Down to work! New Reality Books
Native Americans as a model for the future
“Here I stand. Luther once said. Today the world stands still because of Protestant industriousness. In order to get them to work again, other social models are needed, which humanity has tried abundantly throughout history.
Publication date: 08/02/2022 at 06:00
|
Updated: 02/05/2022 at 12:57 PM
Dr. read it. Elephant. Daniel Arnett
“The great wisdom of Bababalaji lies in these papers,” says South Sea President Toiafe of El-Bayed newspapers after he returned to his island of Tuvia from a trip to Europe. “The Papalagi” was a popular book when I was young, because the green movement of the late ’70s saw a real revival of the naive view of wild Western values. The German Erich Schuermann (1878-1957) first published Invented Speeches in 1920.
“The true origin of the Western perspective lies in the European images of those imaginative and skeptical Aboriginals who aspire to Europe’s curious curiosity,” not in reports of European travels to Aboriginal peoples. This is what the American anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020) and British archaeologist David Wingro (49) wrote in their monumental work The Beginnings, which has just been published in German.
With their book of nearly 700 pages, the two want to write at least a “new history of mankind,” as the subtitle says. Until now it was assumed that our end as hunters and hunters and the beginning of agriculture was the decisive advance of human civilization. Graeber and Wingro responded that this was “simply not true”, “related to dire political consequences” and “responsible for the appearance of the past being too boring”.
They are convinced that the so-called savages, as hunters and hunters, have contributed some important chapters in Homo sapiens’ 200,000-year history – only they were lost or the educated European class simply wrote them down. Graeber and Wengrow: “Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was one of the few anthropologists who took seriously the idea in the mid-20th century that early humans were our intellectual equal.”
Anarchist Graeber (“Debt: The First 5,000 Years”, “Job Bullshit”) and his colleague Wingro advocate learning alternative models of social coexistence from indigenous peoples, rather than “replacing our inherently miserable condition with a little tinkering to improve it”. . Because the current situation in the world shaped by Western Christian thinking requires rethinking and an open perspective without blurring – otherwise humanity will be destroyed.
Graeber and Wingro describe what a different worldview might look like, based on other things, on a meeting between French priest Pierre Bayard (1567-1622) and Canadian Mikmack in what is now Nova Scotia. The priest was upset because the natives considered themselves richer than the French. “Although the French had more material possessions, the macaques had other, more important goods: convenience, comfort, and time.”
David Graeber, David Wingro, “Beginnings – A New History of Mankind”, Klit-Kota
“Explorer. Communicator. Music geek. Web buff. Social media nerd. Food fanatic.”
More Stories
Turtle Nesting Sites and Climate Change: A Growing Concern
NightCafe Review and Tutorial (October 2024)
Report: The Menendez brothers may be released from prison before Christmas