6 ms·

If you read Guns, Germs and Steel or maybe Sapiens, then the term "indigenous" should start to make sense. Wikipedia says they are known as "first peoples": h

by chubot 8y ago

If you read Guns, Germs and Steel or maybe Sapiens, then the term "indigenous" should start to make sense. Wikipedia says they are known as "first peoples": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples For the most part, that is literally true -- they were the first group of humans on that land, humans having originated in Africa. These books make the point that agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Agricultural technology enables people to get on boats and take the land of non-agricultural societies. It enables greater popular density and wealth. This happened all over the world in the same progression, at roughly the same times. In America, the indigenous peoples came from Asia by way Alaska more than 10,000 years ago. Then Europeans came by boat ~500 years ago. I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people China was of course one of the first agricultural societies, and this enabled them to expand their territory rapidly, on the Asian continent and beyond. There were indigenous peoples living all over the Phillipines, Polynesia, Hawaii, etc. but they look "Asian" now because of the Chinese expansion. There were two different groups of people that collided.

mbrumlow 8y ago
Okay, now the hard question. Why should we care that anybody was a "first people"? And how long down the line will we recognize a group of people as fist people? Do they not make babies with non first people? 10k years from now are we still going to be going on about "so and so is of so so blood line making him indigenous" ? While they seem like shitty questions, they are serious, because for somebody like me who knows little about his past, its hard to wrap my mind around being so attached to a group identity that really seems like it matters very little to your ability to succeeded and live a happy life today -- unless -- you declare being indigenous is something special and thus gives you extra rights, or more say, or something? And if having the label brings nothing, they why such the fuss? Also, I am sure we can all trace our blood back to some "first people", so now what? Can I go back to my "first peoples" land and demand to be called indigenous?
- SpaceManNabs 8y ago
  your ancestry and heritage are very much attached to your ability to succeed and live a happy life today, in most parts of the world. That is why people want these things recognized so that statistics can be collected to shape public policy. This is even more so for people that would be indigenous such as native americans, aboriginals, tainos, and ainu.
- harichinnan 8y ago
  Speaking from experience in India, the indigenous people in India form the lowest strata of caste system. They were I'll treated and exluded from society for 1000s of years. Government now has a "schedule" of indegenous people that require government aid and affirmative action in jobs. These are people living in abject poverty.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Part of the issue is cultural preservation, Distinct cultures, particularly indigenous ones, have unique oral and recorded histories, and translation can lose important cultural context. As an example of that, there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu. Also, ethnic discrimination against indigenous peoples has a long history pretty much globally. Legal equality is often not enough, because the past couple centuries have been spent whittling their economic and social capital to basically nothing. Reparations or subsidy is required for even a hope of getting those people on equal footing.
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    > there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu The lack of Manchu native speakers is not a problem for dealing with Qing-era state documents. The Manchu language is well-described and for many, many decades Han Chinese scholars (and then foreign scholars in Europe and North America) have been trained to work with Manchu sources. Does the lack of Latin native speakers hinder anyone from working with a new Roman-era text or inscription? Furthermore, those handful of remaining native Manchus heavily code-switch with Chinese, and they have lost a great deal of their native Manchu vocabulary (a common phenomenon as a language dies), so even if you did show them a Qing-era text, they would probably be unable to understand much of its terminology without special training. I am all for protecting language diversity, but your Manchu example is uninformed.
HuShifang 8y ago
