You can love people and still be honest about them. (You can also hate people and be honest about them.) For example, when my kids’ report cards come home, I don’t react in shock that they haven’t gotten 100% perfect scores and call up their teachers to demand to know what diabolical evil motivated them to lie about my darlings. Having paid at least occasional attention to my kids over the past few years, I already know their strengths and weaknesses–and I still love them.
I was recently conversing with a gay acquaintance who is convinced that mainstream Muslims are just fine with homosexuals. Only Muslim extremists are anti-gay folks, just like American extremists.
This is how to make EvolutionistX sputter in disbelief at your idiocy.
Then they asserted to say otherwise is racist.
Look. Let’s assume that you love Muslims. (And before anyone tries to resist the hypothetical, remember that there are about a billion people in the world who are Muslims and the vast majority of them think Islam is the bee’s knees, not to mention plenty of non-Muslims who’ve lived in Muslim countries and enjoyed the experience, or non-Muslims who have Muslim friends/family.)
You cannot simultaneously claim to love Muslims and profess ignorance of their values.
It’s not hard to figure out what Muslims believe; if you don’t like looking up poll statistics, you can just ask them. Muslims use the internet, too, and millions of them speak English.
In fact, this is true for pretty much everyone: if you want to know what they believe, just ask them. They will probably tell you. (Of course, if you have to ask what the mainstream view on homosexuality is in Saudi Arabia or Iran, I think you have forgotten how to think.)
To save us some time, I’ve already done this, and not only do “mainstream” Muslims disapprove of homosexuality, even “liberal” Muslims aren’t keen on the idea. But in case you don’t believe me, we have poll data:
Honestly, I suspect that if you told the average Muslim that you think most Muslims are okay with homosexuality, they’d get offended, in the same way that the average American would get offended if a Muslim said that mainstream Americans think pedophilia is moral. Saying things that are in direct contradiction of people’s deeply held moral convictions tends to get you that response.
In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, the final passage of the 2014 law against homosexuality — which makes same-sex relationships punishable by 14 years in prison and makes it a crime to organize or participate in any type of gay meeting — is widely regarded by both supporters and opponents of gay rights as a reaction to American pressure on Nigeria and other African nations to embrace gay rights.
Nigeria is about 60% Christian and 40% Muslim. I don’t think either group is keen on homosexuality.
Anti-gay sentiments are widespread across Africa. Same-sex relations remain illegal in most nations, the legacy of colonial laws that had been largely forgotten until the West’s push to repeal them in recent years.
Fierce opposition has come from African governments and private organizations, which accuse the United States of cultural imperialism. Pressing gay rights on an unwilling continent, they say, is the latest attempt by Western nations to impose their values on Africa.
“In the same way that we don’t try to impose our culture on anyone, we also expect that people should respect our culture in return,” said Theresa Okafor, a Nigerian active in lobbying against gay rights.
It’s sad how often people are genuinely surprised to discover that other people actually like their own cultures.
“Before, these people were leading their lives quietly, and nobody was paying any attention to them,” Ms. Iwuagwu said. “Before, a lot of people didn’t even have a clue there were something called gay people. But now they know and now they are outraged.”
One of the more amusing SJW-arguments is that white “liberals” aren’t actually liberal because they make every effort to insulate themselves, in real life, from black people. The immediate cause for this is obvious: black neighborhoods tend to have high crime and low property values. You don’t have to agree with SJWs or have any particular opinions to agree that 1. Whites tend to avoid black neighborhoods and know extremely little about black culture, and 2. black neighborhoods tend to be poor and high-crime.
If anything, it seems to me like whites have begun wearing their ignorance as a badge of pride, as insurance against the threat of being called “racist.” If you know nothing at all about a group of people and so never talk about their traits, then how can anyone call you racist? And better yet, when someone does say something about other groups, you can then, from your position of total ignorance, tell the other person that you are “deeply disturbed by [their] problematic and racist language” and stop the discussion.
Ignorance of others should be called what it is: ignorance.
Today we heap praises upon it and call it virtue.
To put things in slightly less politicized terms, modern conversation is like trying to talk about a local forest with someone who thinks that “forest” is a social construct. You say, “The forest is about 200 miles long and 100 miles wide,” and your interlocutor replies that you are ignorant, and furthermore, “This ‘forest’ consists of individual trees, which are found scattered across the entire country!”
There is no arguing with such people, and yet the temptation always remains.
I read something like Strawberry Girl, and I can’t help but suspect that 70 years ago, the average elementary-school aged child was expected to understand and handle concepts about human groups that today, graduates from our nation’s finest universities profess profound ignorance of. Lois Lenski can love the “Florida Crackers” and still speak honestly of their moral shortcomings and the aspects of their life that an outsider would not agree with. De Poncins loves the Eskimo and probably prefers their lifestyle to his, but he does not lie about their murder rate.
Even the humble Protestant parishioners of a century ago, who received lurid letters describing horrific cannibals and pleading for more money for their churchs’ missionary efforts, probably had a better general grasp of at least one chunk of the world than educated, urbanized moderns.
The devout Protestant of yesteryear believed a great many things that today’s atheists find absurd, such as anything about god. Indeed, a cynic might claim that requiring people to spout nonsense is a good way to separate out all but the true believers. But these articles of faith were focused primarily on the realm of the unprovable, a spiritual realm removed from Earth in time and space. When it came to daily life, these folks were practical and concrete, believing in the straightforward evidence provided by their own eyes.
Today’s devout believer is still required to spout nonsense, but about the very reality he passes through. His eyes are deemed liars; noticing patterns in peoples’ behavior is grounds for excommunication; racism is the new Original Sin. Like the virgin of yesteryear, he professes innocence.
But that spot will not out.
There is no god for the atheist to sacrifice to exculpate his guilt; no bleating goat to load with his sins and turn out into the wilderness.
The modern man must sacrifice himself, give his own–or his children’s–life to absolve the sin of Knowing.
Number two ought to be obvious, but for some reason people fail miserably at it. If the supply of something is infinite–or you operate as though it were–then you have no incentive to preserve it. You may simply keep using and using it. Obviously sunlight is “valuable” in the sense that you cannot live without it, but how much would you pay for it? Nothing, for it is infinitely available. Would you conserve sunlight? Of course not. But a scuba diver pays for air and conserves it carefully, for air beneath the waves is dear indeed.
That which people own, they care for. That which they do not own, they frequently destroy. Compare the state of an owned house to a rental to a squat. These are different kinds of ownership–a renter owns a right to live in a house for a while, though not forever; a squatter may be evicted at any time. A patent lets you develop an idea by guaranteeing you the profits from its sales; an employment contract entitle you to another person’s labor or the products of it.
Without ownership, people cannot invest resources. Would you plant crops on a piece of land that might get bulldozed tomorrow to put up an office building? Would you put up an office building if squatters might be allowed to turn it into apartments tomorrow?
I started thinking about all of this in the context of the Taino, Caribbean Indians who were wiped out by the Spaniards about 500 years ago.
(Hey, did you know that we are temporally closer to the American Revolution than the American Revolution was to Columbus?)
The Spaniards basically treated the Indians like an infinite resource: they’d send them into the fields without food or water and beat them if they stopped working until they dropped dead about 36 hours later. Then they’d send out the next batch of Indians, to work until they fell dead.
When they ran out of Indians, they started importing Africans.
The treatment of slaves in Africa look a lot like the treatment of the Taino, except that no one ran out of Africans. At the funeral of King Gezo, King of Dahomey, Africa, “his loving subjects manifested their sorrow by sacrificing eight hundred negroes to his memory.” Efunsetan Aniwura, a Nigerian chieftess, was praised in song:
“The woman, who instils fear in others,
the fearsome one, who slaughters slaves to celebrate Id-el-Kabir.
Efunsetan is one force, Ibadan is another.
The valiant that challenges the Almighty God,
if the most high does not answer her on time,
Efunsetan leaves the earth to go and meet him in Heaven…”
It cost money to bring African slaves to the Caribbean, so they were slightly scarcer than in Africa and treated, correspondingly, slightly better. Not a lot better, but better than the Taino.
Getting worked to death in the fields (or, if you got captured by the Aztecs, getting butchered for dinner), is obviously labor’s worst-case-scenario. This happens when you have:
No state to protect you, and
Skills that are in near infinite supply.
(Thus also the buffalo and the passenger pigeon.)
There is an extremely large supply of humans, whose lives are of infinitely greater value to themselves than to anyone else.
A functional state protects its people from harm; in return, the people owe the state their allegiance. A state that is not owned is worthless–the German people do not “own” their state any more, because they do not have the right to bar others from it–a people that is not protected by their state will soon be dead. (edited) Skilled workers demand better wages than unskilled ones, because fewer people can do their job. Work a skilled employee to death and you might not find a replacement.
