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University of Cape TownFaculty of HumanitiesDepartment of Social Anthropology

VOICES AT THE FAR EDGE OF THE WORLD

Relations and Discourses of Power in the Erosion and Preservation of Endangered Indigenous Cultures

Student name: Matthew Wayne Schroeder

Student number: SCHMAT013

Course name: Ethnographic Problematiques

Course code: AXL5407S

Course convenor: Francis Nyamjoh

Due date: 04 November 2013

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Voices the Far Edge of the World


Matthew Schroeder

Photos: Phil

Borges

ABSTRACTHumanity today is facing a cultural crisis at a scale never witnessed in the history of our species.

We are living in a time where much of the intellectual, social and spiritual legacy of culture - borne

especially of indigenous peoples across the globe - is being severely eroded. Indigenous languages

are disappearing at an unprecedented pace. With language loss, unique visions of the world are

also lost. The extinction of language does not necessarily entail the wholesale extinction indigenous

cultures, yet it is the most salient indicator of the rate and magnitude of the reducing ethnosphere.

Are indigenous cultures destined to blend in with modernity – assimilated by inevitable globalization

– or should we be taking this crisis more seriously?

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Matthew Schroeder

Cultural change is inevitable. Endangered indigenous cultures – what I call fringe ethnoscapes –

like all cultures throughout history have always adapted and transformed, developing alternate geo-

social modes of relating, ways of thinking and being, as the world around them changes. But it is not

change or transformation that threatens the ethnosphere, it is power, the crude face of domination;

discourses and relations produced and perpetuated by governments, bureaucracies and

corporations. In the main, giant multi-national companies, wealthy banks and nation states – both

developed and developing - coalesce into global corpratocracies, expanding industrialization,

urbanization and modernization further and more intensely than ever before, presaging the

destruction and exploitation of the biosphere, and concurrently the threatening and transformation of

endangered indigenous cultures.

I argue that preserving endangered indigenous ethnoscapes – what has been referred to as

‘salvage anthropology’ - may serve to perpetuate commodification, museumification and

naturalization of cultural difference. Such cultural preservation may moreover play into the hands of

modern discourses on ‘progress’ and ‘multiculturalism’, which so often mask and legitimize the

exploitative, forceful agendas of global corporatocracies, bureaucracies and governments , the most

dominant agents of power at work in eroding not only the ethnosphere, but also the biosphere. The

crux of preserving the ethnosphere – and in particular fringe ethnoscapes – pivots on mitigating the

attendant aphorias, while attempting to protect and inspire valuing of the legacy of culture.

Key terms

Ethnosphere

As Wade Davis defines it, the ethnosphere is ‘’the full complexity and complement of human

potential as brought into being by culture and adaptation since the dawn of consciousness. This is

humankind’s greatest legacy, symbolizing all that we’ve achieved, and all that we can achieve as a

wildly creative species. It is the sum total of all thoughts, and dreams, intuitions and myths,

ambitions brought into being by human consciousness. An organizing principle under which we can

begin to think of the human legacy in different ways’’ (2001:4-5). What Davis also refers to as ‘’the

topography of spirit’’ (2001:6).

Fringe ethnoscapes

The suffix ‘scape’ signifies ‘’transnational distributions of correlated elements whose display can be

represented as landscapes. For example, transnational arrangements of financial, technological,

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Matthew Schroeder

media and political resources can be seen, respectively as finace scapes, techoscapes,

mediascapes and ideoscapes’’. ‘’Ethno’’ refers to people, rather than strictly to ethnicity (Appadurai

1996).

For the purposes of this essay, this refers to societies – described as indigenous - that have been

described as endangered. Such peoples comprise some 5000 distinct geographic societies, totalling

around 350 million people worldwide (UNESCO 2012). They exist in remote regions like the

Amazon basin, Arctic circle, Saharan desert, and Polynesian archipelagos, but also in many

countries in the developing world. Half of the languages of these societies are threatened with

imminent extinction – within the next couple of generations - the places they call home infringed

upon, often completely transformed by governments and corporations, and their ways of life

compelled to negotiate stark changes (Davis 1999 & 2001; Borges 2010; Hume 1999; Miller 1993,

Pallamary 2001, Piddington 2001; Raibmon 2002, Tattersal 2001; Turin 1997; Schwartz 2001;

Wurm 1991).

Endangered languages

These refer to languages spoken by indigenous cultures, considered by UNESCO to be threatened

according to different bands of endangerment.

Safe: language is spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted

Vulnerable: Most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g.,

home)

Definitely endangered: children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home

Severely endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the

parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves

Critically endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the

language partially and infrequently.

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Figure 1: Overview of Vitality of the World’s Languages

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1.INTRODUCTION

Margaret Mead, the great

A Rendile elder enveloped in silence. One of the last speakers of an ancient tongue. Photo: Wade Davis

A hindu sadhu offering libations to the gods on the banks of the Ganges river. Photo: Phil Borges

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American anthropologist said that her greatest fear was that as we drift toward an increasingly amorphized generic worldview, not only would see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a narrower and narrower modality of thought, but that we would awake from a dream one day and have forgotten that there are even other possibilities (cited in Davis 2011).

