Candida Moss - The Dangerous Myth of Utopian Societies

The mischaracterization of the untouched tribe doesn’t solve the debate about whether or not civilization is bad, but it has proved to be an enduring moneymaker for those able to monetize stone-age wisdom. 

In 1971, Manuel Elizalde, a government official in the Philippines and crony of Ferdinand and Immelda Marcos, announced the discovery of a previously lost “stone age tribe” of indigenous people on the island of Mindanao. Known as the Tasaday, the tribe became overnight celebrities, especially when it was revealed that they didn’t even have a word for “war” and were pacifist cave dwellers. They became the poster children for railing against the decadence of modern civilization. 

As it turned out, however, the Tasaday were a hoax. Linguists first became suspicious when it emerged that this group of supposed cave dwellers had a word for “roof.” Then, in 1986, a Swiss reporter discovered that the Tasaday weren’t living “like our ancestors” at all, but rather in typical houses in which they dressed in blue jeans and T-Shirts. Elizalde had convinced some members of local tribes to pretend to belong to the tribe in exchange for money. The villagers never saw any support and in the early 1980s Elizalde fled with (reportedly) $35 million of funds ear-marked for minority groups and a harem of teenage girls. Recent anthropological work has suggested that while some of the local tribes in the region were more isolated than others, there was no “stone age” group that was untouched by the modern world.

In the past three hundred years, as the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and others trawled the globe colonizing the world and exploring areas that were previously unknown (to them), they have often discovered groups of people who seem to them to be a throwback to the prehistoric world. While the majority of European propaganda caricatures foreign groups as dangerous savages to be subjugated, they were also described as “pristine tribes” as noble, simple, fierce, spiritual, and somehow more authentically human than those of us corrupted by  “civilization.”  

The idea of a group of people untouched and unblemished by modernity encouraged social scientists to see them as a control group when it came to asking questions about whether humans have an original nature that has been somehow sullied by civilization. Among the most popular questions are ones about the human capacity for violence and war. Are people inherently violent or was the slow march away from hunting and gathering that left us war-mongering and conflict-ridden?

In 2013, controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his book Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes – The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists. In it, Chagnon presents the Yanomano of the northern Amazonia as a “fierce” tribe of war-mongering people who engage in raids in order to maximize access to women, gain recognition, and take revenge (usually for the death of a member of their group). His essential argument, now being marketed by popular psychologist Steven Pinker, is that men are driven to fight because of reproductive competition. Throughout his work Chagnon presents the Yanomamo as typical stone-age warriors, untouched by the influence of later cultural developments. He writes, for example, that “the Yanomamo are probably a typical example of what life is like in a state of nature” and that “we might want to consider this possibility as we learn more about the nature of human life in a ‘state of nature.’” 

Since the publication of his work, many scholars have criticized Chagnon’s findings and methodology… read more

http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-utopian-societies