Perhaps labor’s best-case-scenario is to have one’s educational expenses covered by a corporation (or society itself) in exchange for a number of years of service to that corporation (or society), in order to produce a small number of highly-skilled people who will be able to command high salaries and good living conditions. An exam or other qualification standards to ensure that inferior workers don’t dilute the profession also helps.
A company cannot afford to invest in training employees if it cannot guarantee a return on its investment–that is, some right of ownership on the employees future labor. Unskilled laborers have little of value to offer on their own in return for education, except the promise of their future labor.
Once the debt is paid, the laborer owns his labor, though he may continue his contract with his company if he so desires.
In the US, doctors and lawyers have it pretty good–well paid and hardly ever worked to death. Entrance to these professions is tightly restricted–only people who have received legal or medical degrees from accredited colleges and passed an exam on the subject are legally allowed to practice. Individuals bear the cost of their initial educations (usually funded based on the promise of future wages paid back to the banks,) but lawyers and doctors then endure many years of on-the-job training–fellowships and residency for doctors, “associate” status for lawyers. At the end of this apprenticeship, lawyers hope to become owners of the company–partners–and doctors, attending physicians.
Wages have stagnated in America since the 60s while owners’ share of profits has increased, most likely because the labor market itself has massively increased due to mass immigration and the entry of women into the workforce. One of the great ironies of our modern age is unions advocating for increased immigration.
Haʻamonga ʻa Maui, a stone trilithon on the Tongan island of Tongatapu.
Haʻamonga ʻa Maui was built in the early 1200s (the talk page says 1300s); each of its three slabs weighs at least 30-40 tons.
“Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through island South-East Asia – almost certainly starting out from Taiwan,[1] as tribes whose natives were thought to have previously arrived about from mainland South China about 8000 years ago – into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia. … In the mid-2nd millennium BC a distinctive culture appeared suddenly in north-west Melanesia, in the Bismarck Archipelago, the chain of islands forming a great arch from New Britain to the Admiralty Islands. This culture, known as Lapita, stands out in the Melanesian archeological record, with its large permanent villages on beach terraces along the coasts. … Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita culture spread 6000 km further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Tonga and Samoa.[2] In this region, the distinctive Polynesian culture developed. The Polynesians are then believed to have spread eastward from the Samoan Islands into the Marquesas, the Society Islands, the Hawaiian Islands and Easter Island; and south to New Zealand. The pattern of settlement also extended to the north of Samoa to the Tuvaluan atolls, with Tuvalu providing a stepping stone to migration into the Polynesian Outlier communities in Melanesia and Micronesia.[3][4][5]” (source) (bold mine)
Ahu Tongariki, Easter Island (source)Palindo, a megalith in Lore Lindu National Park, Indonesia
“Various archaeological studies have dated the carvings from between 3000 BC to 1300 AD.[4]”
Megalith being transported on Nias Island, Indonesia, circa 1915
“The story has it that it took 525 people three days to erect this stone in the village of Bawemataloeo. (P. Boomgaard, 2001)” (source)
Wikipedia claims that Nias is a popular surfing and tourist destination, but beware that, “… transport links on and to the island have become poor. Internally, the road system is in a very bad condition. Externally the air and ferry links are unreliable. There are two ferry terminals (Gunungsitoli and Teluk Dalam) and an airport (Binaka, near G. Sitoli[6]) on the island, serviced mainly from Sibolga and Medan respectively. However, local ferry companies regularly go out of business (or their boats sink), so only one terminal may be active at any given time. Since the 2005 earthquake, transportation has improved to cope with the increase in travel needs for reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts.”
A group of headhunters on the isle of Nias, now part of Indonesia, surrendering to the Dutch
Elsewhere in Indonesia, “Ritual cannibalism was well documented among pre-colonial Batak people, being performed in order to strengthen the eater’s tendi.[2] In particular, the blood, heart, palms and soles of the feet were seen as rich in tendi.”
Marco Polo claims, “They suffocate him. And when he is dead they have him cooked, and gather together all the dead man’s kin, and eat him. And I assure you they do suck the very bones till not a particle of marrow remains in them…And so they eat him up stump and rump. And when they have thus eaten him they collect his bones and put them in fine chests, and carry them away, and place them in caverns among the mountains where no beast nor other creature can get at them. And you must know also that if they take prisoner a man of another country, and he cannot pay a ransom in coin, they kill him and eat him straightway.[7]”
There’s some debate on just how much cannibalism the Batak were engaged in. “Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in the 1820s studied the Batak and their rituals and laws regarding the consumption of human flesh… Raffles stated that “It is usual for the people to eat their parents when too old to work,” and that for certain crimes a criminal would be eaten alive: “The flesh is eaten raw or grilled, with lime, salt and a little rice.”[11]”
But, “German physician and geographer Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn visited the Batak lands in 1840-41. Junghuhn says about cannibalism among the Batak (whom he called “Battaer”):
“People do the honest Battaer an injustice when it is said that they sell human flesh in the markets, and that they slaughter their old people as soon as they are unfit for work…They eat human flesh only in wartime, when they are enraged, and in a few legal instances.” “
“Oscar von Kessel visited Silindung in the 1840s and in 1844 was probably the first European to observe a Batak cannibalistic ritual in which a convicted adulterer was eaten alive. … von Kessel states that cannibalism was regarded by the Batak as a judicial act and its application was restricted to very narrowly defined infringements of the law including theft, adultery, spying or treason. Salt, red pepper and lemons had to be provided by the relatives of the victim as a sign that they accepted the verdict of the community and were not thinking of revenge.[14]”
“Prisoners of war are tied to a tree and beheaded at once; but the blood is carefully preserved for drinking, and sometimes made into a kind of pudding with boiled rice. The body is then distributed; the ears, the nose, and the soles of the feet are the exclusive property of the Rajah, who has besides a claim on other portions. The palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, the flesh of the head, and the heart and liver, are reckoned peculiar delicacies, and the flesh in general is roasted and eaten with salt. The Regents assured me, with a certain air of relish, that it was very good food, and that they had not the least objection to eat it. The women are not allowed to take part in these grand public dinners.”[15]
“Samuel Munson and Henry Lyman, American Baptist missionaries to the Batak, were cannibalized in 1834. … In 1890 the Dutch colonial government banned cannibalism in the regions under their control.[18] Rumors of Batak cannibalism survived into the early 20th century but it seems probable that the custom was rare after 1816, due partially to the influence of Islam.[19]”
Debating exactly how much cannibalism was going on seems to miss the big picture.
“Each monolith here memorializes a particular deceased person, although – since the standing stones are neither carved nor signed – the person’s name may be soon forgotten. The buildings in the background, at the base of the hill, were erected as temporary pavilions for the funeral celebrations; they may eventually be reused here, disassembled and re-erected nearby, kept up for tourist visits, or left to deteriorate, depending on local condition.” (source)
Carved stone burial site, with effigies of the deceased, Toraja
“In Toraja society, the funeral ritual is the most elaborate and expensive event. … The death feast of a nobleman is usually attended by thousands and lasts for several days. … The ceremony is often held weeks, months, or years after the death so that the deceased’s family can raise the significant funds needed to cover funeral expenses. … During the waiting period, the body of the deceased is wrapped in several layers of cloth and kept under the tongkonan. …
“Slaughtering tens of water buffalo and hundreds of pigs using a machete is the climax of the elaborate death feast, with dancing and music and young boys who catch spurting blood in long bamboo tubes. … As with the sacrifice of the buffalo and the pigs, the cockfight is considered sacred because it involves the spilling of blood on the earth. … it is common for at least 25 pairs of chickens to be set against each other in the context of the ceremony.
“… The wealthy are often buried in a stone grave carved out of a rocky cliff. The grave is usually expensive and takes a few months to complete. In some areas, a stone cave may be found that is large enough to accommodate a whole family. A wood-carved effigy, called Tau tau, is usually placed in the cave looking out over the land.[30] The coffin of a baby or child may be hung from ropes on a cliff face or from a tree. This hanging grave usually lasts for years, until the ropes rot and the coffin falls to the ground.
“In the ritual called Ma’Nene, that takes place each year in August, the bodies of the deceased are exhumed to be washed, groomed and dressed in new clothes.[31] The mummies are then walked around the village.[32]”
Indonesia has some nice looking temples, called Candi:
8th century Sewu Temple compound, IndonesiaBorobudur Temple, 9th centuryMap showing the locations of candis built during the Indonesian Classical PeriodPrambanan complex, 9th century
As far as I can gather–though this is somewhat iffy because some of the sources sounded speculative and some of them that seemed better weren’t in English, and I couldn’t figure out what language they were in in order to translate them, but anyway–Indonesia has an ancient tradition of building “step pyramids” out of rocks, which morphed over time into building these big candi stupas, with some Hindu and Buddhist influence along the way.