One thing: one really can't talk about "China" qua society, or "Chinese" qua ethnicity, in this context. While there's a long, long tradition of talking about Zhongguo 中國 ("the Middle Kingdom", though its original meaning was closer to "the states of the Central [Plain]"), and asserting monoculturalism, in reality Chinese regionalism has always been really pronounced -- hence the reality that when spoken, Chinese "dialects" (like Putonghua/Mandarin and Cantonese) are actually more different, and less mutually intelligible, than European Romance languages. (And it goes beyond language -- think regional cuisines. As further illustration, eespecially if you look at Warring States period cultures, there's actually a stark difference between the traditions of the northern plain and of the south, esp. the state of Chu 楚 -- you can even see it, obviously, in their art and artifacts. The aesthetic are wildly different.) Now, you could argue that Taiwan represented a Chinese conquest of indigenous peoples. But even before the island was annexed (during the Qing dynasty, in 1683 CE) there had been fishermen and pirates from the mainland (and Japan) operating there to some degree. Ultimately, you have various populations leaving the Asian mainland at different times. Sometimes later populations intermixed/intermarried with populations that had arrived in outlying territories earlier, sometimes they displaced them; usually it was a combination of both. But it wasn't some monolithic ethno-state exploiting a technological advantage to expand its reach -- the reality was much more complicated.
- chubot 8y ago
  Yes your point is taken, I guess saying "people coming from the geographical area that's now China" is more accurate. Coincidentally, yesterday I was watching "Civilizations" on Netflix, and they brought up the 1986 discovery of these incredible Bronze Age statues from the 12th-11th century B.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxingdui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxingdui And they were saying this contradicts the "Middle Kingdom" idea, i.e. that all of Chinese culture came from one place. The book Sapiens reminds us that every civilization/government likes to make an argument for why it has inevitable "divine" authority, and China is no exception. They exaggerate their history to claim power. ----- But I think there is probably a reasonable analogy to Europe. It's not inaccurate to say the "Europeans" conquered the Americas starting around the 1500's. European states like Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands were constantly at war with each other. But they all made conquests to different places in the Americas at slightly different times (i.e. South and Central America for Spain, the Caribbean, North America, etc.) These societies shared broad characteristics and influenced other. Not just agriculture, but also property rights, the rule of law, etc. Their spoken and written languages were mutually unintelligible, but they recognized each other's currencies and could trade with each other. They adopted each other's technologies. Nobody would call them the same, but it is coherent to talk about them as "European". It's a matter of semantics, but I think you can also call a group of disparate people "Chinese" in the same way. Although in the latter case there is a much greater difference in time. The Europe of today has considerable cultural continuity with the Europe of 1500 (art, music, government to some extent, etc.). I don't know how true that is for pre-modern China, although I suspect that if you adjust for the time period, it's roughly similar. I would be interested in pointers to more resources about that. ----- Another point: what other term would I use besides "Chinese"? "Asian" does not seem accurate or what historians would use. I think historians would come up with a different term than "China" or "Sino" if the difference were extremely large. For example, as far as I know Mycenaean society has basically nothing in common with modern Greece -- no continuity in art, music, government, etc. -- but it's still called "Mycenaean Greece" since the land area they occupied is the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece If there is another word for post-agricultural but pre-modern China, I would be happy to use it! "Chinese" is indeed a big and vague term with a lot of baggage to many people. (I am Chinese myself but born in America.)
knolax 8y ago