This essay is inspired by research and explorations into ‘cultures at the far edge of the world’ by

anthropologists and adventurers Phil Borges, Mark Turin, Michael Pallamary and Keith Harrison,

and amongst them especially Wade Davis. As I read of ethnographies in exotic places, I became

increasingly interested in engaging with and attempting to get a grasp with radically alternate ways

of thinking and being, such as those brought into life by the myriad of indigenous societies around

the globe. What is it really like to think, as the Cogi of the Sierra Madre do, that it is their prayers

and thoughts alone that maintain the cosmic balance of the universe, and that all life exists to pay

homage to the Great Spirit? Or like the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, that time does not exist, no

reference is made to the past, the present or the future, there is only the eternal, experienced in the

dreamtime.

I aim to address the following questions:

1. What are the implications of language loss and transforming fringe ethnoscapes on the

shape of the ethnosphere in the contemporary world?

2. What levels and configurations of power are implicated both in the endangering – through

persuasion and force) and conservation (through archiving and protecting) fringe

ethnoscapes?

My focus is on the evaporating ethnosphere - endangered languages and fringe ethnoscapes - in

particular, and the politics and challenges of preserving the cultural diversity represented and

embodied by indigenous peoples in contemporary times. Am I advocating a revival of what has

been called ‘salvage anthropology’? Depending on how you would define ‘salvage anthropology’, in

some sense I probably am. Mead’s ominous fear strikes a chord in me, stirring engagement. This

ethic, although pervasive through its imperativeness, is not my central focus here. Why, how and

what anthropologists research must be as holistic and diverse as its ethnographic ambit strives

toward.

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Matthew Schroeder

I look at endangered cultures, and the ways in which they have and are negotiating changes

wrought by the spectre of modernity, and the domineering forces of frenetic urbanization and

capitalism. As the forces of globalization seep into contemporary indigenous societies – what I call

fringe ethnoscapes - their habituses (Bourdieu 1990) are changing, transforming, hybridizing, losing

and keeping aspects of their cultures, as well as absorbing aspects from other cultural heritages.

What also changes are worldviews, epistemes (Foucault 1970), and concomitant moralities. The

Penan, the Cogi, and the Ariaal alike all represent particular ways of viewing the world and living in

it and form part of the repertoire of culture that constitutes the ethnosphere.

I argue crucially that it is neither change nor transformation that threatens the ethnosphere, but

power, exerted by bureaucracies, banks, corporations and governments. Cultures around the world

have always been engaged in a dance with change compelled by new influences and interactions.

Rather, the issue pivots on the forceful irreverence with which these conglomerates of power are

asserting themselves; in the name of urbanization and modernity, and increasingly more often at the

expense of fringe ethnoscapes – endangered cultures – and the ecospheres they have called

‘home’ for thousands of years. Here, power is enacted through different relations and discourses.

Most significant and insidious are the discourses that the earth’s resources should be unremittingly

exploited to fuel western-style modernization – ‘progress’ -, and that the so-called ‘primitives’ of the

world - those behind the times – must inevitably join the ‘modern world’. These discourses at once

legitimize this march toward progress and control that typifies the west, the iron cage of capitalism

and monolithic industrialization and urbanization. Insidiuously, the spread of western modernity is

forcing the endangering of indigenous cultures, and thus the totality of the ethnosphere (Eli 2013:4).

Radically altering the lives of endangered societies, by turning rainforest into rubber plantations,

mountain valleys into dams and at the same time impinging on their land and lifestyle, is justified by

the promises of opportunity and comfort that market economies and western education might bring.

What this effectively means is that ways of life that have remained deeply rooted in tradition and in

topography for thousands of years, from the Arctic to Australasia, of the Inuit and the Aborigine, are

being (and have been) threatened by the onslaught on modernity. The issue is then whether to

assume that the endangering of indigenous cultures is an inevitable consequence of change and

civilizational progress, or to realize that it is something that needs to be seriously considered and

engaged with.

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As crucial as it is to protect, preserve and learn from the rich diversity of the ethnosphere, this

potentially perpetuates commodification, naturalization, patronization and museumification of

endangered ethnoscapes, indigenous cultures (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Baba 2002).

Preservation may moreover play into the hands of modern discourses on ‘progress’ and

‘multiculturalism’, so often masking the exploitative, forceful agendas of global corporations,

bureaucracies and wealthy nation states. The crux of preserving the ethnosphere – and in particular

endangered ethnoscapes – rests on mitigating the attendant aphorias, while attempting to protect

and inspire valuing of the legacy of culture.

A Jaguar Shaman of the Brazilian

Amazon. Ancient spiritual

practices of these seers of the

rainforest are under threat as their

homes are destroyed.

Photo: Wade Davis

A band of Kogi travel through

Andean alpine valleys on a

sacred pilgrimage to the Sierra

de Santa Marta, what they call

the ‘birthplace of the world’.

