It is a popularly held view that before whites arrived, Aboriginal society lived in harmony with nature with cultural practices that contributed to that harmony and the survival of the population.
In the newly released book Sick Societies, Robert B. Edgerton debunks the myth of primitive harmony. In doing so he uses examples from Australian Aboriginal groups, among many others, to support a view that primitive societies worldwide should not be viewed through rose-coloured glasses, as so many anthropologists have done in the past.
Many of these societies have practices and beliefs which harm their chances of survival, or are at best neutral. Moreover, many of the practices result in great human misery and fear, much of which is unnecessary. Alienation, suffering, disquiet and rebelliousness are not the sole province of western societies and their ugly cities.
His Aboriginal examples are the Kaiadilt and the Tasmanians. The Kaiadilt lived on Bentinck island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, separated from European contact until the 1940s.
From 1942 to 1947 the population declined from 123 to 47 and the Kaiadilt faced extinction when a tidal wave salinated their only pools of fresh water. The 47 were rescued by a mainland Aboriginal, Gully Peters.
Peters said the Kaiadilt always had a reasonable amount for seafood for survival. The reason for the decline in population over those five years was not drought or food shortage, but because they were killing each other. A man coming back from the reef would be killed by a band who would take his catch, then take his wife and eat his children.
Whether the children were eaten cannot be confirmed, but certainly men killed each other for women. The Kaiadilt themselves acknowledged depopulation was being caused through fights over women, not absence of food or diseases of white men. And the killings resulted in fragmentation of their society.
The Kaiadilt were trapped on the island because their boats were too small to get to the mainland. They could not avoid each other. Their food gathering did not require a great deal of co-operation, but it did require peace. When the Kaiadilt men killed each other in pursuit of women, the practice could not have served any adaptive purpose.
They were only saved from extinction by the intervention of another Aboriginal group and white colonialists.
It has to be said that elsewhere thousands of other Aboriginal groups were wiped out by white diseases, colonialism, being pushed off their land and so on. Edgerton’s point, though, is that it is anthropological romanticism to suggest that all Aboriginal societies lived in peace and harmony. And that we would better understand the human condition generally, including our own society, if this nonsense were put aside.
We can better question our own maladaptive and misery-inducing beliefs and practices if the myths of the noble savage and primitive harmony do not blind us to analysing what is it about human nature that causes us to live in more miserably than we need to.
Tasmanian Aborigines maladaptively mistreated their women, for example. Women did all the dangerous and hard work: diving for shellfish, climbing trees to club possums and digging for roots. Men did the easy enjoyable work: hunting for wallabies. Yet men got the best food, while women nearly starved in winter.
It was not the optimal way of gathering food. It enabled the Tasmanians to survive, but not comfortably.
The Tasmanians were isolated for 12,000 after the icecap melted creating Bass Strait. In that time they went backwards. Unlike mainland Aborigines, they did not develop better tools and weapons. They used only a dozen artifacts.
Unlike mainland Aborigines they had no leisure time for songs, dances and art. The archaeological record shows they lost the art of making boomerangs, rafts, bone tools and barbed spears. Fish disappeared from the archaeological record 4000 years ago. On European contact they had no hooks, fish spears or nets despite being desperately hungry in winter. Mainland Aborigines were incredulous when told the Tasmanians had no fish.
They made no effort to fashion clothing. They just threw wallaby skins over themselves. They had no fire-making; they had to carry it. They treated illness by cutting the victim and covering him in blood. In short, the isolation led to a slow strangulation of the mind.
The Tasmanian Aborigines were not lacking intellect; on European contact the children did well at school. It was just that their culture failed them.
Men fought over women. Bands lived in constant fear of reprisal raids and had to stop foraging for food to defend themselves. This was not an adaptive response to the environment, but a reflection on human predisposition, especially male competition for women and a desire to dominate them.
(This is really hard stuff for the politically correct. They either have to chose women’s right to equality or the respect for primitive culture that denigrates those rights mercilessly.)
When Europeans arrived, Tasmanian society quickly collapsed. Until then, Tasmanian society muddled through the centuries because they were isolated from other populations, not because they adapted themselves to their environment or were in harmony with it. Moreover, they muddled through in a fairly miserable way quite needlessly because the environmental resources were there to make their lives better if they had not had cultural impediments and impediments caused through genetic predisposition.
Left on their own there is no law that says humans will improve their lot. To the contrary; they might make their lot worse. Further, it is the cultural beliefs and practices that made their lot worse.
The lesson is that cultural and religious beliefs, far from requiring respect, require questioning. The Kaiadilt and the Tasmanians were just two of many examples Edgerton used to make the point. Other examples make it more forcefully. Some cultural and religious practices are worthwhile but the majority are either destructive of human happiness or at best neutral.