the Chinese-imposed government. The episode seemed to embolden the Tibetan people, and over the coming months they demonstrated openly in the city, and eventually provoked a series of major confrontations with the Chinese authorities. Fighting erupted in central Lhasa and around the monasteries, leading to another Chinese clamp-down and to yet additional restrictions on visitors to the area. Because of the tight communications embargo, no one knows how many Tibetans were killed or imprisoned during these episodes.
I had come to Tibet for only a few weeks at the end of a long journey, but I encountered there a raw cultural conflict of proportions that seemed out of place in the technologically sophisticated modern world. The Chinese had occupied Tibet since 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled to India amid fighting that, according to Chinese sources, killed 87,000 Tibetans; the Tibetans place the figure at more than one million. In the intervening decades since the 1959 revolt, the Chinese communist authorities had moved in millions of new administrators, settlers, and soldiers to solidify their hold on the mountainous land. Still, the people resisted the central Beijing government in small and large ways.
In the nervous young recruits of the People’s Liberation Army of China with their array of heavy weapons and armored vehicles, I saw the brute force of the state. Yet in the eyes of the old lamas, the pilgrims, and even the children strapped to their mothers’ backs, I saw the resistance of a people to that state, no matter how large its army or how great its power. I heard the same resistance in the creaking turn of the prayer wheels in front of the monasteries, and saw it in the massive embroidered thankas hanging over the monastery walls, displaying the sacred image of the Buddha. I saw it in the traditional clothes the women wore. I smelled it in the fresh juniper and the rancid butter burning in the temples, and I even tasted it in the salty Tibetan tea made with the same yak butter as that burned in the lamps.
The cultural conflicts that I saw so vividly displayed in Tibet challenged many of my notions about humans and their cultures. How did human groups become so different from one another? Why is there still such tremendous cultural variety in the world, and why does it persist? Are the cultural differences among humans around the world increasing or decreasing?
Compared to such animals as dogs or cats, which show tremendous physical variation, humans around the world show only minor differences in size, color, and features. Humans who live in cold climates have no more hair than people who live in hot climates, and humans run only a modest color variation from dark to light, with none of the vivid blues, purples, yellows, oranges, and greens characteristic of birds and fish. The male and female of the human species differ less than even some of our closest relatives, such as the baboons, in which species the male may be several times the size of the female.
With such marked homogeneity in physical form, it seems all the more surprising that humans vary so much in culture, language, and behavior. Compared with physical variation, cultural variety seems incredibly great. For example, some groups have a relatively unencumbered attitude toward sexuality, whereas for others it is a matter of death if a person has sexual contact with a person of a forbidden category or at a forbidden time in life. Some societies allow multiple spouses; others specify only one. Buddhists and Hindus believe that it is wrong to kill an animal for any reason, while the ancient Greeks and Jews believed that their gods wanted animals killed on the altar as the highest sacrifice humans could make to their deities.