>I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested. That's quite a strong and controversial claim to be making without strong evidence. From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea. As one of the other replies pointed out, it's also a bit anachronistic to be applying terms like China and Japan in this situation.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea. Japan is a country where even in academia, people often have an unshakable belief in the "uniqueness" of their culture. This has made Japanese unwilling to consider connections to other Asian regions and peoples. Consequently, a lot of the scholarly consensus on Japanese history has been formed by scholars from outside Japan who don't have an attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique. Generally, Korean has been seen as the probable source of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, not China, and there were Japanoid populations on the Korean peninsula centuries ago. However, Alexander Vovin (one of the world's most respected scholars on the history of Japanese) recently gave a thought-provoking conference presentation arguing that the Japanese language and certain aspects of Japanese culture may well ultimately spring from coastal China.
  - sgrove 8y ago
    Do you have a link to Alexander Vovin's presentation somewhere online? It sounds fascinating.
    - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
      I believe he posted it to his academia.edu.
  - knolax 8y ago
    >Japanoid Given my experience with these outside "scholars" of my own culture, I'm going to go with the Japanese consensus. Often what these people claim as "objectivity" is actually just ignorance that they mask with the pseudoscientific language of the Humanities. >attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique. Every nation and culture is unique. Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors, this notion does not seem unfounded. The hostility that outside scholars have towards this idea does however seem less than objective.
friendstock 8y ago
For the case of Polynesia (including Hawaii), they are considered to be Austronesian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples It is widely believed that they are related to (and originated from) the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, which is distinct from Chinese civilization in both genetics, culture and agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansio... When the Polynesians arrived by boat in New Zealand (Maori), Hawaii, Easter Island and other islands in the South Pacific prior to AD 1300, they were the first settlers there. Also, their expansion is completely unrelated to "Chinese expansion".
- ncmncm 8y ago
  Hawai'i was already occupied before the population Cook met arrived. Like the Chatham islanders (still present when Cook landed, before the Maori learned of them), they were mostly wiped out. In Hawai'i only legends of "menehunes" remain. A similar process happened in England and Ireland, with Gauls displacing the Picts ("pixies"). The Gauls of Britain and Ireland lost their culture and land to Nordic invaders, but stiil represent much of the genetic heritage there. The "menehunes" arrived via the Marquesas. The present Polynesian population came from Tahiti or Fiji, although all ultimately trace back to Taiwan. There is some evidence that islands closer to New Guinea were populated more than 20,000 years ago, before the present population swept in. Japan adds an interesting footnote: the samurai are said to retain a much higher proportion if Ainu genetic heritage than typical Japanese. This observation is not popular in Japan.
droithomme 8y ago
> agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples Isn't part of the history of Plymouth that the Mayflower pilgrims had no idea how to farm and were woefully unprepared and thus on the verge of starving, but the indigenous Wampanoag people helped them learn how to do it and survive? Isn't there massive, widespread and overwhelming evidence that most indigenous societies in the Americas as an example practiced sophisticated agriculture and had an enormous variety of developed crops and techniques including selective breeding, biochar, terracing, enormous terraforming projects, large scale irrigation systems, special varieties of maize for arctic, desert and salty biomes, as well as developing massive trade networks that managed to get central american grown cocoa as far north as Utah? How could it be that such cultures could possibly be described as being distinguished by not having agriculture?
- SECProto 8y ago
  > > agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples Yes, that part of the parent comment stuck out at me as grossly untrue. While some were hunter-gatherers, many American indigenous populations had widespread agriculture [1]. [1] I know it's a bit uncouth to cite wikipedia, but it was easy as a source for something I already knew to be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...