Photo: Wade Davis

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Figure 2: Geography of Endangered Languages

Figure 4: Endangered languages by degree of endangerment and by number of speakers (the y-axis represents number of languages, the x-axis the number of speakers)

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2. The Contemporary Crisis of Vanishing Languages and Endangered Cultures

Just to know, that in the Amazon, Jaguar Shaman still journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that the Buddhists in Tibet still pursue the breath of dharma, is to remember the central revelation of anthropology; the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality (Davis 2009:1).

Around the world it’s the same story but with different faces; age-old cultures besieged by modern

pressures. Worldwide some 350 million people, roughly 5% of the global population – constituting

some 5 000 societies (National Geographic 1999) - still retain a strong identity as members of an

indigenous culture, rooted in history and language and attached by myth and memory to a particular

place. Yet increasingly their unique visions and ways of life are being compromised in a whirlwind of

change.

In Brazil a gold rush brings disease to the Yanomami, killing a quarter of the population in a decade,

leaving many of the 8 500 survivors destitute. In Nigeria pollutants from the oil industry saturate the

delta of the Niger River, homeland of the Ogoni, impoverishing the once fertile soils. In Tibet 6 000

monuments and monasteries, ancient temples of wisdom and veneration, are reduced to riprap by

the Chinese (Davis 2011:43). Multinational corporations continue to extend their insatiable reach,

marginalizing indigenous societies and jeopardizing their ways of life through vectors such as

commercial agriculture and fishing, deforestation, mining, industrialization, amongst others.

These are not isolated events but rather elements of a global contemporary phenomenon – the

radical erosion of the ethnosphere - that will no doubt be remembered as one of the hallmarks of

this century, and indeed of the modern, industrial era. One of the central issues is whether

endangered cultures will be free to change on their own terms, adopting beneficial aspects of the

modern world while rejecting forceful intrusions and stark transformations that can only harm their

spirit and heritage, and in turn the anthology of human culture.

Anthropologists and linguists underscore the erosion of the ethnosphere by flagging the staggering

rate of language loss (Turin 2005; Borges 2006; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010). Today, just as plants

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and animals are disappearing in what biologists recognize as an unprecedented wave of extinction,

so too languages are dying at such a rate that they are leaving in their wake no descendants. Within

a generation or so nearly half of the world’s languages are predicted to be extinct (Davis 2009;

Harrison 2010). Of these languages on the brink of extinction, the majority of them are only orally

transmitted, some clinging to existence by a handful of last speakers each. Along with the dramatic

erosion of the biosphere, we are witnessing as a species the equally dramatic evaporation of

ethnosphere – the key indicator being language loss - at an unprecedented rate.

Of the world’s approximately 6000 languages, 43%, roughly 2500 are classified as endangered

(UNESCO 2012). Around 2000 of these are spoken by societies with less than 10 000 speakers

each – many with less than 1000 and hundreds with fewer than 100 - marking them as severely and

critically endangered (UNESCO 2012). Representing far more than just grammatical and lexical

structures, languages are snapshots into different worldviews (Harrison 2010), flashes of the human

spirit (Davis 2009), the vehicles through which culture comes into existence (Turin 1997). They are

not just a means of communication but symbolize the very fabric of cultural expressions (Pallamary

1999), the carriers of knowledge and belief about the natural and supernatural world (Borges 2011).

Language endangerment does not necessarily entail that peoples will not maintain aspects of their

culture; however in many cases what we are seeing is the beginning of a slippery slope towards

assimilation and acculturation and, in some sense, annihilation (Davis 2009;89).

As languages are lost, the repository of culture is swiftly slipping away, different ways of thinking

and being are disappearing, and so too does our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges

that confront us as a species. It is estimated that roughly every fortnight and elder dies and carries

with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue (Borges 2011; Davis 2011;

Harrison 2011). What this essentially means is that within a generation or two, we will be witnessing

the loss of half of humanity’s social, cultural and intellectual legacy (Turin 1997; Davis 2009;

Harrison 2010; Borges 2011). This legacy represents, as Davis puts it, ‘’the rich, complex

topography of the human spirit’’ (2009:6).

Here are some vitals on the status quo of contemporary language loss around the globe:

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Some 3,500 languages are kept alive by 0.25% of the world’s population.

About 97% of the world’s people speak about 4% of the world’s languages, and conversely,

about 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by 4% of the world’s people.

80% of the world’s population communicates with one of just eighty-three languages.

At least 50% of the world’s 6000 languages are losing speakers.

About 90% of the world’s languages may be replaced by dominant languages by the end of

the 21st century.

10 languages are the mother tongues of more than half of humanity.

There remain only 300 languages that have more than a million speakers each.

Over six hundred have fewer than a hundred speakers.

(UNESCO 2012)

What of the poetry, songs and knowledge encoded in other voices then, in endangered cultures that

are the guardians and custodians of 98.8% of the world’s linguistic diversity (Davis 2009:6)? MIT

linguist Ken Hale argues that ‘’when you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a

work of art’’ (Hale cited in Davis 2009). It is important to remember that whether a thousand people,

a hundred thousand people, or a million people speak a language, every language represents a

particular intellectual and spiritual lineage that goes back to the dawn of time (Harrison 2007).