I haven’t found many good pics of the ancient sites; one supposed ancient site appears to be a bunch of naturally-occurring basalt that people might have moved around, but the Wikipedia page on it sounded so questionable, I opted not to include it. (Again, there was a page that looked better, but was not in English.)
The ruined city of Nan Madol, built in the ocean off the coast of Pohnpei island, MicronesiaMap of Nan Madol
“Understanding Law in Micronesia notes that The Federated States of Micronesia’s laws and legal institutions are “uninterestingly similar to [those of Western countries]”. However, it explains that “law in Micronesia is an extraordinary flux and flow of contrasting thought and meaning, inside and outside the legal system”.” …
“The people [of Micronesia] today form many ethnicities, but are all descended from and belong to the Micronesian culture. The Micronesian culture was one of the last native cultures of the region to develop. It developed from a mixture of Melanesians, Polynesians, and Filipinos. Because of this mixture of descent, many of the ethnicities of Micronesia feel closer to some groups in Melanesia, Polynesia or the Philippines. A good example of this are the Yapese who are related to Austronesian tribes in the Northern Philippines.[25] A 2011 survey found that 93.1% of Micronesian are Christians.[26]” (source)
“The islands of Bokonijien, Aerokojlol, and Nam were vaporized during nuclear tests that occurred there.”
Economy: “Additional money comes in from government grants, mostly from the United States, and the $150 million the US paid into a trust fund for reparations of residents of Bikini Atoll that had to move after nuclear testing.”
Apparently the radiation fallout affected some nearby islands, where a bunch of people got radiation poisoning and had to move. (Some Japanese fishermen, who hadn’t been warned about top-secret military testing, got killed by the blast.)
“Most residents of Micronesia can freely move to, and work within, the United States.”
“The roughly 3000 residents of the Federated States of Micronesia that reside in Kapingamarangi, nicknamed ‘Kapings’, are both one of the most remote and most difficult people to visit in Micronesia and the entire world. Their home atoll is almost a 1000-mile round trip to the nearest point of immigration check-in and check-out. There are no regular flights. The only way to legally visit is to first check-in, travel on a high-speed sailboat to the atoll, and then backtrack almost 500 miles. Owing to this difficulty, only a handful of the few sailors that travel across the Pacific will attempt to visit.”
Technically, both Bhutan and North Sentinel Island sound harder to get to (and North Korea?) but point taken.
I was wondering if Indonesians knew about Australia (it seems like they would have,) and it turns out that at least some of them did: “Fishing fleets began to visit the northern coasts of Australia from Makassar (formerly Ujung Pandang) in southern Sulawesi, from about 1720, but possibly earlier. While Campbell Macknight’s classic study of the Makassan trepang industry accepts the start of the industry as about 1720, with the earliest recorded trepang voyage made in 1751,[5] Regina Ganter of Griffith University notes a Sulawesi historian who suggests a commencement date for the industry of about 1640.[6] Ganter also notes that for some anthropologists, the extensive impact of the trepang industry on the Yolngu people suggests a longer period of contact. Arnhem land rock art, recorded by archaeologists in 2008, appears to provide further evidence of Makassan contact in the mid-1600s.[7]”
Luritja man, Australia, demonstrating a method of attacking with a boomerang (1920).
Prehistoric Australia is known primarily for its nomadic hunter-gatherers, but they did build some permanent or semi-permanent stone houses and other structures, eg:
The website Trans-Pacific Project wonders if Polynesians made contact (and trade) with the Americas:
Don’t forget possible Melanesian DNA in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest.
Rai stone, used as currency on the island of YapHawaiian multi-hulled boat
“On his first voyage of Pacific exploration Cook had the services of a Polynesian navigator, Tupaia, who drew a hand-drawn Chart of the islands within 2,000 miles (3,200 km) radius (to the north and west) of his home island of Ra’iatea. Tupaia had knowledge of 130 islands and named 74 on his Chart.[47] Tupaia had navigated from Ra’iatea in short voyages to 13 islands. He had not visited western Polynesia, as since his grandfather’s time the extent of voyaging by Raiateans has diminished to the islands of eastern Polynesia. His grandfather and father had passed to Tupaia the knowledge as to the location of the major islands of western Polynesia and the navigation information necessary to voyage to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga.” (source)
“Pottery art from Fijian towns shows that Fiji was settled before or around 3500 to 1000 BC, although the question of Pacific migration still lingers. It is believed that the Lapita people or the ancestors of the Polynesians settled the islands first but not much is known of what became of them after the Melanesians arrived…”
“Constant warfare and cannibalism between warring tribes were quite rampant and very much part of everyday [Fijian] life.[22] During the 19th century, Ratu Udre Udre is said to have consumed 872 people and to have made a pile of stones to record his achievement.[23] According to Deryck Scarr (“A Short History of Fiji”, 1984, page 3), “Ceremonial occasions saw freshly killed corpses piled up for eating. ‘Eat me!’ was a proper ritual greeting from a commoner to a chief.” Scarr also reported that the posts that supported the chief’s house or the priest’s temple would have sacrificed bodies buried underneath them, with the rationale that the spirit of the ritually sacrificed person would invoke the gods to help support the structure, and “men were sacrificed whenever posts had to be renewed” (Scarr, page 3). Also, when a new boat, or drua, was launched, if it was not hauled over men as rollers, crushing them to death, “it would not be expected to float long” (Scarr, page 19). Fijians today regard those times as “na gauna ni tevoro” (time of the devil). The ferocity of the cannibal lifestyle deterred European sailors from going near Fijian waters, giving Fiji the name Cannibal Isles; as a result, Fiji remained unknown to the rest of the world.[24]”
Remember, folks, whites are the most evil people to ever walk the face of the earth, and indigenous native peoples were all peaceful, non-violent matriarchists:
“The future of life on the planet depends on bringing the 500-year rampage of the white man to a halt. For five centuries his ever more destructive weaponry has become far too common. His widespread and better systems of exploiting other humans and nature dominate the globe. The time for replacing white supremacy with new values is now.”
What kind of non-white values ? Cannibalism? Burkas? Living without white technology like vaccines, antibiotics, and telephones?
“And just as some whites played a part in ending slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow segregation, and South African apartheid, there is surely a role whites can play in restraining other whites in this era.”
LOL what? Who, exactly, fought and died in the Civil War? A bunch of white people, you ass. Who put a stop to the slave trade in Africa? The English. (and probably the French, Dutch, etc.) Who stopped cannibalism throughout the world? Americans, Dutch, English, French, and missionaries from the world’s great religions–Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. (The influence of the last three on the bulk of Indonesia seems obvious enough.) Whites don’t have a monopoly on greatness, but the claim that whites have done nothing for the planet is not only ignorant bullshit, but displays a profound ignorance of and refusal to learn about the histories and cultures of the entire non-white part of the world.
Normally, SJWs might deem spouting astonishingly ignorant nonsense about non-whites “racist,” but so long as your ignorance is being used to attack whites, then obviously everything is peachy keen and you’re worthy of publication on a major liberal website.
The sunken continent of Zealandia
“Pre-European Māori had no distance weapons except for tao (spears)[14] and the introduction of the musket had an enormous impact on Māori warfare. Tribes with muskets would attack tribes without them, killing or enslaving many.[15] As a result, guns became very valuable and Māori would trade huge quantities of goods for a single musket. From 1805 to 1843 the Musket Wars raged until a new balance of power was achieved after most tribes had acquired muskets. In 1835, the peaceful Moriori of the Chatham Islands were attacked, enslaved, and nearly exterminated by mainland Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama Māori.[16] In the 1901 census, only 35 Moriori were recorded although the numbers subsequently increased.” (source)
Maori people
“During the Musket wars, it has been estimated that the total number of the Māori population dropped from about 100,000 in 1800 to between 50,000 and 80,000 at the end of the wars in 1843. The 1856–1857 census of Māori, which gives a figure of 56,049, suggests the lower number of around 50,000 is perhaps more accurate. … the Maori suffered high mortality rates for new Eurasian infectious diseases, such as influenza, smallpox and measles, which killed an unknown number of Māori: estimates vary between ten and fifty percent.” (source)
Model of fortified Maori town
“Initial contact between Māori and Europeans proved problematic, sometimes fatal, with several accounts of Europeans being cannibalised.[35] … In the Boyd Massacre in 1809, Māori took hostage and killed 66 members of the crew and passengers in apparent revenge for the captain’s whipping the son of a Māori chief. Given accounts of cannibalism in this attack, shipping companies and missionaries kept a distance and significantly reduced contact with the Māori for several years.” (source)
Traditional tattoos on a Filipino man, Bontoc people (why is “Filipino” spelled with an F?)
“Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather.[32]
“Harold Gatty suggested that long-distance Polynesian voyaging followed the seasonal paths of bird migrations. There are some references in their oral traditions to the flight of birds and some say that there were range marks onshore pointing to distant islands in line with the West Pacific Flyway. A voyage from Tahiti, the Tuamotus or the Cook Islands to New Zealand might have followed the migration of the long-tailed cuckoo (Eudynamys taitensis) just as the voyage from Tahiti to Hawaiʻi would coincide with the track of the Pacific golden plover (Pluvialis fulva) and the bristle-thighed curlew (Numenius tahitiensis). It is also believed that Polynesians employed shore-sighting birds as did many seafaring peoples. One theory is that they would have taken a frigatebird (Fregata) with them. These birds refuse to land on the water as their feathers will become waterlogged making it impossible to fly. When the voyagers thought they were close to land they may have released the bird, which would either fly towards land or else return to the canoe.
“It is likely that the Polynesians also used wave and swell formations to navigate. Many of the habitable areas of the Pacific Ocean are groups of islands (or atolls) in chains hundreds of kilometers long. Island chains have predictable effects on waves and on currents. Navigators who lived within a group of islands would learn the effect various islands had on their shape, direction, and motion and would have been able to correct their path in accordance with the changes they perceived. When they arrived in the vicinity of a chain of islands they were unfamiliar with, they may have been able to transfer their experience and deduce that they were nearing a group of islands. Once they had arrived fairly close to a destination island, they would have been able to pinpoint its location by sightings of land-based birds, certain cloud formations, as well as the reflections shallow water made on the undersides of clouds. It is thought that the Polynesian navigators may have measured the time it took to sail between islands in “canoe-days” or a similar type of expression.[32]”
“The first settlers of the Hawaiian Islands are thought to have sailed from the Marquesas Islands using Polynesian navigation methods.[34] To test this theory, the Hawaiian Polynesian Voyaging Society was established in 1973. The group built a replica of an ancient double-hulled canoe called the Hōkūle‘a, whose crew successfully navigated the Pacific Ocean from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti in 1976 without instruments. In 1980, a Hawaiian named Nainoa Thompson invented a new method of non instrument navigation (called the “modern Hawaiian wayfinding system”), enabling him to complete the voyage from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti and back. In 1987, a Māori named Matahi Whakataka (Greg Brightwell) and his mentor Francis Cowan sailed from Tahiti to Aotearoa without instruments.” (source)
I finished Kabloona, though I still have a few excerpts for you guys.
De Poncins does eventually discover that he feels warmer after eating the Eskimo’s food than after eating bread. It is really a pity that all those guys who died of scurvy on their ways to the poles did not know that.
Oh, and I think I may have figured out the mystery of why arctic peoples don’t have fur. De Poncins describes in one passage how his beard (which he could not shave while on the trail,) had become laden with ice in the -50 degree weather, and periodically the ice would crack and a chunk of beard would get ripped out of his face.
Polar bears handle fur just fine, but their noses jut out much further than ours; our exhalation goes directly down our faces.
Additionally, one of the constant concerns in the arctic is keeping properly dry. You get snowy, you go indoors to warm up, the snow melts, now you’re wet. Head back outside, and the wet freezes.
Bare skin probably dries faster than fur.
Anyway, back to our quotes:
A group of Eskimos were sitting in an igloo. Night had fallen, and they sat laughing and smoking after a good day of sealing. … the idea of a coming feast excited the men, and the pitch of their conversation rose and became playfully crude. At that moment the word was spoken. Not an insulting word, not a direct slap, but a word mockingly flung forth and therefore more painful, a word that made a man lose face before the others, that crippled him if he had no retort. One of the younger men had spoken. Encouraged by the laughter of the rest he hand gone further than he intended. Planted before an older man, who was lying back on the iglerk, [sofa made of snow] he said to him scornfully, “When you don’t miss a seal, you certainly strike him square. If we were all as accurate as you are, the clan would have to get along without eating.”
The old man’s blood rushed to his face, but except for a single flash of the eyes he remained impassive. He sat still, unable to reply. … He got up after a moment and slipped out of the igloo. His igloo. This made it more unbearable. …
He strode to the other end of the camp, and crawled into Akyak’s igloo. There, without a word, he sat down. Akyak was alone. She looked at him and wondered what the old man was doing in her igloo when he had guests at home. But she asked no questions. Causally, she picked up the teapot and poured him out a mug of tea. He drank it at a gulp, and then said suddenly:
“Inut-koak“–“I am an old man.”
Astonished, Akyak protested vaguely; but he was not listening. Already he was on his way out. …
The old man went sealing with the rest. But those words gnawed at him unbearably. … Bowed over his hole in the ice, he brooded. If he had been able to kill several seals in a row, he would have resumed his place as the great hunter of the clan, and it would have been his privilege to speak mockingly to the younger man. But fate was against him. He missed seal after seal. …
The day came when he would no longer sit with the rest in another Eskimo’s igloo. While they laughed and feasted, he remained at home, motionless on his iglerk, eyes shut, arms hanging loose, like a sick doll. He had stopped going with the others out on the ice. He was beginning to mutter to himself. He was forgetting to eat. His dogs would howl, and he would not so much as go out of doors to beat them.
…Still, the other would come to see him, whether out of curiosity or malice it is hard to say. They would find him sitting at his end of the iglerk, saying over and over to himself:
“Inut-koak“–“I am an old man.”
Some would try to cheer him up.
“Com, come!” they would say. “You have the best wife in the camp. There’s nobody like you with a woman.”
“Inut-koak!” he would repeat obstinately.
…He was not thinking, but brooding… There was only one way to be rid of it, and that was death. But whose death? His, or the young man’s?
It was going to be his, and he knew it. He was too old to kill. The thought invaded him, took possession of him, and as he never struggled against it, it undermined him. …
One day he made up his mind. It was evening, his family were there, and the old man spoke.
“Prepare the rope,” he said to his wife.
Nobody stirred. They were all like this, and it was true of all of them that once an Eskimo had made up his mind there was no dissuading him from his decision. Not a word was said. The dutiful wife came forward with a rope made of seal. A noose made in it never slips. …
In the igloo the old man fashioned a running noose. With a single jerk the thing was done. Seated on the edge of the iglerk, his face bent down to the ground, he had strangled himself, and his body lay slack. No one would touch it. they would leave it as it was, and strike camp to escape the evil spirit that had possessed this man. The next day they were gone and the igloos stood empty in the white expanse.
It was not that they did not care enough to stop him, but that they did not wish to impose upon his freedom to do as he wished.
Going into the other igloo on the second day, I found on the ground a doll. It was a thing that might have been made not only for a child, but by a child–shapeless, covered in caribou hide, shining with fat like the Eskimos themselves, and pigeon-toed as their women invariably are. Tufts of musk-ox fur had been stuck either side of the head to simulate human hair. The thing had no form, was crude, wretched, yet how expressive it was! … It filled me with pity, and with admiration, too, for if it spoke of wretched poverty, it spoke no less of stoicisim. …
On the spot I gave two plugs of tobacco for the doll, and instantly I became the idiot white man. For a bit of hide that the child would no longer play with, I had given two plugs of tobacco. I had hardly left them before they began hastily to manufacture bright new dolls, dressed in new skins. Surely the Kabloona would pay five or six plugs for the new dolls! They were in Algunerk’s igloo the next day before I was out of my sleeping-bag, and when, in triumph, they held up the new dolls, and I wrinkled my nose (the Eskimo sign for “no”), they grumbled angrily and withdrew, convinced now that the white man was surely mad.
After a very long journey, de Poncins finally managed to meet Father Henry:
I am going to say to you that a human being can live without complaint in an ice-house built for seals at a temperature of fifty-five degrees below zero, and you are going to doubt my word. Yet what I say is true, for this was how Father Henry lived; and when I say, “ice house for seals,” I am not using metaphorical language. … An Eskimo would not have lived in this hole. An igloo is a thousand times warmer, especially one built out on the sea over the water, warm beneath the coat of ice. I asked Father Henry why he lived thus. He said merely that it was more convenient, and pushed me ahead of him into his cavern. …
Compared with this hole, an igloo was a palace. From the door to the couch opposite measured four and one half feet. Two people could not stand comfortably here, and when Father Henry said Mass I used to kneel on the couch. “If you didn’t, you would be in my way,” was how he put it. … The couch was a rickety wooden surface supported in the middle by a strut, over which two caribou hides had been spread. On these three plank forming a slightly titled surface, Father Henry slept. …
Father Henry and I took to each other from the beignning. A seal ice-house bring people together moe quickly than a hotel room, and a good deal more intimately. Convesation in such a place is frank and honest, untrammelled by the reticences of society.
“I said to him one day:”Don’t you fidn this life too hard for you, living aline like this?”
“Oh, no,” he said; “I am really very happy here. my life is simple, iI have no wories, I have everything I need.” (He had nothing at all!) “Only ne thing preys on my mind now and then” it is–what will become of me when I am old?”