by chubot 8y ago

mbrumlow 8y ago

Okay, now the hard question. Why should we care that anybody was a "first people"? And how long down the line will we recognize a group of people as fist people? Do they not make babies with non first people? 10k years from now are we still going to be going on about "so and so is of so so blood line making him indigenous" ? While they seem like shitty questions, they are serious, because for somebody like me who knows little about his past, its hard to wrap my mind around being so attached to a group identity that really seems like it matters very little to your ability to succeeded and live a happy life today -- unless -- you declare being indigenous is something special and thus gives you extra rights, or more say, or something? And if having the label brings nothing, they why such the fuss? Also, I am sure we can all trace our blood back to some "first people", so now what? Can I go back to my "first peoples" land and demand to be called indigenous?

SpaceManNabs 8y ago
your ancestry and heritage are very much attached to your ability to succeed and live a happy life today, in most parts of the world. That is why people want these things recognized so that statistics can be collected to shape public policy. This is even more so for people that would be indigenous such as native americans, aboriginals, tainos, and ainu.
harichinnan 8y ago
Speaking from experience in India, the indigenous people in India form the lowest strata of caste system. They were I'll treated and exluded from society for 1000s of years. Government now has a "schedule" of indegenous people that require government aid and affirmative action in jobs. These are people living in abject poverty.
bobthepanda 8y ago
Part of the issue is cultural preservation, Distinct cultures, particularly indigenous ones, have unique oral and recorded histories, and translation can lose important cultural context. As an example of that, there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu. Also, ethnic discrimination against indigenous peoples has a long history pretty much globally. Legal equality is often not enough, because the past couple centuries have been spent whittling their economic and social capital to basically nothing. Reparations or subsidy is required for even a hope of getting those people on equal footing.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu The lack of Manchu native speakers is not a problem for dealing with Qing-era state documents. The Manchu language is well-described and for many, many decades Han Chinese scholars (and then foreign scholars in Europe and North America) have been trained to work with Manchu sources. Does the lack of Latin native speakers hinder anyone from working with a new Roman-era text or inscription? Furthermore, those handful of remaining native Manchus heavily code-switch with Chinese, and they have lost a great deal of their native Manchu vocabulary (a common phenomenon as a language dies), so even if you did show them a Qing-era text, they would probably be unable to understand much of its terminology without special training. I am all for protecting language diversity, but your Manchu example is uninformed.

HuShifang 8y ago

One thing: one really can't talk about "China" qua society, or "Chinese" qua ethnicity, in this context. While there's a long, long tradition of talking about Zhongguo 中國 ("the Middle Kingdom", though its original meaning was closer to "the states of the Central [Plain]"), and asserting monoculturalism, in reality Chinese regionalism has always been really pronounced -- hence the reality that when spoken, Chinese "dialects" (like Putonghua/Mandarin and Cantonese) are actually more different, and less mutually intelligible, than European Romance languages. (And it goes beyond language -- think regional cuisines. As further illustration, eespecially if you look at Warring States period cultures, there's actually a stark difference between the traditions of the northern plain and of the south, esp. the state of Chu 楚 -- you can even see it, obviously, in their art and artifacts. The aesthetic are wildly different.) Now, you could argue that Taiwan represented a Chinese conquest of indigenous peoples. But even before the island was annexed (during the Qing dynasty, in 1683 CE) there had been fishermen and pirates from the mainland (and Japan) operating there to some degree. Ultimately, you have various populations leaving the Asian mainland at different times. Sometimes later populations intermixed/intermarried with populations that had arrived in outlying territories earlier, sometimes they displaced them; usually it was a combination of both. But it wasn't some monolithic ethno-state exploiting a technological advantage to expand its reach -- the reality was much more complicated.

chubot 8y ago
Yes your point is taken, I guess saying "people coming from the geographical area that's now China" is more accurate. Coincidentally, yesterday I was watching "Civilizations" on Netflix, and they brought up the 1986 discovery of these incredible Bronze Age statues from the 12th-11th century B.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxingdui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxingdui And they were saying this contradicts the "Middle Kingdom" idea, i.e. that all of Chinese culture came from one place. The book Sapiens reminds us that every civilization/government likes to make an argument for why it has inevitable "divine" authority, and China is no exception. They exaggerate their history to claim power. ----- But I think there is probably a reasonable analogy to Europe. It's not inaccurate to say the "Europeans" conquered the Americas starting around the 1500's. European states like Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands were constantly at war with each other. But they all made conquests to different places in the Americas at slightly different times (i.e. South and Central America for Spain, the Caribbean, North America, etc.) These societies shared broad characteristics and influenced other. Not just agriculture, but also property rights, the rule of law, etc. Their spoken and written languages were mutually unintelligible, but they recognized each other's currencies and could trade with each other. They adopted each other's technologies. Nobody would call them the same, but it is coherent to talk about them as "European". It's a matter of semantics, but I think you can also call a group of disparate people "Chinese" in the same way. Although in the latter case there is a much greater difference in time. The Europe of today has considerable cultural continuity with the Europe of 1500 (art, music, government to some extent, etc.). I don't know how true that is for pre-modern China, although I suspect that if you adjust for the time period, it's roughly similar. I would be interested in pointers to more resources about that. ----- Another point: what other term would I use besides "Chinese"? "Asian" does not seem accurate or what historians would use. I think historians would come up with a different term than "China" or "Sino" if the difference were extremely large. For example, as far as I know Mycenaean society has basically nothing in common with modern Greece -- no continuity in art, music, government, etc. -- but it's still called "Mycenaean Greece" since the land area they occupied is the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece If there is another word for post-agricultural but pre-modern China, I would be happy to use it! "Chinese" is indeed a big and vague term with a lot of baggage to many people. (I am Chinese myself but born in America.)