The catastrophic loss of language of our times marks a watershed in the topography of cultural

diversity, of the ethnosphere of Earth. Not only are languages – to varying degrees - endangered,

mythologies, metaphysics, arts and ancient pharmaceutics – alternate ways of thinking and being –

are also threatened. Peoples throughout history have come into contact with other cultures,

threatened and influenced each other; yet never before have indigenous societies been more

endangered by foreign forces (Tattersall & Schwartz 2001). Cultures have evolved in response to

contact for thousands of years, but the pace is changing at an unprecedented rate.

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3. Ethnoscapes, Cultural Entropy and Evolution

Societies have undergone changes big and small since the dawn of humanity. Our species, homo

sapiens have existed for some 200 000 years, a mere moment in universal time. About 40 000 we

outlasted our distant cousins the Neanderthals and became the only human species on the planet,

setting off out of Africa around this time, a hegira that would spread our kind across the globe. Since

the end of the last ice age – some 10 000 years ago- the human population has increased from a

mere 10 million to over 7 billion today1. As an amazingly creative and curios species, the diversity of

cultural manifestations brought into being during this time is astonishing. And yet it is the victors –

the societal giants - that have written cultural history, powerful civilizations, empires and nations

from 3000 BC, shunting minority cultures to the margins of collective imagination.

It may be asked, ‘’what does it matter if these cultures fade away?’’ The answer is simple. When

asked the meaning of being human, the peoples of the world respond in thousands of different

voices. These voices are part of the overall repertoire of humanity; our cultural legacy and reservoir

for coping with the challenges that confront us. As we drift toward a more and more blandly

amorphous, generic world - as Margaret Mead feared - as cultures dissolve and disappear and life

becomes more uniform, we as a people and a species, and Earth itself, will become deeply

impoverished.

There is a tendency for those of us in dominant Western culturescapes to view traditional people—

even when we're sympathetic to their plight—as quaint and colourful, but reduced to the sidelines of

history, while the real world, which of course is our world, continues moving forward. These peoples

are seen as failed attempts at modernity, as if they're destined to fade away by some natural law, as

if they cannot cope with change. This is simply not true. Change is the one constant in history. All

societies in all times and in all places have constantly adapted to new possibilities of life. It is neither

change nor technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, but relations and discourses

of power (Turin 1997; Borges 2001; Davis 2001 & 2009; Harrison 2010).

We (Westerners) reflexively think of ourselves as the cutting edge of history. And if the measure of

success is technological wizardry, we would no doubt come out on top. But if the criteria shifted, for

example, to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable manner, in harmonious coexistence with

nature, the Western way of life would come up short. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history

of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the

1 http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_2.htm

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civilized, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement

that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited

(Turin 2005; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).

Consider for a moment how we might appear to someone looking at our culture from the outside.

One thing we often forget is the way in which the personal freedoms and social values we cherish

might appear to someone from another culture. We, for example, celebrate the individual at the

expense of family and community. We take this for granted, yet in most of the world the community

still prevails, for the destiny of the individual remains inextricably linked to the fate of the collective

(Davis 1995; Turin 1997). Thus, what we see as freedom may appear to another as chaos. The

rugged individualism and Protestant work ethic of the west are starkly contrasted to the harmonious

communitarian and egalitarian socio-scapes of many indigenous cultures (Appadurai 1996). Around

the world many indigenous groups have over centuries or millennia successfully sustained

economies in one particular place and ecosystem. The co-adaptation of people with other elements

of their ecological systems has meant that the integrity and functioning of these systems has been

sustained even as the communities' culture developed and changed historically (Berkes et al 1995).

Think for a moment about our social structure. An anthropologist looking at us from the outside

would see a culture that reveres marriage, yet allows half of its marriages to end in divorce; that

admires its elderly, yet permits grandparents to live with grandchildren in only 6 per of its

households; that loves its children yet embraces a slogan—24/7—that implies total devotion to the

workplace at the expense of family (Davis 2011).

Think about the manner in which we impact the natural world. Our technological sophistication and

wizardry is balanced by embracing an economic model of production and consumption that

compromises the life support systems of the planet. And as our machine-dominated world runs on,

we do little to curtail the industrial processes that are threatening to transform the very biochemistry

of the planet. This is not to say that such western modalities are wrong, but rather to suggest

humbly that our way of life, brilliant and inspired in so many ways, is by no means the pinnacle of

humanity's potential. It is merely one possibility. Endangered cultures represent other possibilities,

alternative ways of thinking and being. They are not failed attempts to be western, modern, or

techno-savvy capitalists; they are unique manifestations of human culture.

Typified by frenzied accumulation and consumption of mass-produced commercial goods and

played out by the precept that ‘money is power’, the domineering culture-scape of the west is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem

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Matthew Schroeder

overshadowing minority endangered cultures more pervasively and significantly than ever before,

legitimizing its geo-social command through its dominance and self-substantiating relations and

discourses of authority. In the erosion of the ethnosphere – most critically of fringe ethnoscapes -

politics of persuasion and force are enacted through powerful states and transnational corporations,

who are at the helm of the deforestation, industrialization, and urbanization that plague the

ethnosphere and the biosphere at the same time. For many indigenous groups, the advent of

globalization threatens the sustainability of their economies by making their land and knowledge

valuable targets as commodities in a globalized economy (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009).