He said this with such an air of confessing a secret weakness that my heart swelled with sudden emotion, and I tried clumsily to comfort him.
“When you are old,” I said, “you will go back among the white men. You will be given a mission at Chesterfield, or at Churchill.”
“No, no, no!” he protested, “not that.”
From a conversation reported to our author about himself:
“Does he speak Eskimo?”
At this point, Father Henry said to me: “Observe the delicacy of these men. He might have said, ‘badly.’ Instead, in order not to hurt anyone, he said, ‘All that he has said to us, we have clearly understood’
De Poncins has managed to reach a group of Eskimo with almost no contact with the outside world:
As we moved from camp to camp, I was surprised everywhere by the spaciousness, I might almost have said the magnificence, of these igloos Their porches were invariably built to contain two good-sized niches, one for the dogs, the other for harness and equipment. In some camps I found again the communal architecture of which I had seen a deserted specimen on the trial–three igloos so built as to open into a central lobby. Each igloo housed two families, one at either side of the porch, and was lighted by two seal-oil lamps. I measured them and found they were twelve feet in diameter–so wide at the axis that the iglerk, which in the King William Land igloo fills three quarters of the interior, took up less than half the floor space. The seal-oil lamps, or more properly, vessels, were nearly three feet long. All this luxury was explained by the presence of seal in quantity, whereas round King, seal is, to say the least, not plentiful.
Back of each lamp, on a sort of platform of snow, lay the usual larder of the Eskimo rich in provisions, into which every visitor was free to put his knife and draw forth the chunk of seal or caribou or musk-ox that he preferred. …
What I was seeing here, few men had seen, and it was now to be seen almost nowhere else–a social existence a in olden days, a degree of prosperity and well-being contrasting markedly with the psueduo-civilized life of the western Eskimo and the pitiful, stunted, whining life of the King William clan with its wretched poverty , its tents made of coal-sacks, its snuffling, lackluster, and characterless men clad in rags’ that life like a dulled and smutted painting with only here and there a gleam to speak of what it had once been.
I figure one of the reasons anthropology has changed so much is that today, there’s a good chance your subjects will read your book, so you might not want to refer to your informants as pitiful, stunted, and whining.
… There were, however, some societies, like those in the Pacific, which developed in extreme geographical isolation, since less than one percent of the Pacific is land. For hundreds of years, the Pacific sat apart from the major trade routes and so the cross-fertilization of naviational ideas was limited. One result of this was that the unique navigation methods that were developed in the Pacific remain distinct and different to this day. –Tristan Gooley, The Natural Navigator
The Pacific is also the last (major) region of Earth to be settled. We figured out how to survive on the polar sea ice thousands of years before we figured out long-distance ocean navigation. Humans didn’t arrive in New Zealand until sometime around 1250-1300 AD, (which means they got to Hawaii and Easter Island–one of the mot geographically isolated places in the world–before New Zealand.) Or to put it another way, less time passed between the Maori settling New Zealand and Columbus arriving Cuba than between Columbus and the American Revolution. (This is even more remarkable when you consider that humans arrived in Australia 40-50,000 years ago.)
The short version of all of this, as we’ve been discussing, is that the Melanesians (who, as their name indicates, have a lot of melanin,) spread out along the southern coast of Asia following the Out-of-Africa event, settling in the Andaman Islands, modern Indonesia, PNG, and eventually Australia.
After that, they basically stopped. The distances between their islands and the next islands were too great for Melanesian technology, and the islands they had were probably pretty nice compared to taking their chances out in the open waves just to hope they might make landfall on some tiny speck hundreds or thousands of miles away.
About 32,000 years later, a group of Taiwanese folks (probably also descended from Melanesians,) developed some better boats and navigational technologies and set out to discover the Pacific.
Micronesian “stick chart” for mapping ocean swells and currents (National Geographic)
(Interestingly, they also went in the opposite direction, across the Indian ocean, and settled in Madagascar.) The Polynesians who eventually landed in New Zealand are among their descendants.
Getting to Indonesia does not seem to have posed much of a problem for ancient man, since Homo Erectus got there even before h. Sapiens, a good 1.5 million years ago. Lower sea levels probably made this easier than it would be today, by linking up a lot of the islands to the mainland.
(I believe Indonesia is actually located on a sinking magmatic “cool spot” that is essentially drawing the whole region downward, leaving only the tips of its mountains above water; southern Africa is located over a rising magmatic warm spot, lifting the crust in that area.) But the movements of large chunks of crust across the mantle are beyond our temporal scope; we just want to know what Indonesia, PNG, and Australia looked like during the Ice Ages:
Indonesia and Australia during the Ice Age
This still requires boats to cross, but it’s not too complicated a voyage. New Zealand, though, is right out. You’re not getting to New Zealand this way–the ocean currents are against you. I suspect it’s easier to get to NZ from the middle of the Pacific–as people actually did–than from Australia.
So I was reading the Iliad yesterday, (for the simple reason that I like the Iliad,) laughing over the section in book I where Hera and Zeus are bickering, and I thought, “I am so glad I have never had to write an English paper on this.” I am perfectly happy discussing a book, writing a review that I hope will help someone else decide if they want to read the book, or highlighting things that I think are particularly interesting about a book. But I hate English papers. You know what they say about explaining a joke; being forced to spend multiple pages explaining why I think Homer intends us to find the passage amusing kills the whole experience. (And then getting a curt note from the teacher to the effect that this is really not what she was looking for just adds insult to injury.) No one but my Greek prof ever wanted to hear that great literature was supposed to be funny.
Obviously my ability to read and write English lies somewhere above average but below extraordinary; sufficient, you might think, for the average English class.
I did not do well in English. Average, not well. I spent most of English class wondering why we had to destroy such nice books by writing such god-awful papers about them. No, I do not care about the symbolism of the color green in Jane Eyre; I do not care about the grand themes in the Scarlet Letter. There has always been a judgment rolled up in this, an indication that the way I experience and internalize and interpret novels is somehow incorrect, and the teacher’s version is the correct way to do it.
While there are better and worse ways to teach math, I accept that the math I did in highschool and college was “real math,” and that anyone faced with calculating when a plane going 500 miles an hour will get to Detroit will do much the same calculation as I did. To the extend that I use math in my adult life, it is generally performed exactly like I was taught to do it, or else I can figure it out based on what I have already learned.
But my adult understanding and use of English (and literature) has nothing at all to do with anything we were taught back in highschool English.
It’s tough coming up with a more solidly Southern lineage than mine–General Sherman’s troops literally burned down my great-great-great grandparent’s farm–and yet, I don’t actually know what “Southern Hospitality” is. This may just be a quirk of the people who raised me, who perhaps simply forgot to explain it to me, expecting me to pick up cultural values via osmosis instead.
At any rate, I started thinking more about Southern Hospitality after conversations with two friends–one a Southerner who has moved to Yankeedom, and the other a non-Southerner who recently sojourned through the South. The Southerner reports that the Yanks are rude, unfriendly, and decidedly lacking in Southern Hospitality. The non-Southerner reports that the Southerners they encountered were rude, unfriendly, and really not hospitable at all. Intrigued, I went searching online and discovered many similar accounts. Southerners swear up and down that “Southern Hospitality” is real and Northerners are rude; Northerners swear up and down that Southerners are fake-friendly, un-hospitable, and aggressive.
How could this be?
When faced with a conundrum like this, I find it useful to assume that both sides are truthfully reporting their impressions, at least as far as humans can, and then find a theory that fits both. In this case, obvious things that come to mind:
Different cultures define “hospitality” differently, and your own culture, of course, is the one doing it right
People don’t generally notice whether or not they are being hospitable to others, but they notice right away if people aren’t being hospitable to them, and this tends to only come up while traveling
Some people or places in the South are more hospitable than others
Southerners are more hospitable to some people than others
Southern hospitality is a phrase used in American English to describe the stereotype of residents of the Southern United States as particularly warm, sweet, and welcoming to visitors to their homes, or to the South in general.
Well, that wasn’t my experience growing up in the South. I found my classmates generally hostile and aggressive, and I don’t even know the names of the people who lived next door to us because they never said hello.
I have traveled (albeit quickly) through much of the country, including the South. From that perspective, few states really stand out (not counting geography,) except for Mississippi. No one smiled at us in the entire state of Mississippi. The one time random strangers stopped to help me out, I was in New England.
The friend who recently traveled through the South reported unfriendliness from strangers, lack of smiling, people staring at them, hostility, etc.
The Wikipedia quotes a very different perspective, from Jacob Abbott (1835):
[T]he hospitality of southerners is so profuse, that taverns are but poorly supported. A traveler, with the garb and the manners of a gentleman, finds a welcome at every door.
This reminds me of Soviet propaganda trying to convince people that American grocery stores had so much food because Americans couldn’t afford to buy food, and that Soviet grocery stores were empty because Soviet citizens were buying up all of the food.