knolax 8y ago

>I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested. That's quite a strong and controversial claim to be making without strong evidence. From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea. As one of the other replies pointed out, it's also a bit anachronistic to be applying terms like China and Japan in this situation.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea. Japan is a country where even in academia, people often have an unshakable belief in the "uniqueness" of their culture. This has made Japanese unwilling to consider connections to other Asian regions and peoples. Consequently, a lot of the scholarly consensus on Japanese history has been formed by scholars from outside Japan who don't have an attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique. Generally, Korean has been seen as the probable source of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, not China, and there were Japanoid populations on the Korean peninsula centuries ago. However, Alexander Vovin (one of the world's most respected scholars on the history of Japanese) recently gave a thought-provoking conference presentation arguing that the Japanese language and certain aspects of Japanese culture may well ultimately spring from coastal China.
- sgrove 8y ago
  Do you have a link to Alexander Vovin's presentation somewhere online? It sounds fascinating.
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    I believe he posted it to his academia.edu.
- knolax 8y ago
  >Japanoid Given my experience with these outside "scholars" of my own culture, I'm going to go with the Japanese consensus. Often what these people claim as "objectivity" is actually just ignorance that they mask with the pseudoscientific language of the Humanities. >attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique. Every nation and culture is unique. Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors, this notion does not seem unfounded. The hostility that outside scholars have towards this idea does however seem less than objective.

friendstock 8y ago

For the case of Polynesia (including Hawaii), they are considered to be Austronesian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples It is widely believed that they are related to (and originated from) the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, which is distinct from Chinese civilization in both genetics, culture and agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansio... When the Polynesians arrived by boat in New Zealand (Maori), Hawaii, Easter Island and other islands in the South Pacific prior to AD 1300, they were the first settlers there. Also, their expansion is completely unrelated to "Chinese expansion".

ncmncm 8y ago
Hawai'i was already occupied before the population Cook met arrived. Like the Chatham islanders (still present when Cook landed, before the Maori learned of them), they were mostly wiped out. In Hawai'i only legends of "menehunes" remain. A similar process happened in England and Ireland, with Gauls displacing the Picts ("pixies"). The Gauls of Britain and Ireland lost their culture and land to Nordic invaders, but stiil represent much of the genetic heritage there. The "menehunes" arrived via the Marquesas. The present Polynesian population came from Tahiti or Fiji, although all ultimately trace back to Taiwan. There is some evidence that islands closer to New Guinea were populated more than 20,000 years ago, before the present population swept in. Japan adds an interesting footnote: the samurai are said to retain a much higher proportion if Ainu genetic heritage than typical Japanese. This observation is not popular in Japan.

droithomme 8y ago

> agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples Isn't part of the history of Plymouth that the Mayflower pilgrims had no idea how to farm and were woefully unprepared and thus on the verge of starving, but the indigenous Wampanoag people helped them learn how to do it and survive? Isn't there massive, widespread and overwhelming evidence that most indigenous societies in the Americas as an example practiced sophisticated agriculture and had an enormous variety of developed crops and techniques including selective breeding, biochar, terracing, enormous terraforming projects, large scale irrigation systems, special varieties of maize for arctic, desert and salty biomes, as well as developing massive trade networks that managed to get central american grown cocoa as far north as Utah? How could it be that such cultures could possibly be described as being distinguished by not having agriculture?

SECProto 8y ago
> > agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples Yes, that part of the parent comment stuck out at me as grossly untrue. While some were hunter-gatherers, many American indigenous populations had widespread agriculture [1]. [1] I know it's a bit uncouth to cite wikipedia, but it was easy as a source for something I already knew to be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...