Younger generations of Penan,

face inextricable changes -

some more stark than others -

as Borneo is transformed by

extensive deforestation and

industrialization.

Photos: Wade Davis & Keith

Harrison

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4. THE TOPOGRAPHY OF POWER

4.1 State and Corporate Power: Politics of Persuasion and Force

More than 5,000 distinct indigenous societies continue to exist today. The majority of these are

clustered in North America, South America, Africa, the Far East and Polynesia (Dietzsch 2009).

Most are eager to retain their ancestral lands, sovereignty, governance systems, and economic,

cultural, and spiritual practices (Miller 2007), if not separate, at least not threatened by the

rampages of commercial agriculture, industrialization and urbanization. Many indigenous peoples

around the world have for centuries - since the Portuguese Conquest of Cueta in 1415 - have been

impacted by the global reach of colonizing powers.

Yet all now face an ever more aggressive effort by global corporations, bureaucracies and

governments which seek access to the resources and lands that indigenous peoples have protected

for millennia, and on which they depend (Turin 2005; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011). The

Ainu of Hokkaido for instance, who fought for the armies of imperial Japan for a thousand years,

and over the last century have – under the hand of the Japanese government - lost the right to fish

in their rivers, been conscripted as forced labour, and even banned from speaking their own

language. A policy of extinction by assimilation. In Kenya, Canadian corporate Tiomin Resources,

the World Bank, and Kenyan government mining operations evict Digo and Kamba groups from

their homes, stripping ancestral lands of all vegetation, as logging industry and road construction

threaten their livelihoods2.

Notable among the impacts on indigenous societies are incursions mainly by global corporations;

exploiting forests, mineral and fossil fuel reserves, fish, wildlife, constructing dams, roads and

factories in the process and thus affecting the viability of the livelihoods of these people. The

development of giant infrastructures like pipelines, dams, waterways, ports, and roads bring

environmental damage to the lands where many indigenous peoples have lived for thousands of

years (Pallamary 1999; Miller 2007). Such vectors of power force displacement of native

populations to make way for large-scale commercial agriculture and widespread industrialization.

Most of such projects have been encouraged or financed by such institutions as the World Bank,

IMF, WTO, or by development banks and export credit agencies (UNESCO 2012). These

bureaucracies – in the name of and legitimized global trade and development interests - invariably

result in the forceful separation of indigenous peoples from control of their lands and resources.2 International Forum on Globalization, Indigenous Peoples’ Project.

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While indigenous peoples in all regions of the world live on lands and territories that contain a great

wealth of natural resources, they remain some of the most vulnerable people on earth due to

centuries of marginalization and discrimination, which has gained increasingly speed over the last

50 years (Tattersall and Schwartz 2001). Many of the as yet unexploited traditional lands of

indigenous peoples are viewed by governments and corporations as opportunities for economic

growth. However indigenous peoples’ special relationships with their lands – a fundamental element

of their cultural and physical survival – are often at odds with these interests. Indeed, the history of

relationships between indigenous peoples, governments and corporations is one fraught with

conflict and characterized by the exploitation and violation of fundamental freedoms and human

rights, including rights to lands, territories and resources (Ricoeur 2006; Miller 2007). What results

are commercial agriculture, biopiracy, cattle grounds, fisheries, mining, oil plants, road construction,

shipping, logging, militarization, nuclear sites, and pollution, all operating to severely impact

endangered indigenous peoples.

The Bayaka community in Central African Republic is destroyed by logging. The Dinka and Nuer in

Sudan see their lands taken over for oil reserves. The Wichí in Argentina face a major highway

through their territory. The Miskito of Nicaragua watch as gold mining ravages once pristine

rainforest. The last of the aborigine peoples witness tourism and road works on their ancestral

lands. The Jharkhand tribal peoples of Indian are displaced due to a massive megadam project.

Industrial plantations destroy tropical forests on which the Dayak people of Indonesia depend.

Large-scale coffee plantations and commercial agriculture evicts Montangards from their homeland

in Vietnam. Uranium mining and resulting toxic waste contaminates the ecosystem on which the

Dene and Cree in Canada rely. Overfishing jeopardizes survival of the Chukchi and Eskimo in

Russia. Mining on North American Indian lands, including the Western Shoshone, Quechan Nation,

Mohawk, and Zuni peoples, transform the landscape into a world of machines and smoke3.

Particularly serious challenges to indigenous peoples are then generated by mega-projects, such as

mining, oil, gas and timber extraction, monoculture plantations and dams. The impact of such

projects includes environmental damage to traditional lands in addition to loss of culture, traditional

knowledge and livelihoods, often resulting in conflict and forced displacement, further

marginalization, increased poverty and a decline in the health of indigenous peoples (UNESCO

2012).

