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Savages and Civilization: Who Will Survive?
A “provocative [and] vivid” ( Minneapolis Star Tribune ) look at the primitive cultures that have given many gifts to the modern world, and how their very existence is now threatened
“This book should serve as a ‘wake-up’ call to people everywhere.”— Library Journal
In Indian Givers and Native Roots , renowned anthropologist Jack Weatherford explored the clash between Native American and European cultures. Now, in Savages and Civilization, Weatherford broadens his focus to examine how civilization threatens to obliterate unique tribal and ethnic cultures around the world—and in the process imperils its own existence.
As Weatherford explains, the relationship between “civilized” and “savage” peoples through history has encompassed not only violence, but also a surprising degree of cooperation, mutual influence, trade, and intermarriage. But this relationship has now entered a critical stage everywhere in the world, as indigenous peoples fiercely resist the onslaught of a global civilization that will obliterate their identities.
Savages and Civilization powerfully demonstrates that our survival as a species is based not on a choice between savages and civilization, but rather on a commitment to their vital coexistence.
“This book should serve as a ‘wake-up’ call to people everywhere.”— Library Journal
In Indian Givers and Native Roots , renowned anthropologist Jack Weatherford explored the clash between Native American and European cultures. Now, in Savages and Civilization, Weatherford broadens his focus to examine how civilization threatens to obliterate unique tribal and ethnic cultures around the world—and in the process imperils its own existence.
As Weatherford explains, the relationship between “civilized” and “savage” peoples through history has encompassed not only violence, but also a surprising degree of cooperation, mutual influence, trade, and intermarriage. But this relationship has now entered a critical stage everywhere in the world, as indigenous peoples fiercely resist the onslaught of a global civilization that will obliterate their identities.
Savages and Civilization powerfully demonstrates that our survival as a species is based not on a choice between savages and civilization, but rather on a commitment to their vital coexistence.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
8 people are currently reading
204 people want to read
About the author
Jack Weatherford
13 books739 followersJack McIver Weatherford is the DeWitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is best known for his 2004 book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. In 2006, he was awarded the Order of the Polar Star, and the Order of Genghis Khan in 2022, Mongolia’s two highest national honors. Moreover, he was honoured with the Order of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho by the Government of Bolivia in 2014.
His books in the late 20th century on the influence of Native American cultures have been translated into numerous languages. In addition to publishing chapters and reviews in academic books and journals, Weatherford has published numerous articles in national newspapers to popularize his historic and anthropological coverage of Native American cultures, as well as the American political culture in Congress in the 20th century. In recent years, he has concentrated on the Mongols by looking at their impact since the time that Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes in 1206.
His books in the late 20th century on the influence of Native American cultures have been translated into numerous languages. In addition to publishing chapters and reviews in academic books and journals, Weatherford has published numerous articles in national newspapers to popularize his historic and anthropological coverage of Native American cultures, as well as the American political culture in Congress in the 20th century. In recent years, he has concentrated on the Mongols by looking at their impact since the time that Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes in 1206.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 29, 2013
Interesting and salient, though the prose is lacking. Not quite academic, yet not intended for the uncritical thinker. A unique look at pre-"urbanization" and a good reminder that the U.S. (maybe modernity as a whole) is really just a slightly more extreme, better-documented reiteration of individual and societal behaviors across time.
May 2, 2010
Hmmm. Kind of dumb and a little boring.
September 30, 2018
I clearly enjoyed this more than a lot of the previous reviewers. I found this title randomly while perusing Bookman's (a local buy-sell-trade book store in Tucson, Arizona) and decided that I was going to take a chance on it. A scholar in Indigenous/American Indian Studies, the word "savage" has a lot of different connotations and this is probably why I first picked the book up--I was interested to see how Weatherford was using the term. And once I started reading this book, for me, it was really hard to put down.
It does read like an introduction to anthropology, perhaps, because it begins exploring civilization from Pangaea onward. I think that Weatherford does this in an interesting manner because each chapter attempts to focus on a certain geographic location. Chapters have unique information about things you might not think to expect in a civilization guide: for example, did you know a seal penis bone can be up to 2 feet long and is shaped like a baseball bat? That is a unique tidbit that you can pick up, and there is more information peppered throughout chapters.
