Can anthropological studies carried out among primative tribes throw any light on our way of life ????

Question

Apart from their intrinsic interest , these studies do show that , regardless of race , colour , or creed , human beings , enen the most primative , face more or less the same problems but have different ways if dealing with them ....................( i need ur opinions on this subject and support them with examples ) . Tell a problem and tell me how the primative man could deal with it , and how we could deal with it and the differences . Thanx all

Answer 1

first of all you need to NOT EVER use the word 'primitive' again! it is a major anthropological folly on your part! tribes is also no longer an acceptable word in the field either. in any case its true that ancient peoples have faced very similar problems to the ones we're facing now and in the end it ruined them. take Chaco Canyon, a well known southwestern archeological "super city" as it were. Chaco became a place where thousands upon thousands of peoples began to congregate. it was much like the cities of today with its multistoried, apartment like living structures and its grand temples. when too many people thrived there the environment collapsed (among other collapses of political power) and a lot of people died of disease and famine at the time of its fall. the remaining people were forced to flee to other locations far, far away (because the environment around was dessimated from severe over use) from Chaco in order to find/grow food to survive. there are numerous examples, the mayans included where the same kind of thing happend. these of course are the lessons we must learn from in order for our society to not collapse on itself. the main difference between man back then and man now dealing with these same issues is technology. back then you could only do so much to keep the population limited so it wouldn't destroy the environment. now there's things like birthcontrol to prevent this.

Answer 2

Well, the Kung! bushmen are probably one of the best examples of this.  They are (or were) one of the few hunter-gatherer groups left in the world in the 70's and 80's, and anthropologists were eager to study them.

One interesting aspect was that they also seem to practice "serial monogamy", as do many in Western culture.  However, many of the difficulties of this style were lessened for one reason.  The small groups that the married couples lived in were composed of family members of both of them, but most importantly, of the wife.  If she was being mistreated as a young bride, her father would step in and have a harsh word or two for her husband.  If a couple with children later divorced, the woman's family was right there to help support the children, and to be sure that everyone would be fairly treated.  This seemed to give the women in that society more equality in their relationships.  I wonder if we might do more to see that our own society's children are better protected, even if we do not know every child personally as the Kung! did.  Perhaps the problem is that our "tribes" have gotten so big, that we are expected to care for millions of "group members" all together.  It also says something about the value to women of keeping close ties with family members.

Answer 3

Indeed, primitive is wrong on so many levels. It is rather relative; I assume you use it in a technological sense (i.e. 'they' hunt with bow and arrow, whilst 'we' cook food in a microwave). Probably the only acceptable way of using primitive is in a temporal sense (i.e. these people lived a long long time ago), but the term is too prone to connotations and should perhaps never be used.

I assume that what you are looking for is fundamental pattern in human behaviour regardless of cultural differences? Remember that all humans alive today belong to H. sapiens, so they are equally cognitively complex. What problems they'll have to deal with depends on their environment.

Therfore, there are many different ways of dealing with similar problems (be they biological or social in nature), but the solutions depend on socio-cultural factors as well as the decisions made by individuals. You could perhaps cited one of the studies you speak of tho clarify what type of problems in particular you were thinking of.

Answer 4

the first thing to study is why we live it if we dont even understand it