3 International Forum on Globalization, Indigenous Peoples’ Project

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Indigenous peoples are on the cusp of the crisis in sustainable development (UNESCO 2012). Their

communities are concrete examples of sustainable societies, historically evolved in diverse

ecosystems. Today, they face the challenges of extinction or survival and renewal in a globalized

world (Miller 2007). Industrial and urban development and other processes of globalization and

modernization do not only entail and perpetuate the marginalization for indigenous peoples; these

vectors invariably constitute a multi-pronged threat to the very foundation of their existence and

livelihoods (Turin 1997; Davis 2001; Borges 2001. Indigenous people throughout the world sit on

the "frontlines" of modernity’s expansion; they occupy the last pristine places on earth, where

resources are still abundant, forests, minerals, water, and genetic diversity. All are ferociously

sought by global corporations, trying to push traditional societies off their lands ((Turin 2005; Davis

2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).

Recently, new advances in technology, the reorientation toward export-led development, and the

imperatives of expanding global financial markets are all driving forces in the extermination of

countless indigenous societies which stand in their way (Dietzche 2009; Harrison 2010). Traditional

sovereignty over hunting and gathering rights has been thrown into question (Davis 2009; Borges

2011) as national governments bind themselves to multi-billion dollar global economic contracts with

international corporations and bureaucracies, Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, the World Bank the IMF. New

trade and investment agreements, which are opening up previously inaccessible territory to

industrial extraction of natural resources, has forced indigenous peoples to defend their homelands

under an invasion of unprecedented rate and scale. Big dams, mines, pipelines, roads, energy

developments, military intrusions all threaten the lands of thousands of indigenous peoples

(UNESCO 2012). Global rules on the patenting of genetic resources via the WTO have made

possible the privatization of indigenous peoples’ genomes, the biological diversity upon which they

depend, and the very knowledge of how that biodiversity might be used commercially. National

governments making decisions on export development strategies or international trade and

investment rules do not consult native communities (Bateson 2004).

The reality remains that without rapid action, these native communities may be wiped out, taking

with them vast indigenous knowledge, rich culture and traditions, and any hope of preserving the

natural world, and a simpler, more holistic way of life for future generations. Humanity today is

facing a cultural crisis at a scale never witnessed in the history of our species. We are living in a

time where much of the intellectual, social and spiritual legacy of culture - borne especially of

indigenous peoples across the globe - is being severely eroded. Indigenous languages are

disappearing at an unprecedented pace.

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Cultural change is inevitable. Indigenous - like all cultures throughout history – have always adapted

and transformed, developing alternate geo-social modes of relating, ways of thinking and being, as

the world around them changes. But it is not change or transformation that threatens these peoples,

it is power, the crude face of domination; discourses and relations produced and perpetuated by

governments, bureaucracies and corporations. In the main, giant multi-national companies, wealthy

banks and nation states – both developed and developing - coalesce into global corpratocracies,

expanding industrialization, urbanization and modernization further and more intensely than ever

before, presaging the destruction and exploitation of the biosphere, and concurrently the threatening

and transformation of endangered indigenous cultures.

4.2 Anecdotes of Endangered, Indigenous Cultures

Fringe ethnoscapes – endangered indigenous peoples - represent different faces, caught within

borders, and in no-mans’ lands between borders (Gupta & Ferguson 1992), in many instances

tenuously holding on to the survival of their old ways. Here are some anecdotes of some of the

indigenous peoples documented by anthropologists engaged in such ethnography.

The Kogi

The Kogi are descendants of the

ancient Tairona civilization that once

carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain

of Colombia. In the wake of the

conquest and the madness that

ensued, these people retreated into

the peaks of the Sierra Nevada de

Santa Marta, a vast volcanic massif

that rises to 20,000 feet from the Caribbean coastal plain. In a blood-stained continent, these

people were never conquered (McFadden 2000).

To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood. The training for the priesthood is rather

astonishing. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of two or three,

sequestered in stone huts in a world of darkness and shadows for eighteen years (two nine-year

periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spent in their natural

mother’s womb) so that they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. During that entire

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time, they are indoctrinated in the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that

their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic or ecological balance. At the end of this

arduous initiation, they suddenly are let out by the priests, the mamas, and before first light,

suddenly, in that crystal moment of awareness of their first dawn, everything they have learned in

the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory as they see the sun rise over the flanks of the Sierra

Nevada. The priest sort of steps back and with his body language says, ‘’you see it is as beautiful

as I said, it is that wondrous, it is yours to protect as the elder brother’’ (Davis 2009;154).

The Kogi continue to symbolize resistance to the force and speed of modern change. They cling

determined to their old ways of life and cultural legacy, wary of the insidious, pervasive effects of the

extensive industrialization wrought by corporations, bureaucracies and governments.

The Penan

The Penan live in northern Borneo, at

the head of the rivers that flow away into

the South China Sea. The rivers are the

domain of the Dyak head hunters, who

traditionally preyed on the Penan. The

Penan themselves fled into the

hinterland they knew so well. Every

aspect of their life, through their

traditions and their generations, was

based on manipulation of the natural world around them. From childhood to old age, the forest

counted for everything. They depended on the forest for every single aspect of their material

wellbeing (Davis, McKenzie & Kennedy 1995).