As far as I know, the South was more sparsely populated than the North, especially before the advent of air conditioning, the full eradication of malaria, and anti-hookworm campaigns, and the like. The economy hasn’t been all that robust, either. Few well-off travelers in a sparsely populated area => not many inns, so a social norm of local hospitality for travelers may, without which any travel would be quite difficult, may have been the most sensible outcome. We see this in other areas where people must depend on each other due to lack or uncertainty of local resources–the Eskimo were traditionally so hospitable, a traveler might even enjoy the loan of a man’s wife for an evening. Muslims also pride themselves on hospitality; a friend who has traveled extensively in Muslim countries claims that folks there are extremely friendly and hospitable, (except for that unfortunate time terrorists blew up his hotel. And afterwards, the rescue workers were extremely apologetic and embarrassed that such a bad thing could happen to a guest in their country.)
I suspect that the desert, like the arctic, is particularly fraught with dangers and scarce of people, and so cultural norms popped up about helping strangers.
And [Abraham] lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, and said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant: let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree: And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said.
And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth. And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it. And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat. (Genesis 18:2-8)
Of course, directly after this story, these same visitors went to the city of Sodom, where they were treated most inhospitably by the mob. So Sodom, for its poor treatment of guests, was wiped from the map, while Abraham’s wife conceived her first child and he became father of a nation.
Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it.
Ezekiel 16:49
The most common defense I have seen of Southern hospitality is that it is a waning norm, not found in all areas of the South, and more common in the countryside than the city. This is a very reasonable defense (and would explain why I didn’t encounter it.) Cities are a relative novelty in the South, and have a lot of recently arrived migrants from other parts of the country, (who are therefore not culturally Southern,) and cities generally aren’t great places to be hospitable, just because they have too many people and too much crime.
Come to think of it, “stranger danger” was a big deal when I was a kid, so not only was I not raised to be hospitable to strangers, I was told that strangers would rape and murder you and to run away screaming if anyone tried to talk to me. Sure, it sounds paranoid now, but when I was little they found a dead kid in the dumpster at my apartment complex, so I think my parents were really doing the best they could.
Getting back to Jacob Abbott, note that he specifies that the traveler is a gentleman. He does not tell us what reception a black man or a poor farmer would receive. Southern society has traditionally been more hierarchical than Northern society, not just in the form of rigidly enforced class distinctions between aristocratic whites, poor whites, and blacks, but also in the relations between strangers and of children to their relatives.
Many Southerners, for example, report believing that children should not call relatives by their proper names, but by their familial position–eg, “Grandpa” instead of “Grandpa Joe” or just “Joe.” It is my impression that most children do this, but here the justification is that it is improper for children to use adults’ names. When my dad talks to me about something my mom has done, he doesn’t use her name, he calls her “mom,” because this is the only name I am supposed to call her by. I actually don’t know the names of some of my relatives because no one uses them with me.
(I know some Northerners who call their family members simply by their names, but I don’t know if that is a common thing in the North.)
Within this code of formality and class distinction, whether a Southerner calls someone “Sir” or “John” or “Mr. Smith” may (I am speculating) have great meaning, even if it means nothing at all to an outsider unfamiliar with the social norms. So a Southerner might in fact be acting “hospitably” in their mind by observing proper, polite social etiquette with a stranger (and yes, there is a problem with calling “etiquette” “hospitality” and expecting people to know what you mean, but inexactness of language is pretty common among humans,) and the stranger might not even notice, having no awareness of such distinctions of manners.
It’s like giving perfume to someone who can’t smell.
Ultimately, I suspect that “Southern Hospitality” may be inexactly named, because it primarily isn’t about hospitality per se, but about the conduct of relations between people, enforced perhaps among the middle to upper class, where folks (particularly strangers) at or above one’s social class are treated formally and deferentially. This includes hospitality norms, among other things, but does not necessarily mean that hospitality is extended to all classes of people or that it means what non-Southerners think of as hospitality.
I suspect that Southern “hospitality” did not traditionally extend to people lower class than oneself–Southern plantation owners were not opening their kitchens and bedrooms to every passing vagrant. Northerners who expect to be treated well regardless of their social class may find that they do not rate very highly on the Southern totem pole.
Northern society is supposed to be less hierarchical, (at least in theory,) and as a result, there are (I suspect) fewer socially observed norms of formality. (Business contexts may be different, though.)
And this explains why Southern Hospitality feels “fake” to Northerners. Northerners tend only to be overtly friendly toward people they actually regard as friends, while to Southerners, overt friendliness toward strangers (whom they may never be friends with,) is simple politeness. The politeness is genuine politeness, but it is not friendship, which Northerners mistake it for. When they discover that it really wasn’t friendship, they feel deceived. To the Southerners, of course, Northerners come across as ill-mannered and rude, due to their disregard of formalities.
Indeed, many of the things Southerners consider “normal” in the hospitality department are (I gather) considered rude or offensive in the North. For example, I think Northerners tend to expect their guests to stay at hotels, and Southerners expect to be put up in people’s houses. The Northerners believe it rude to inflict oneself overmuch onto another’s company and invade their home and disrupt their routine, while Southerners believe that being with others is a great joy and helping their relatives save money by opening up their homes is a moral good.
Which, of course, leads to both sides referring to the other as “rude.”
Set in the little-known backwoods region of Florida, [Strawberry Girl] is Birdie Boyer’s story; of how she and her fierce Cracker pride battled nature, animals, and feuding neighbors to become the best “strawberry girl” the backwoods ever knew.
I confess: I picked this one out of the used books bin for the obvious reason.
The newly-released, 60th anniversary edition has a different back blurb, which doesn’t mention “Crackers.” I don’t know if they censored the text, too.
Strawberry Girl is a middle grade novel–about right for a fourth or fifth grader, depending on their tolerance for dialect–along the lines of the Little House Series.
From the Forward:
Few people realize how new Florida is, or that, aside from the early Indian and Spanish settlements, Florida has grown up in the course of a single man’s lifetime. In the early 1900’s, the date of my story, Florida was still frontier country, with vast stretches of unexplored wilderness, woodland and swamp, and her towns were frontier towns thirty and forty years later than the same frontier period in the Middle West.
After the Seminole War, 1835-1842, Anglo-Saxons from the Carolinas, Georgia, and West Florida drifted south and took up land in the lake region of Florida. … Their descendants, in the second and third generation, were, in 1900 and the following decade, just prior to the coming of the automobile, living in a frontier community, with all its crudities, brutalities, and cruelties. The “Crackers” lived a primitive life, an endless battle went on–a conflict with nature, with wild life, and with their fellow man. …
Like their antecedents in the Carolina mountains, the Florida Crackers have preserved a flavorsome speech, rich in fine old English idiom–word, phrase and rhythm. Many old customs, folk songs, and superstitions have been handed down along with Anglo-Saxon purity of type, shown in their unusual beauty of physical feature, and along with their staunch integrity of character. …
My material has been gathered personally from the Crackers themselves, and from other Floridians who know and understand them. I have visited in Cracker homes. … All the characters in my book are imaginary, but practically all incidents used were told to me by people who had experienced them.
Assuming Mrs. Lenski is accurate, there’s a great deal of interesting material here. For starters, yes, apparently “Florida Crackers” are a real thing and not just a slur, and even have their own (small) Wikipedia page. (So do the “Georgia Crackers.”) According to Wikipedia:
By the 1760s the English, both at home and in the American colonies, applied the term “Cracker” to Scotch-Irish and English settlers of the remote southern back country, as noted in a passage from a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth: “I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.” The word was later associated with the cowboys of Georgia and Florida, many of them descendants of those early frontiersmen.[1]
There is some debate, it appears, over the word’s origin, whether from Shakespearean usage, “to crack a joke, to boast,” ie, people who were loud-mouth boasters, or from the sound of a whip cracking as the cowboys drove their cattle to market.
Today, of course, the term is much more likely to be used as a slur, eg, “creepy cracker.”
The Scotch-Irish are more commonly known as Appalachians. Lenski’s characterization of her informants as “Anglo-Saxons” is therefore perhaps not entirely true; indeed, her main character’s last name, Boyer, is most commonly French. (This is not an insurmountable issue–plenty of French Huguenots settled in the American South after getting kicked out of France, and had long intermarried with everyone else.)
“Purity of type” is a phrase one doesn’t hear much anymore.
My main regret about this novel is that it is told from the POV of the Boyers instead of the Slaters. The Boyers have just arrived in Florida from “Caroliny,” and their goal is to start a commercially viable farm growing oranges and strawberries, which they send by train to markets in other states. The Slaters have been in the state for 4 generations (since grandpa Slater fought in the Seminole Indian Wars,) and are subsistence ranchers. While the Boyers’ experiences are interesting, I understand the motivations of commercial farmers pretty well. I’d rather learn more about the Slaters’ POV–their lifestyle is far less common. Since the Slaters are the antagonists, they just come across as dumb/lazy/mean (though not all of them.)