Of course, there are some 'greatest hits' in the chapters. You are definitely going to read about Alexander the Great, Egypt, Rome, etc. and I don't find that to be a negative thing. If you're interested in exploring civilization, including these chapters makes a lot of sense. But there are a lot of chapters devoted to Asian countries/locations as well as African regions. I was surprised to see a discussion about Spain. And of course, I was very interested in the chapters that discussed cannibals (Fiji/New Zealand) and there are nice bits and pieces that discuss American Indians.
I'll leave a few quotes here:
"Civilization needs the tribal values to survive; yet civilized urban life in most parts of the world destroys tribal people whenever contact is made." (p121)
"Colonialism is as old as civilization." (p186)
"From the Sioux in South Dakota to the Zulu in South Africa, from the Maori of New Zealand to the Eskimo of the Arctic, the tribal people had fallen under the administration of some alien nation or state. Defeated and no longer a threat to the national destiny of any government, tribal people became objects of curiosity--romantic novelties from the past, surviving in a rapidly modernizing world." (p210)
"Our vision of native peoples, no matter whether positive or negative, often reveals more about ourselves than it does about them." (p210)
"If war or new plagues do not bring down civilization, it might easily collapse as a result of environmental degradation and the disruption of productive agricultural lands. If the great collapse comes, it might well come from something that we do not yet suspect. Perhaps war, disease, famine, and environmental degradation will be only parts of the process and not the causes. . . . Because we do not know the problems that lie ahead of us, we do not know which set of human skills or which cultural perspective we will need." (p290-291)
Again, I really enjoyed this book and thought that it did a good job of covering a *lot* of civilization's timeline. I have read a lot of academic texts and don't find it to be 'dull' as some other reviewers did. But... in fairness... I have read a lot of books that I would definitely categorize as dull. This just wasn't one of them.
It does read like an introduction to anthropology, perhaps, because it begins exploring civilization from Pangaea onward. I think that Weatherford does this in an interesting manner because each chapter attempts to focus on a certain geographic location. Chapters have unique information about things you might not think to expect in a civilization guide: for example, did you know a seal penis bone can be up to 2 feet long and is shaped like a baseball bat? That is a unique tidbit that you can pick up, and there is more information peppered throughout chapters.
Of course, there are some 'greatest hits' in the chapters. You are definitely going to read about Alexander the Great, Egypt, Rome, etc. and I don't find that to be a negative thing. If you're interested in exploring civilization, including these chapters makes a lot of sense. But there are a lot of chapters devoted to Asian countries/locations as well as African regions. I was surprised to see a discussion about Spain. And of course, I was very interested in the chapters that discussed cannibals (Fiji/New Zealand) and there are nice bits and pieces that discuss American Indians.
I'll leave a few quotes here:
"Civilization needs the tribal values to survive; yet civilized urban life in most parts of the world destroys tribal people whenever contact is made." (p121)
"Colonialism is as old as civilization." (p186)
"From the Sioux in South Dakota to the Zulu in South Africa, from the Maori of New Zealand to the Eskimo of the Arctic, the tribal people had fallen under the administration of some alien nation or state. Defeated and no longer a threat to the national destiny of any government, tribal people became objects of curiosity--romantic novelties from the past, surviving in a rapidly modernizing world." (p210)
"Our vision of native peoples, no matter whether positive or negative, often reveals more about ourselves than it does about them." (p210)
"If war or new plagues do not bring down civilization, it might easily collapse as a result of environmental degradation and the disruption of productive agricultural lands. If the great collapse comes, it might well come from something that we do not yet suspect. Perhaps war, disease, famine, and environmental degradation will be only parts of the process and not the causes. . . . Because we do not know the problems that lie ahead of us, we do not know which set of human skills or which cultural perspective we will need." (p290-291)
Again, I really enjoyed this book and thought that it did a good job of covering a *lot* of civilization's timeline. I have read a lot of academic texts and don't find it to be 'dull' as some other reviewers did. But... in fairness... I have read a lot of books that I would definitely categorize as dull. This just wasn't one of them.
