The problem with Evil races is not what you think

[Hussar]

One interesting point in that article is the discussion of ironworking in the Philippines being displaced by imported goods. The relationship between trade, production and technological diffusion is a very interesting one.

Australia used to make cars but doesn't anymore, for reasons that might be compared (at an appropriate level of abstraction) to iron in the pre-colonial Philippines. I don't think that entails that Australia is "primitive".

Naw, you're primitive because everything in your country is either poisonous or venomous.

 

[Ixal]

Ok, let's work with this a bit.

How advanced?

Is Japan primitive because it doesn't use cheques? Is it primitive since it's home computer use is very close to zero? How primitive compared to who, exactly? Is it that only those with the bleeding edge of technology that aren't primitive? But, then, how do you call one group primitive and another not primitive when it's very likely that one group is more advanced in one area but less advanced in another. You mentioned China and the Opium Wars. You do realize that at the time, China produced the best porcelain in the world. No one else was even close. There's a reason that England imported massive quantities of Chinese porcelain for centuries. Does that mean that England was primitive?

Heck, on the topic of China, on the Tea Horse Road, China would trade tea with Tibet for horses bred in Tibet. Did so for centuries. Tibetan horses were considered the best work horses to be had. Does that make China primitive? But, at that point in time, China was light years ahead technologically than Europe. So, Europe was always primitive until about the 17th Century when European technology, imported from other areas began to widely spread and be used?

You do see why your definition doesn't work here right? Being primitive is not simply "oh, that's a bit old fashioned". Being primitive has pretty strong denotative and connotative meanings. There's a very, very good reason why the writer of The Book of Cylinders didn't use it. And didn't use the word tribal either. Why do you believe that grippli are tribal?

As I said before, what is primitive is relative to the technology of the observer.
For example, the type of agriculture the Amish engage in would be considered now, but 500 years ago (roughly what Cormyr and the sword cost is modeled after) it would have been state of the art.
And a theoretical alien species which is 1000+ years ahead of us would consider everything on earth primitive.

Why do I think the Grippli are tribal? Because others said so and complained loudly that only tribal societies are ever called primitive.

The PDF is indeed interesting, especially the part about the uneven technological development on the Philippines, something that according to some should not be possible.

(BTW: By the time of the opium wars Germany had displaced China as the "king of porcelain" production, at least in quality.)

 

[Aldarc]

The PDF is indeed interesting, especially the part about the uneven technological development on the Philippines, something that according to some should not be possible.

The idea of "uneven technological development" generally presupposes an outdated Euro-American sense of lineral cultural advacement and hierarchies of civilization.

 

[Hussar]

Well, y'know, that's fair. Grippli are not described as tribal, so, we DO have an example of a non-tribal people's art described as primitive.

Granted, I'm still kinda waiting to hear your explaination for how a group that trades regularly with a highly advanced group that lives a day away and has traded with that group for centuries, is primitive and why their art would be described thus. Again, we're talking about someone from London describing somone from Cardiff as "primitive". I mean, they are less than a hundred miles from Baldur's Gate. They have dressed stone buildings, use lumber for their docks and have steel weapons. What, exactly, is primitive about them?

 

[Hussar]

The idea of "uneven technological development" generally presupposes an outdated Euro-American sense of lineral cultural advacement and hierarchies of civilization.

Yeah, I wondered about that. I had thought that the notion of linear development had largely been left by the wayside. Some cultures will be as advanced, or even more advance, while still being less advanced in other areas. I mean, the Aztecs had glassware that was equal to anything in Europe, for example.

 

[aramis erak]

I don’t know if I actually gamed with a real racist, but I definitely game did with one guy who was standoffish for the entire 3 years I was in that group. Don’t know that we ever shook hands.

I avoid shaking hands. Not because of ethnicity... but because, in general, I hate doing so. The only time I do so is at church or job interviews.

 

[aramis erak]

What are you talking about?

North American First Nations peoples adopted horses, metal tools, housing, and within a century, the vast majority of native peoples in North America (at least the ones that weren't wiped out) lived in relatively equal footing with European settlers.

That's not correct. Most of the Native populations who haven't assimilated live in conditions that would get their kids taken away off-reservation. Somewhere around half of the Dineh on the reservation lack water, as of this year.

Most of the Yupiq and Inupiaq live in housing that, except for the cold adaptations, is otherwise pretty poor. Giving up Village Life means better housing, better nutrition, and better health care... just give up who you were born as and your parents' culture... Barrow still has honeybucket service, rather than central sewer, tho' central sewer is going in. And only in this 21st century did they finally remove the law banning indoor plumbing. (It stopped being enforced in the 1970's.)