The book’s principle dram revolves around conflict between the Boyers’ lifestyle–which requires fencing off the land, hard labor, and long-term planning–or the Slaters’ lifestyle–which involves hunting and occasionally rounding up freely-ranging hogs and cattle. The Boyers’ fences interfere with the Slaters’ hogs and cattle getting to food and water, and the Slaters’ hogs and cattle ate and trampled the Boyers’ crops. Before the Boyers showed up, the Slaters had few neighbors, and free-ranging livestock weren’t really a problem. So from the Slaters’ POV, they had a perfectly good system going before the Boyers had to go move in next door. (Or did they? What was the TFR for folks like the Slaters?)
I’d really like to know how common this pattern was–did many places get settled by, shall we say, wilder, more impulsive, violent folks (mostly Borderlands Scots and Scots-Irish?) who were willing to take their chances fighting Indians in untamed frontier areas and favored hunting, fishing, and ranching, and then once they’d done the hard work of “taming” these areas, did more English and German settlers fence everything off, start commercially profitable farms, and displace them? (A kind of gentrification of the frontier?)
You may have noticed Birdie’s bare feet on the cover; Lenski mentions bare feet often in the narrative, and the manure spread on the fields for fertilizer. This, as you know, is a recipe for hookworm infection–which 40% of Southern children suffered from.
Hookworm infections cause anemia, malnutrition, malnourishment, lethargy, and death. In fact, the Southern stereotype of lazy, pale, gaunt, and impoverished people–personified in the book by the Slaters–is due, in large part, to the effects of mass hookworm infection.
The book takes place around 1900 and the few years after. The first public hookworm eradication campaigns started in 1910, and there was another big campaign going on in Florida at the time the book was published. So I suspect hookworms were on the informants’ and author’s minds when describing their old lifestyles, in a “we didn’t know!” kind of way.
The book also depicts two older boys (teenagers) getting in a fight with the school master and beating the tar out of him. Interestingly, in the first chapter of Farmer Boy (in the Little House series,) Almanzo Wilder is worried about the older boys at his school beating the tar out of his teacher. (Farmer Boy is set in Upstate New York.) Was beating up the teacher some kind of regular thing?
As is typical for the time, there’s a Prohibition theme (technically, Prohibition never fully ended in parts of Appalachia,) with the grown ups clucking moralistically over the antagonist’s habit of spending all of his family’s money on alcohol and then going into alcohol-fueled rages.
Unfortunately, the ending is not very good–it basically feels like the author decided she was done writing and so the main antagonist spontaneously found Christ and decided to stop being lazy and mean, but this is an overlookable flaw in an otherwise good book.
Continuing a series of excerpts from Kabloona, an ethnography of the Eskimos published in 1941.
The homosexual Eskimo:
An apparition at the Post pulled me up one day with a shock of amazement. I am as well aware as the next man that sexual aberration knows no geography and no chronology, that inversion is a phenomenon observable in ancient as in modern times, in primitive as in civilized societies. Yet it was not in my thoughts that I should one day see a homosexual Eskimo; and if I put this man in my notebooks, and write about him now, it is not because of his aberration but because he was, in his repellant way, a singularly comic and glittering figure, at once loathsome and fascinating.
There was never such a master of pantomime as this infinitely strange, perpetually agitated, and yet extraordinarily self-possessed rogue who dropped in one afternoon from Back’s River and was off again the next day. He seemed to take it for granted that neither Gibson nor I would understand his speech, for immediately on coming in he began to display his talent as a mime, and he did it with obvious relish. He had no need of worse: face and hands sufficed him to paint for us his four days on the trail. He had run out of tea on the second day, and he wrote in sign language a poem of the brewing and drinking of his last cup. he had started with only a little coal-oil; and in a moment he was coxing the last drop of oil out of an invisible tin, aping marvelously–how he did it I do not know–the very tin itself, showing us with his hands what emptiness was. … Forgetting himself momentarily, he would speak rapid words, but his pantomime went faster than his words, and he would fasten his eyes on your face with the shrewdness and the childish self-satisfaction of an old actor, as if saying, “Don’t you admire the way I am doing this?”
Another thing: he looked exactly like portraits of Louis XIII’ and not only did I sketch him, but fearing that my drawing might be the fruit of my imagination, I photographed him, and it was Louis XIII to the life who stared at me from the negative. A narrow strip of beard that looked half natural and half makeup, ran down his chin, and he was either all curtsies and scrapings, bowing forward with rounded back to leer at you while his hands sent dismayingly over your person and he murmured over the beauty of your clothes, or he would straighten up abruptly, stick out his chest, and posture stiffly as if posing for his portrait.
Unfortunately, though several drawings and photographs made it into the book, this Louis XIII’s portrait did not. However, it is pretty easy to find portraits of the original Louis XIII:
Louis XIII by Franz Pourbour the Younger, 1620
You know, I can see the possible resemblance.
The WIkipedia notes some rumors on the subject of “Was Louis XIII gay?” and there’s some even weirder stuff on the talk page. I don’t know if this is some real connection, or if people just like to speculate that famous people might have been gay.
At any rate, it is a blow against the claim that homosexuality is unknown among hunter-gathers.
… To heighten the impression of inversion this man dragged along with him, behind him, a child whose features were no less astonishing than his own–a little Aiglon* with romantic locks brushed across his forehead and immense, incredibly ringed eyes that were a little melancholy and rather protuberant.
*According to Google, “Aiglon” is a private boarding school in Switzerland, so I take this as a French term for a school aged child?
What was this? Was it a girl, a boy? A boy, yes, said our Louis XIII, turning round to stroke the passive forehead’ and a very good trapper. He got two foxes the other day. The word “trapper” went very ill with the look of the boy, and I was sure the man was lying about his minion. As the evening wore on, and the child began to droop with sleep, he refused to allow the boy to go off to the igloo alone, explaining with inconceivable gestures that they always slept together (gesture of rocking the child to sleep in his arms) and saying that the boy was never able to go to sleep without him.
…The whole thing was beyond words disconcerting, and I aid to myself that next day, when thi man and the child had moved of over the sea, had vanished into the infinity of the North, I should be perfectly right to believe that the whole thing had been a dream.
It is interesting how our definition of “homosexual” has changed over time to no longer include “synonymous with pedophile.” I don’t know if this is because of a shift in the behavior of gay people, a shift in how people think of gay people, or a mere shift in the technical carving up of categories. The association with actors, however, remains.
The meeting of two worlds:
Trading at a Hudson’s Bay Post is a struggle in which two mentalities, the White and the Eskimo, meet and lock. In the end each is persuaded that he has won the match–the white man because in this barter he has got his “price,” and the Eskimo because he is convinced of having got something for nothing.
Your Eskimos turn up with sacks of foxes and signify that they want to trade. The trading is done at the Store, which stands some forty yards off from the Post proper. You lead them out, and as they troop over the snow there is a good deal of strangled laughter. What a great farce this is! Once again they are going to do the white man in the eye, and once again the white man is not going to know what has happened to him. All those wonderful things that fill the Store are to be theirs for a few foxes. What can the white man want with foxes? in the igloo, a fox-skin will do as a clout, but even to wipe things with, the ptarmigan makes a better rag It isn’t possible that the white man should have so many things that need wiping!
One by one, like Arab into a mosque, they file into the Store, wives and children at their heels. And though they have been inside before, each time that they see these treasures they stand stock still, silent, stunned. … To people for whom a rusted file is a treasure–Amundsent speaks of Eskimos traveling six hundred miles to get a few nails–this is the holy of hollies. They raise their heads and see fifty tea kettles hanging from the ceiling almost within reach. … The notion that thanks to a few tufts of frozen fur they are going to possess these gleaming treasures is too much for them. It sends them off into brief gusts of nervous laughter. And what an amazing being this white man is! Not only does he have all these pots and kettles that you see, but every year a new lot arrives. He must have, buried in his distant country, immense caches of pots and kettles. …
…when he leaves the Store, dragging behind him a wooden box filled with treasures, he senses vaguely that many of these shining objects are of no use to him. Oftener, however, it is simply that he no longer wants those things which, a moment ago, he was unable to resist. And then a second stage of trading begins–that between the natives themselves. And since in their eyes nothing possesses intrinsic value, but the value of an object is great or small accordingly as they desire or disdain it, a handsome dog-collar may be swapped for a clay pipe, or a half sack of flour for a red pencil. A needle thus becomes worth a whole fox, a worn strip of leather has the value of a lamp. And what is most curious is that no Eskimo will ever say to you that he has been had in a trade. It is not that his vanity forbids such a confession but that this can never occur to him. He wanted what he got in the trade; soon after, perhaps, he ceased to want it; but between the two his primitive intellect will not allow him to establish any relationship. Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to Eskimos. In the South Sea islands I have known natives to do sixty miles through the bush and across rives in order to trade for matches they furiously desired because the matches had red heads.