March 18, 2017
Jack Weatherford has written a wonderful book on the topic of tribal or "primitive" cultures, generally nomadic, often pastoral ones in world history and today, seeking to explore the relationship between tribal peoples and the people of cities and what is thought of as civilization. The fact that these people have gone by so many names throughout history, whether stigmatic names like barbarian, savage, pagan, or heathen or more modern less pejorative names like ethnic group, folk tradition, or national minority shows that urban cultures have generally had a difficult time coming to grips with those outside the mainstream of global civilization.
Weatherford covers a great deal of history in his discussion of tribal cultures. He visits with and discusses the Australian aborigines; those that still have their traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle, he writes, with slight modifications, could have lived almost any time in the last 200,000 years in the temperate and tropical zones of Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia (covering something like 99 percent of human history). The modern Aleuts and Inuit of North America, the Sami or Lapps of Scandinavia, and such northern Siberian peoples as the Yakut and Chuckhi represent remnants of the thousands of such groups from the last Ice Age, groups that had to give up foraging and worked in groups to hunt the massive megafauna of the Arctic regions, whether mammoths or whales.
The fact that tribal peoples did not settle into the dense concentrations that urban peoples did and many tribal groups had relatively few domesticated animals would have a profound impact upon world history. An interesting point he makes involved pastoral people and disease; virtually every infectious or epidemic disease known among human has a close animal counterpart (smallpox is similar to cowpox in cattle and myxomatosis in rabbits, measles has similarities to distemper in dogs and rinderpest among bovines) and those cultures that did not have much in the way of domesticated animals (such as the Polynesians and Native Americans) were free of these epidemic diseases.
Weatherford wrote that the political and technological interaction between the wandering tribal peoples and civilized peoples for the three thousands years between 1600 B.C. and 1500 A.D. was the focal point of Eurasian civilization. Once indigenous people played a huge role in world history, one group occasionally assimilating the other or forcing millions to move in vast relocations. In some cases the nomads were technological innovators (inventing the horse-drawn chariot and the stirrup, for a time dominating urban peoples until they in turn assimilated these new inventions), in other cases acting as conduits for technological change (the Mongols for instance borrowed animals, ideas, and technology from all parts of their territories, spreading them from Europe to China). For centuries there was, despite the conflicts, a symbiotic relationship between farmers and nomads, as one helped the other (the former supplying cereals, tea, sugar, metal-working, and chemicals for leatherworking, the latter important in bringing in exotic items and introducing new products and ideas); this has been obscured by the fact that most written records about the nomads were left by the settled agricultural peoples and were often biased against the nomads. On occasion this was recognized; North African scholar Ab-ar-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote the first historical analysis of the relationship between tribal and urban people; he said that the city people needed the tribal people because the latter reinvigorated the civilized world, bringing in new blood and new ideas (such as Islam and Judaism). They brought a simple, direct, honest way of dealing with the world, a strength that accounted for the success of the Hebrews against the Canaanite cities, the Arab Bedouins in the Middle East, and the Moors in Spain (among others). However, the longer tribal people associated with urban people, the weaker they became. Weatherford makes the point that this assertion of Ibn Khaldun's was predated by the Old Testament of the Bible (evident in how the Hebrews viewed the corrupt cities of Jericho, Sodom, and Gomorrah), unique in being one of the few texts by a nomadic group.
Weatherford definitely wrote what some might call a "big picture" analysis of world history. He devotes several chapters to how eventually the urban peoples of the world came to complete dominate tribal cultures. He wrote that it took roughly 8,000 years for a truly world economy to emerge, the time between the first agricultural village and the start of the first trans-Pacific route from Acapulco to Manila (via the famed Spanish Manila galleon). This process required three major technological and social breakthroughs; the unification of Asia and Europe via the horse (made possible by the invention of stirrups, bridles, and saddles), the connection of sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean world via the camel, and the voyages connecting Europe and Asia across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (made possible by the mastery of celestial and compass navigation and by paper and the invention of the printing press and movable type to maintain contact over thousands of miles and to aid in the creation of modern nation states by standardizing language, culture, and national identity).
I can only give a very brief introduction to this book. Though a quick read, it is epic in scope. Later chapters are devoted to how tribal peoples were treated during the age of imperialism, the advent of anthropology (the "study of the exotic by the eccentric"), and the future of tribal peoples today (which ironically may be aided by technology as it has aided widely separated people to maintain touch with one another and facilitated broadcasting and printing in tribal languages).
