Submitted by CircleA in anticiv

A common critique of anarcho-primitivism and other anti-civ theory is that civilization and agriculture were practiced by indigenous people before colonization. Applying the term agriculture to those cultures is erroneous because agriculture focuses on annuals and overlooks perennial & food-forest based cultivation.

When Europeans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, they declared there to be no plant cultivation in the area, when there in fact was, but not in a way European colonizers recognized. They were looking for neat rows of annual crops and cleared ground waiting to be planted (slash and burn). What they failed to perceive was plant cultivation that was perennial as well as forest-based.

Cultivated plants that were mixed in among the forest trees included a variety of berry bushes and brambles, hazelnut, saskatoon, wapato, silverweed, white oak, camas, nettle, a rhizome-forming clover, and more. But because the colonizers didn't recognize the utility of native plants, they ignored it all and branded the local people primitives for not having agriculture.

Similarly, the hierarchy of indigenous groups in the area was virtually created by colonizers who wanted a single representative in place to sign/agree to treaties. They assigned power to chiefs that wasn't bestowed on them by the tribes in order to use them to get what they wanted.

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Rat wrote

I bet you could go on and on about this, and I would welcome it!

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Majrelende wrote (edited )

Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed gives an indication of which kinds of cultivation are able to be best exploited by authorities: legible monocultures, easily recognisable as such, and which can harvested all at once, stored, and transported. In SE Asia, that meant padi cultivation. States actually tried to mandate it so as to squash the more ungovernable types of cultivation, which included swiddening, with crops such as upland rice, maize, barley, and root vegetables. When pressure from states was high, anarchic people might switch totally to foraging to escape.

I don't agree with the traditional primitivist stances on agriculture and think they are excessively inflexible. We could restate them, not as stances but as statements. For instance, foraging for one's food (including perennial cultivation) can increase personal freedom and independence, and is less easily appropriated by states.

Death to ideology!

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Bezotcovschina wrote

A common critique of anarcho-primitivism and other anti-civ theory is that civilization and agriculture were practiced by indigenous people before colonization.

How can it be a legit critique? Even if indigenous people practiced agriculture before colonization?

Tangentially related, but small rant:

In some places indigenous people practiced agriculture, in other ones places they did not. In some places the hierarchy of indigenous groups was created by colonizers in other ones it existed before. Don't need to put all the different indigenous people all around the world under one one umbrella, pretending all of them have been lived free from oppression in a true harmony with the nature, unhierarchical societies without gender binaries and roles, without hierarchy-forming religions. Looks like some sort of fetishisation.

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