In the interests of fairness, I should note that de Poncins comes around to the necessity of the Eskimos’ ways and mentalities after a fair amount of exhausted traveling about on the ice himself. Much of what he says in the first half of the book is meant to show his own misconceptions. But continuing on with the subjects of trade and culture:
Everything about the Eskimo astonishes the white man, and everything about the white man is a subject of bewilderment to the Eskimo. Our least gesture seems to him pure madness, and our mot casual and insignificant act may have incalculable results for him. Let but a Post Manager say to an Eskimo, “here is a package of needles for your wife,” and he will have started … a train of questions and ruminations that may lead anywhere. The free gift is unknown among the Eskimos: better yet, it is incomprehensible to them. Had the white man said, “Lend me your wife in exchange,” the Eskimo would have understood. An exchange is normal’ a gift passes his understanding. It sends his thoughts going. It i amoral. He will not thank the white man. He will go back to his igloo and ruminate. “Since the white man has given me these needles,” he will in effect say to himself, “it must be that he does not want them, and if he does not want his treasures, why should not I have them?” From that day forth, this Eskimo will be a different man. He will begin by despising the white man, and soon he will plan cunningly to exploit him. Since the white man has proved himself a fool, why not? So the Eskimo becomes a liar and a cheat. A single generous impulse on the part of the white man has stared the moral disintegration of a native.
De Poncins does not tell us how he came to believe in the possibility of this final series of events, whether due to conversation or personal experience or what-have-you. Nevertheless, let us take it as a general warning against the dangers of misunderstood gifts.
On happiness:
Many people imagine that the sun is necessary to human happiness and that the South Sea islanders must be the gayest, most leisurely and most contented folk on earth. No notion could be more falsely romantic, for happiness has nothing to do with climate: these Eskimos afforded me decisive poof that happiness is a disposition of the spirit.
(De Poncins himself, however, develops some serious cabin fever in the middle of winter.)
Here was a people living in the mot rigorous climate in the world, in the most depressing surroundings imaginable, haunted by famine in a grey and sombre landscape sullen with the absence of life; shivering in their tents in the autumn, fighting with recurrent blizzard in the winter, toiling and moiling fifteen hour a day merely n order to get food and stay alive. Huddling and motionless in their igloos through this interminable night, they ought to have been melancholy men, men despondent and suicidal; instead, they were a cheerful people, always laughing, never weary of laughter.
A man is happy, in sum, when he is leading the life that suits him, and neither warmth nor comfort has anything to do with it. I watched these Eskimos at the Post. This house, you would say, ought to mean for them the zenith of well-being and relaxation… But look at them! They are dull, sullen, miserable. Physically, they seem shrunken, their personalities diminished and extinguished. Instead of laughing, they brood; and you see them come in, take their seats on the bench and remain like sleepwalkers, expressionless and spiritless… But open wide the door, fling them into the blizzard, and they come to. they wake up suddenly; they whistle,; their women scurry about, their children crack the triumphant whip, their dogs bark like mad: an impression of joy, of life, fills the environs of the Post.
I suspect that people are basically happy when living in accordance with their natures, active, and possessed of a sense of agency over their lives.
Warning: I am not entirely satisfied with this post.
Errrg.
I had to spend today with dumbs.
At one point, someone claimed ISIS consists of militant atheists.
By the end I was about ready to chew my arm off to escape.
You know, if The Big Bang Theory were at all realistic, one of the rules in Sheldon’s roommate agreement would be that Penny isn’t allowed in his apartment. He wouldn’t be able to stand her.
“Tribe” can be a difficult concept to articulate, especially if you don’t live in an explicitly tribal society. To be an outlier (in any way) is a recipe for isolation–there’s simply no one else around like yourself. You make do, if you can. But when you finally find someone–or a whole group of someones–like yourself, it’s a wonderful moment.
These days, spending most of my time in the company of others like myself leads to a certain complacency, but it takes only a few hours in the presence of outsiders to remind me of just how awful it is to be in a place where no one thinks like you do.
I’m not one for “who is a true X?” fights. I’m not going to debate who is and isn’t a poser. But I reserve the right to have personal opinions about whether or not we get along and how people affect group dynamics.
I think it is emotionally healthy–perhaps even necessary–to have a group of people you fit in with and whose company you enjoy.
To have such a group requires at least some awareness of the existence of your group and a willingness to define some people as inside of it and some as outside of it. This does not require hating outsiders–if anything, most people seem capable of identifying with some group or another (a local sports team, their state, people who use ham radios, etc.,) without particularly hating everyone outside of it. (For that matter, most people are quite innocently self-concerned–too busy with their own lives to really take much notice of things outside of it–and so do not really notice or know much about people outside of their own groups.)
But nerds have a habit, in my experience, of being explicitly anti-tribal. I think this is a side effect of growing up on the outside of everyone else’s tribes. When everyone else has a group of friends and you don’t, it’s pretty easy to decide that being exclusionary is wrong and immoral.
Realistically speaking, of course, there aren’t a lot of people trying to sneak into nerd spaces for inappropriate reasons–how many people are physics posers? (I am pretty sure I have been snuck to an exclusive physics lecture by someone trying to date me. Does that count as inappropriate?) But even so, group membership is not worthless. When my husband and I met and he asked me out, I was willing to give him a chance because I was vaguely familiar with him as a member of my social group. People in my group, at least, were somewhat known quantities–if he were a bad person, I likely would have heard about it or could find out quickly from a mutual acquaintance.
(A note for the unwary: sometimes your mutual acquaintances value different things in a partner than you do; sometimes people are outright liars. Tread cautiously when dealing with the opinions of others.)
Even now, I find that, “Do you look like people I have previously gotten along with?” is a pretty good metric for picking people to talk to.
Serious question, folks: Have you ever observed a correlation between “I find this person attractive” and “I enjoy talking to this person”? Not in an “I find it unpleasant to talk to ugly people because they hurt my eyes,” nor in an “I am going to be extra sympathetic to things you say because I want to have sex with you,” kind of way. More in a “Wow, how did I get so lucky that I am actually attracted to the small subset of people I can stand talking to?” My own taste in men hasn’t changed since 4th grade, which was really well before I had any idea what sorts of personality traits or political opinions or lifestyles I’d be interested in as a grown-up, and yet it has consistently served me well.
Anyway, back to politics. A few decades ago, it seems like there was more of a place for nerds in mainstream politics. Republicans liked funding projects that employ nerds, like atomic bombs, and Democrats claimed to believe in things like evolution. Even then, of course, there was a third political position that attracted a fair number of nerds: Libertarianism aka Objectivism. Heck, even the name sounds appropriate for people who are inclined toward a scientific view of the world.
Since then, both mainstream sides have turned against us. Republicans have been anti-science since at least Bush II–who ran on an explicitly anti-smart people campaign–and have been trying to prevent people from learning about the basic theories underlying modern science since approximately forever. This drove a lot of us into the “liberal” or “Libertarian” camps back in the ’90s and ’00s. Since then, though, liberalism underwent a shift, from extolling Libertarian-like meta-politics of respecting peoples’ individual rights on matters like free speech, entertainment, or religion, to the collectivist advocacy of particular group interests–groups that are, to be explicit, not nerds.
Demographically speaking, most nerds are English, German, Jewish, and East Asian men. (Most of them are also heterosexual, cisgendered, etc. etc.) Of course nerds come from all sorts of backgrounds–black, Russian, maybe even borderlands Scot. We are just talking overall numbers. But the SJW orthodoxy has been hammering, pretty explicitly, against the main nerd demographics.
To give an example: most of the nerdy and/or high IQ people I know were, circa 2000, sympathetic to feminist arguments. For that matter, when it comes to violence against women, nerds are probably among the groups least likely to commit any. Per capita, blacks, Hispanics, and lower-class whites commit much more violence. And yet, as a practical matter, people like Scott Alexander–who’s asexual, non-violent, and simply asked for advice on how to find love–or Scott Aaronsen, who confessed to feeling so terrified of the possibility of accidentally harassing someone that he became suicidal–are more likely to get attacked by feminists than folks who actually actually rapedover a thousand children.
As a female nerd, I confess I find this a double insult: first you attack my people for something they aren’t guilty of, and then you refuse to defend women against the people actually raping them.
So nerds have split. Some of the old Libertarians have decided that, essentially, we can’t use a meta-ethic of treating everyone equally if some people are starting from unequal positions–that everyone has to be brought to equal positions first, and then treated equally. Others–especially those now styling themselves “Rationalists,” have stuck with the original Libertarian values but attempted to improve their ability to to deal with complex, real-world situations. And a third group–Neoreactionaries–has turned explicitly away from equality.