I enjoyed how the author opened many chapters with personal experiences. They ranged from traveling by camel in the Sahara to drinking chicha (homemade corn beer) in the isolated town of Pocona, Bolivia, to recounting experiences with the Kuna of the San Blas Islands of Panama, the only Native Americans visited by Christopher Columbus that are still alive. A great book.
Weatherford covers a great deal of history in his discussion of tribal cultures. He visits with and discusses the Australian aborigines; those that still have their traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle, he writes, with slight modifications, could have lived almost any time in the last 200,000 years in the temperate and tropical zones of Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia (covering something like 99 percent of human history). The modern Aleuts and Inuit of North America, the Sami or Lapps of Scandinavia, and such northern Siberian peoples as the Yakut and Chuckhi represent remnants of the thousands of such groups from the last Ice Age, groups that had to give up foraging and worked in groups to hunt the massive megafauna of the Arctic regions, whether mammoths or whales.
The fact that tribal peoples did not settle into the dense concentrations that urban peoples did and many tribal groups had relatively few domesticated animals would have a profound impact upon world history. An interesting point he makes involved pastoral people and disease; virtually every infectious or epidemic disease known among human has a close animal counterpart (smallpox is similar to cowpox in cattle and myxomatosis in rabbits, measles has similarities to distemper in dogs and rinderpest among bovines) and those cultures that did not have much in the way of domesticated animals (such as the Polynesians and Native Americans) were free of these epidemic diseases.
Weatherford wrote that the political and technological interaction between the wandering tribal peoples and civilized peoples for the three thousands years between 1600 B.C. and 1500 A.D. was the focal point of Eurasian civilization. Once indigenous people played a huge role in world history, one group occasionally assimilating the other or forcing millions to move in vast relocations. In some cases the nomads were technological innovators (inventing the horse-drawn chariot and the stirrup, for a time dominating urban peoples until they in turn assimilated these new inventions), in other cases acting as conduits for technological change (the Mongols for instance borrowed animals, ideas, and technology from all parts of their territories, spreading them from Europe to China). For centuries there was, despite the conflicts, a symbiotic relationship between farmers and nomads, as one helped the other (the former supplying cereals, tea, sugar, metal-working, and chemicals for leatherworking, the latter important in bringing in exotic items and introducing new products and ideas); this has been obscured by the fact that most written records about the nomads were left by the settled agricultural peoples and were often biased against the nomads. On occasion this was recognized; North African scholar Ab-ar-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote the first historical analysis of the relationship between tribal and urban people; he said that the city people needed the tribal people because the latter reinvigorated the civilized world, bringing in new blood and new ideas (such as Islam and Judaism). They brought a simple, direct, honest way of dealing with the world, a strength that accounted for the success of the Hebrews against the Canaanite cities, the Arab Bedouins in the Middle East, and the Moors in Spain (among others). However, the longer tribal people associated with urban people, the weaker they became. Weatherford makes the point that this assertion of Ibn Khaldun's was predated by the Old Testament of the Bible (evident in how the Hebrews viewed the corrupt cities of Jericho, Sodom, and Gomorrah), unique in being one of the few texts by a nomadic group.
Weatherford definitely wrote what some might call a "big picture" analysis of world history. He devotes several chapters to how eventually the urban peoples of the world came to complete dominate tribal cultures. He wrote that it took roughly 8,000 years for a truly world economy to emerge, the time between the first agricultural village and the start of the first trans-Pacific route from Acapulco to Manila (via the famed Spanish Manila galleon). This process required three major technological and social breakthroughs; the unification of Asia and Europe via the horse (made possible by the invention of stirrups, bridles, and saddles), the connection of sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean world via the camel, and the voyages connecting Europe and Asia across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (made possible by the mastery of celestial and compass navigation and by paper and the invention of the printing press and movable type to maintain contact over thousands of miles and to aid in the creation of modern nation states by standardizing language, culture, and national identity).
I can only give a very brief introduction to this book. Though a quick read, it is epic in scope. Later chapters are devoted to how tribal peoples were treated during the age of imperialism, the advent of anthropology (the "study of the exotic by the eccentric"), and the future of tribal peoples today (which ironically may be aided by technology as it has aided widely separated people to maintain touch with one another and facilitated broadcasting and printing in tribal languages).
