- Re: Society has existed for as long as humans Archived Message
Posted by dereklane
on July 4, 2019, 8:00 am, in reply to "Re: Society has existed for as long as humans"
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I can see Keith's point and I'll couple with an example; in Australia, aboriginal groups that speak different languages are collectively (or were for a long time) referred to as tribes rather than nations or countries. The former suggests stateless and underdeveloped, the latter sows a more accurate definition but poses uncomfortable unasked questions of how we came to superimpose our own nations on top of theirs. More accurately, within nations there are tribes, but in oz there wasn't this distinction; the nation was listed as Australia, rather than the perhaps 500 nations that existed prior to the genocide and extermination. Tribe might be defined as a benign thing but in the minds of colonialist westerners it suggests underdevelopment. There are other such terms in western lexicon that don't necessarily match the definitions we provide. I'd remember them if my brain was functioning better right now but it is not. |