When viewing a film like Avatar, if you don’t immediately identify with the blue-skinned native Na’vi culture, you may feel like James Cameron is rubbing your face in the sins of the past. Especially since your only other choice is to identify with the vicious and greedy military and corporate white men trying to invade the Na’vi’s home. This of course brings up thoughts about the violent way in which North America was historically seized from its indigenous inhabitants; almost wiping out the natives, and leaving the survivors with serious difficulties.

But people don’t like to be reminded of their mistakes (or the mistakes of their culture), and the common reaction is to direct spite toward the film, or to Cameron, or to Hollywood in general. Kill the messenger (poor quality of the message notwithstanding).

This seems like a pretty useless response. As equally useless as the hand-wringing white guilt that the film seemingly inspires, and which this spite is supposed to protect the audience from.

Sure, historical mistakes were made that can’t be undone, and Avatar kind of hits you over the head with that. But the solution isn’t to look at the film and say “ah, that’s just crap” and search for another source of gratification. The solution is to actually do something about a problem which continues to this day. The colonization of native people never really ended—it’s still going on in many parts of the world, particularly the developing world. Experts estimate that within the lifetime of the current generation, most of these cultures will simply cease to exist.

We may not be able to do much about the past, but we can still do something in the present. We can put pressure on government and business, at home, and abroad, to protect native rights and land claims. We can listen to people like Wade Davis, who recently spoke about the plight of indigenous peoples around the world in the 2009 Massey Lectures (also see TVO video, here).

Let’s realize that indigenous ways of life are valuable and still have much to contribute to humanity, and they’re not just primitive curiosities to be swept aside in the name of progress—and that there is still time to take action, if we could only get over our jaded self-importance, stop criticizing a work of fiction, and stand up for real people right now.

If we can’t do that, then we really haven’t learned anything from history.

One of my most interesting teachers in university was anthropologist David Turner. After bringing convocation hall to order with a Didgeridoo, he and three other teachers began the first day of my first year anthropology class, describing the four branches of anthropological science (physical, linguistic, archaeology, and socio-cultural). Later that year, Turner taught the socio-cultural portion and I think for the first time in my life I realized that indigenous people really don’t think like us “civilized” folk at all. I mean, like night and day.  As someone who has been dissatisfied with the conventional thinking of Western Civilization all of his life—well, I took that realization to be a sign that there may, in fact, be some intelligent life still left on Earth.

I’ve copied what follows from Turner’s bio page on wikipedia to illustrate some fundamental differences between the Australian Aboriginal way of life, and our own. It bears repeating:

According to Turner, the Aborigines have developed several social mechanisms for ensuring social and environmental harmony that run quite contrary to conventional Western thinking. In particular, rather than formulate their society around notions of personal or national autonomy and property, they favour a philosophy of mutual dependence. It is this mutual dependence, or interdependence, which ensures peaceful coexistence.

This is no more explicit than in the Aboriginal practice of renunciation,which resembles reciprocal altruism but runs much deeper. Rather than reciprocal trading of resources, or sharing them by giving a portion of what one has to another, the Aborigines give everything of what they have to whoever needs it, as codified by the statement: “You have nothing, everything I have is yours; I have nothing, everything you have is mine.”[3]

Likewise, the Aborigines practice renunciation in their allocation of property. On Bickerton Island, each group of people within Aboriginal society lives within a defined region of land, and each region contains one major resource (such as fresh water or a particular type of food). Rather than having exclusive access to their region’s resource (as in conventional concepts of ownership), the group is instead forbidden to consume it. In the Aboriginal world, such resources exist only to be freely given to members of neighbouring groups. Again, this is a method which makes self-sufficiency impossible, ensuring that neighbours must rely on each other and work to make their relations cooperative and peaceful.[4]

However, it is important to realize that renunciation is not simply a concept or an economic theory, but a literal reenactment of creation as it is perceived by the Aborigines. For the Aborigines, physical and spiritual reality coexist, flowing in and out of each other in an endless process. Spiritual forms are always giving of themselves to make the world and the people in it. In such a world, it makes no sense to hold on to anything, because nothing is ever “yours” to begin with. So, an act of renunciation–even something as simple as giving food to a stranger who does not have any–is an action which reflects the fundamental nature of reality itself.

In Turner’s view, rather than simply failing to develop modern technologies, economics, and ways of living, at some point in their extensive history (upwards of 130,000 years), the Aborigines made a conscious decision to turn toward more socially and spiritually meaningful pursuits. They turned away from technology, and toward each other. In doing so they eliminated poverty, theft, social classes, and warfare, and lived in peace for possibly tens of thousands of years.

Compare that to the economic system that just failed because big businesses basically got too greedy. This whole notion of competition over scarce resources frames our worldview–resources only appear scarce because we compete for them… and as a result we are locked into this arms race of who can make more money the fastest, and we’re killing each other, and the planet, in the process. That’s life in the fast lane I guess, the rat race and all of that.

Don’t get me wrong—the Aborigines have their problems too, life isn’t perfect for them, and I’m not about to say we should all try to live exactly like them. But I think there’s plenty we can learn from their example. We can be a lot more sensible.

]]> http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/05/aboriginal-economics/feed/ 0