Their houses could be built in a few hours, lived in for as long as a month, depending on the supply

of the various products of the forest itself. The wealth of the society is measured not in objects, but

rather in the strength of the relationships amongst people. These people are a totally non-literate

oral tradition, and what that means is that the total vocabulary of the entire language is

encapsulated in the vocabulary of the best storyteller. As they turn to the forest for inspiration, they

sadly today hear nothing but the sound of machinery (Davis, McKenzie & Kennedy 1995).

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In a single generation, the Penan homeland has been ravaged by the most egregious example of

deforestation in probably the history of the world (Davis, McKenzie & Kennedy 1995;12). In a single

generation, the Penan have seen their homeland penetrated by roads, their forests cut down, and

the appearance of acidic red soil that has polluted their rivers. They see the formerly crystal clear

rivers now polluted and silt- laden, carrying half of Sarawak away to the South China Sea, where

the Japanese tankers hang ominously on the horizon, ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped

from the forests of Borneo. Women in settlements serve itinerant loggers as prostitutes and

laundresses, many of whom were raised in the forest. Elders are forcibly brought to settlement

camps to live within structures they believe are carved from the bones of their spirits (Davis,

McKenzie & Kennedy 1995;32).

The Xikrin-Kayapó

The Xikrin live on the Bacaja

River, a tributary of the Xingu

River in the Brazilian Amazon.

Just a few miles from Poti-Krô

village, the Xingu will soon be

home to the third-larget dam in

the world, the Belo Monte.

Despite over 20 years of

indigenous, environmental, and local protest, Belo Monte is reaching peak construction this year,

threatening to displace roughly 20,000 people while it converts the power of the Xingu into 11,233

MW of electricity (Broges 2011).

The Loba

Mustang’s remote mountain

geography and political

autonomy insulated the area

from the cultural reforms that

impacted the rest of Tibet,

making it one of the last pockets

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of traditional Tibetan life left in the world. But all of that is about to change. Now, a brand-new

highway in the area has connected Mustang to the modernizing forces of China and lower Nepal for

the first time, bringing eagerly anticipated yet profoundly transformative change to the area. While

many Loba celebrate the arrival of such modern conveniences as electricity and Western hospitals,

many locals also fear that the “old ways” will be lost (Turin 2005).

The Nomadic Herders of Mongolia Mongolia is on the fast track for

change, with some of the world’s

largest reserves in coal, copper, and

gold, the country is quickly becoming

one of the fastest growing economies

in the world. But will this change

affect everyone positively, and what will be its effect on Mongolian culture? Mongolian pastoral

herders make up one of the world’s last remaining nomadic cultures. For millennia they have lived

on the steppes, grazing their livestock on the lush grasslands. But today, their traditional way of life

is at risk on multiple fronts. Alongside this rapidly changing economic landscape, climate change

and desertification are also threatening nomadic life, killing both herds and grazing land. Due to

severe winters and poor pasture, many thousands of herders have traded in their centuries-old way

of life for employment in mining towns and urban areas. The ger (yurt) camps that ring the capital

city, Ulaanbaatar, house a permanent population of displaced nomads. There, they live without

running water or a tangible use for the skills and crafts that were practiced on the steppes. The

younger generation is no longer learning these essential aspects of their nomadic heritage (Harrison

2007).

4.2 Preserving Endangered, Indigenous Cultures

Vanishing cultures must be seen not as anachronistic, as behind the times, but in time, and need to

be understood as being situated within the homogenizing currents of modernity (Raibmon

2002:189). ‘’These cultures do not represent failed attempts at modernity, marginal peoples who

somehow missed the technological train to the future’’, rather, ‘’they are alternative visions of life,

birth, death, and creation itself (Davis 2001:173)…‘’they are unique expressions of the human

imagination and heart (2009:19). Endangered indigenous cultures ‘’are not threatened because they

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cannot adapt to modernity, but because the political and economic configurations of global

capitalism deny them control over the degree and pace of change in their lives’’ (Raibmon

2002:194). As Davis writes, ‘’It is not change that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, it is

power, the crude face of domination (Davis 2001:105), and totalizing ideologies and the denial of

human rights (Pinker cited in Davis 2009:16).

Such ethnographers challenge the teleological notions of progress, intending to remind us that

modernity facilitates and produces very particular ways of living in the world, whilst hindering, if not

actually foreclosing others (Davis 2001; Hume 2001; Piddington 2001; Turin 2005; Borges 2011).

The importance of studying vanishing cultures is that they teach us that there are other possibilities,

other ways of thinking, other ways of interacting with and living on earth (Turin 1997; Swartz &

Tattersall 2001; Davis 2009). Will the cultures that these authors have documented fade away

completely? Raibmon argues that this issue cannot be addressed if we admit that the loss of

cultural diversity is a regrettable, but inevitable side-effect of modernity, nor via attempts to preserve

these cultures separate from modernity (2002:152).