I enjoyed how the author opened many chapters with personal experiences. They ranged from traveling by camel in the Sahara to drinking chicha (homemade corn beer) in the isolated town of Pocona, Bolivia, to recounting experiences with the Kuna of the San Blas Islands of Panama, the only Native Americans visited by Christopher Columbus that are still alive. A great book.
June 5, 2015
Review title: Savages, civilization--and Facebook?
Weatherford reads like a basic Anthro 101 textbook, with a walk through the trend of civilization from tribal to national to global scope. He tends to equate civilization with increasing urbanization, and savagery with (theoretically decreasing) levels of pastoral hunting and gathering. He accounts for the horrific savagery of 20th century "civilization" through the agent of "micronations"--his term for ethnic groups embedded within larger national boundaries:
National governments are usually antagonistic to ethnic groups because they compete with one another for loyalty and power. The ethnic groups present an alternative definition of public life and culture to that offered, and often insisted upon, by the state. The state has two basic options in dealing with ethnic groups. It can repress them and try to destroy them, or it can try to manage them and balance them against one another while keeping them clearly subordinate to the state. (p. 236)
Nothing new or shocking here. So where does Facebook come in? Writing in the early 1990's, at the dawn of the internet age but before the social networking explosion that as literally toppled nations and tightly bound widely-scattered ethnic groups, Weatherford senses the power of this soon-to-come communication to cross national boundaries, citing the pervasive-at-the-time presence of easily-shared cassette tapes.
Technology freed culture from geography. For thousands of years, one had to be surrounded by other members of the same culture to be part of it. . . .Cultural boundaries become less and less related to the national borders of a country. . . . The communications industry has retribalized the world. (p. 252-256)
While not the goal of Facebook (according to "The Social Network", Mark Zuckerburg just wanted to meet girls), that tool has been the catalyst, the killer app, of retribalization. We're still figuring out where that will take us. Weatherford sounds a rather pessimistic warning in conclusion, but the twitterverse is still expanding in Big Bang mode. Lets just hang on and see how it all works out.
Weatherford reads like a basic Anthro 101 textbook, with a walk through the trend of civilization from tribal to national to global scope. He tends to equate civilization with increasing urbanization, and savagery with (theoretically decreasing) levels of pastoral hunting and gathering. He accounts for the horrific savagery of 20th century "civilization" through the agent of "micronations"--his term for ethnic groups embedded within larger national boundaries:
National governments are usually antagonistic to ethnic groups because they compete with one another for loyalty and power. The ethnic groups present an alternative definition of public life and culture to that offered, and often insisted upon, by the state. The state has two basic options in dealing with ethnic groups. It can repress them and try to destroy them, or it can try to manage them and balance them against one another while keeping them clearly subordinate to the state. (p. 236)
Nothing new or shocking here. So where does Facebook come in? Writing in the early 1990's, at the dawn of the internet age but before the social networking explosion that as literally toppled nations and tightly bound widely-scattered ethnic groups, Weatherford senses the power of this soon-to-come communication to cross national boundaries, citing the pervasive-at-the-time presence of easily-shared cassette tapes.
Technology freed culture from geography. For thousands of years, one had to be surrounded by other members of the same culture to be part of it. . . .Cultural boundaries become less and less related to the national borders of a country. . . . The communications industry has retribalized the world. (p. 252-256)
While not the goal of Facebook (according to "The Social Network", Mark Zuckerburg just wanted to meet girls), that tool has been the catalyst, the killer app, of retribalization. We're still figuring out where that will take us. Weatherford sounds a rather pessimistic warning in conclusion, but the twitterverse is still expanding in Big Bang mode. Lets just hang on and see how it all works out.
January 13, 2013
I love this author, and would recommend his other books unquestionably to anyone else. Particularly Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and his follow up The Mongol Queens. But this, as one of his earlier works, is a bit rambly. I dont think he had quite found his voice for writing yet. Apparently Jared Diamond just came out with a new book on a similar subject which I will mark as 'to read'.
January 9, 2009
very interesting
November 10, 2009
This book was really dull! I forced my way through it because I was sure the interesting parts promised by the title would come up.. but they didn't!
July 12, 2013
10 years later still interesting, vivid, thoughtful. Would love to see an update.
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August 11, 201410
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