Everything I've seen says the Canadian Inuit are only slightly better off than the Alaska Eskimo (Yupiq, Inupiaq). Other First Nations groups also apparently have substandard housing in their cultural traditional locations.

Again, in Canada, if they assimilate, they gain better access to needs.

And in both the US and Canada, indigenous populations are often still below age/education peers in pay and living conditions. Even assimilated individuals.

 

[Hussar]

Sorry, @aramis erak I most certainly wasn't trying to imply differently. But, the reasons for the poor housing and deplorable living conditions aren't because First Nations people in Canada are primitive. It's because of many, many reasons that because of board rules I won't talk about, they are forced into poverty and those living conditions.

There's a difference between primitive and poor and victims of horrendous practices for the past several hundred years.

((Sorry, but, if you've been watching the Canadian news, this is a REALLY touchy subject right now.))

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

That's not correct. Most of the Native populations who haven't assimilated live in conditions that would get their kids taken away off-reservation. Somewhere around half of the Dineh on the reservation lack water, as of this year.

Most of the Yupiq and Inupiaq live in housing that, except for the cold adaptations, is otherwise pretty poor. Giving up Village Life means better housing, better nutrition, and better health care... just give up who you were born as and your parents' culture... Barrow still has honeybucket service, rather than central sewer, tho' central sewer is going in. And only in this 21st century did they finally remove the law banning indoor plumbing. (It stopped being enforced in the 1970's.)

Everything I've seen says the Canadian Inuit are only slightly better off than the Alaska Eskimo (Yupiq, Inupiaq). Other First Nations groups also apparently have substandard housing in their cultural traditional locations.

Again, in Canada, if they assimilate, they gain better access to needs.

And in both the US and Canada, indigenous populations are often still below age/education peers in pay and living conditions. Even assimilated individuals.

Your incorrect assumption here is that all of that is because of the Native populations, and not because of the colonizers' and their descendants' centuries of racial oppression in attempt to get rid of the native populations. I mean, have you not heard about all of this?!?! The Boarding Schools were an attempt to commit cultural genocide against the Native peoples, kids were often taken off reservations and forced into adoption for the same reason, and the rest of their struggles (financially, occupationally, etc) are largely because of that.

 

[pemerton]

Comparing processes of technological diffusion in the "modern" period to earlier periods is fraught. Not to say that it can't be done, but doing it well requires close attention to the social processes involved.

Here's Hodgson again (same essay, pp 70-71):

Within the Afro-Eurasian historical complex, the overall rise in the level of social power that had everywhere taken pace (sic) was cumulatively very marked. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish, the Ottoman, the Indian, or the Chinese empires could, any of them, have easily crushed the ancient Sumerians at their strongest - as one of them did crush the Aztecs, who were on a comparable level. But the rise was very gradual. In any given era, each society . . . had to reckon with the others essentially as equals, whatever temporary superiority one of them might gain. . . . This was because over the millennia any really basic new developments had been gradually adopted everywhere within the space of four or five centuries - or even more rapidly in such a case as gunpowder weapons.

But it was part of the transmutational character of the new transformation [ie modernity] that it broke down the very historical presuppositions in terms of which such gradual diffusion had maintained parity among Afro-Eurasian citied societies. In the new pace of historical change, when decades sufficed to produce what centuries had produced before, a lag of four or five centuries was no longer safe. The old gradual diffusion and adjustment was no longer possible. Very shortly - at the latest by the end of the seventeenth century - all non-Western peoples were faced with the problem of coping as outsiders with the new order of civilized life as it was emerging in the Occident. Unless, by the oddest of chances, they happened to have started a comparable transmutation of their own at precisely the same moment as the Occident, there was no time for them to follow their own independent developments, however promising. Yet, still moving, culturally, at an agrarianate pace, the could also not simply adopt the Western development for themselves year by year as it proceeded (which would have been required for such adoption to be effective). Those untransmutated agrarianate-level societies that did not share the Western cultural presuppositions had perforce to continue developing in their own traditions at their own pace, adopting from alien traditions only what could be assimilated on that basis. Hence the Wester Transmutation, once it got well under way, could neither be paralleled independently nor be borrowed wholesale. Yet it could not in most cases, be escaped. The millennial parity of social power broke down, with results that were disastrous almost everywhere.​

And the analysis doesn't get any more straightforward once one factors in deliberate processes of colonisation, which have deliberately set out to disrupt, in various ways, processes of borrowing, diffusion and accommodation.