Genocide, physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned. Yet ethnocide, the

destruction of a people’s way of life, is not only not condemned; in many parts of the world, it is

encouraged and advocated as appropriate policy. Very often the consequence of development

thrusts, industrialization and modernization have the effect of tearing indigenous peoples from their

past, either through coercion or in many cases on their own volition, seduced by the allure of the

modern and persuaded by relations of power and wealth. Torn from the past, these societies are

propelled into uncertain futures, often in very insecure places on the lowest of socio-economic

ladders, lacking political and financial capital to control their lives. Such peoples – on the far edge of

their worlds – inevitably wake up to the realization that there historical life-worlds have been

transformed forever. The issue of how to preserve these peoples thus enters into the conversation.

Whether or not such engagement is within the ambit of anthropology is debatable and subjectively

justifiable. A more critical question might however be asked; ‘’what is at stake in preserving

indigenous cultures in the face of inevitable development?’’ This is a weighty issue, deserving deep

engagement, and could constitute a sequel to this essay. Preserving endangered indigenous

ethnoscapes – what has been referred to as ‘salvage anthropology’ - may serve to perpetuate

commodification, museumification and naturalization of cultural difference. Such cultural

preservation may moreover play into the hands of modern discourses on ‘progress’ and

‘multiculturalism’, which so often mask and legitimize the exploitative, forceful agendas of global

corporatocracies, bureaucracies and governments. The crux of preserving the ethnosphere – and in

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particular fringe ethnoscapes – pivots on mitigating the attendant aphorias, while attempting to

protect and inspire valuing of the legacy of culture.

Endangerered indigenous societies should not be kept intact like museum pieces or archived in

lengthy volumes on dusty shelves or seldom visited websites. These societies are perfectly capable

of changing. The issue is not about us seeing what should happen to them. Such an assumption

underscores discourses around cultural preservation, yet the issue is far subtler. Rather we should

consider what we as a species need to do to find a way to move to a truly multicultural, pluralistic,

convivial world where the spread of beneficial technology - whether it's medicine or the Internet -

need not imply the erosion of the cultural diversity of the ethnosphere.

If we think about it, all of these questions are predicated on the assumption that indigenous peoples

want to be western. Many of the younger generations may in fact want this, but this is once again an

effect of relations and discourses of power (Davis, Mkenzie & Kennedy 1995). Elder generations,

the custodians of culture as passed down through millennia, in many instances still cling to their old

ways of thinking and being. They recognize that as the forces of industrialization, urbanization and

modernity at large increasingly impinge on their culturescapes, the very legacy of their cultures are

threatened (Borges 2011; Eli 2013).

In the end however, it is not change that should be feared, but the inability of individuals and

cultures to deal with change. Change, in fact, is the only constant. Indigenous societies only

disappear when they are overwhelmed by forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to (Turin

2005; Davis 2009). The key idea is to allow endangered indigenous peoples to have ways to

maintain their livelihoods, craft their own life-worlds and to make their own choices, without being

threatened by powerful external forces that ostensibly neither value, nor attempt to protect their

culture (Turin 2005; Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).

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5.5.5.5.5.5.

CONCLUSION

I have tracked the decline and erosion of the ethnosphere, in particular fringe ethnoscapes –

endangered indigenous cultures – and argued that this degeneration portends steadily amorphized,

homogenized, monochromatic global culturescapes, in relation to ways of thinking (episteme) and

being (habitus), and the very fabric of the legacy of human culture. Every view of the world that

fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes the possibility of life (Tattersall & Schwartz

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2000; Turin 2005). Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world, but also of realms of the

cosmos, intuitions about spiritual, metaphysical realms (Dietzche 2009). This critically reduces our

cultural repertoire, the reservoir of human consciousness and creativity.

Is the wisdom of an elder any less important simply because he or she communicates to an

audience of one? Is the value of a people a simply a correlation of their numbers? No. To the

contrary, every culture and society is a vital branch and aspect of humanity, a repository of

knowledge and experience, and indeed a source of inspiration and promise for the future. More than

ever, gaining perspective of the crises that face endangered indigenous societies, and the

ethnosphere at large, is required. Such perspective proffer important insights into the diverse legacy

of human culture, the radical ways in which ethnoscapes are changing and transforming, and serve

to develop answers to the challenges that confront us in the 21st century.

History has not stopped; the processes of cultural change and transformation are more dynamic

today than ever, for better or worse. The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist

in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. Which

interpretations of the world prevail, as Nietzsche once said, are not products of truth, but of power.

And it is, as I have argued most crucially, relations and discourses of power, produced, enacted and

perpetuated by governments, bureaucracies and corporations. Giant multi-national companies,

wealthy banks and nation states – both developed and developing – continue to coalesce into

global corpratocracies, expanding industrialization, urbanization and modernization further and

more intensely than ever before, presaging the destruction and exploitation of the biosphere, and

concurrently the threatening and transformation of endangered indigenous cultures.

What will the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century be remembered for by future

generations? Will it be warfare and technological innovation? Or will it be remembered, as Davis

writes, ‘’as the era when we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the

massive destruction of both the biological and cultural diversity of this planet’’ (2011:45). At risk is a

vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written

language composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen,

midwives, poets, and saints — in short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression of the full

complexity and diversity of the human culture. Quelling this flame, this spreading inferno, and

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rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit as expressed by culture, is

among the central challenges of our times (Davis 2009; Harrison 2010; Borges 2011).

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