[PEN-L:2957] Re: selling Manhattan

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Barkley,

Pretty much all of the indigenous peoples have been studied by anthropologists; and the generalization I made works for the North Americans pretty well, including the groups in the vicinity of Manhattan. Your word "grandiose" sounds like only one or two tribes have been studied and then there was an inference to the rest. But , one by one, the whole grand total has been studied ethnohistorically, archeologically and ethnographically. So, in this case your implication of a generalization based on lack of data is wrong. In other words, I didn't make a grandiose generalization, but one based on a HUGE amount of ethnological investigation and reasoning. There are no examples  groups in the vicinity of Manhattan having property concepts like the Dutch, which is all I need - conceptions DIFFERENT than the Dutch - to conclude there was no meeting of the minds.

Yes we also know the Aztecs are somewhat different than many of the tribes of North America. However,  there are theories about Inca Communism. So, we don't know that the Aztecs, Toltecs, Mixtecs, Maya, Olmec or occupants of Teotihuancan (pyramids of the sun and moon north of Mexico city) didn't have somekind of communal property concepts, very different from the Dutch. In fact, the evidence we have is that the indigenous people of MesoAmerica probably didn't have Dutch concepts of private property. There is no evidence that the Aztecs had capitalism.

What's your evidence that any group in the Western Hemisphere had conceptions close enough to Dutch conceptions for a meeting of the minds ? All the evidence we have would give rise to the opposite presumption.

After you study anthropology for 30 years, you feel more comfortable with making generalizations in it. Sorry about the grandiose generalizations of others on the list.

Charles Brown





>>> "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb@xxxxxxx> 02/05 3:22 PM >>>
Charles,
     You are doing something that we have seen a bit too
much of on some of these lists, namely making grandiose
generalizations about all "indigenous peoples" especially
Native American Indians.  There were lots of tribal
variations in many practices and social/economic relations
and patterns.  Although many were arguably exemplars of
"primitive communism," many were not.  I would note the
Aztecs for starters, but could go on.
Barkley Rosser
On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 14:09:56 -0500 Charles Brown
<CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Indigenous people didn't have no concept of property. They had no PRIVATE property. Private property is not the only form of property. Property is a social relation of production, a relationship between people regarding things. Indigenous peoples had production and relations of production. The latter organized their relationship to each other with respect to "the land", productive sources in nature or their genome. Early communism doesn't mean there was no sense of "our genome".
>
> The solution is to put the land back into communist relations of production, abolish private property in the basic means of production , including the land.
>
> Charles Brown
>
> >>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 02/05 1:49 PM >>>
> michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> >Barkley know better.  The Dutch did not BUY Manhattan since the indigenous
> >people had no conception private proerty.  They gave beads and the people
> >let them stay there and use the land.  Only later did they declare it to
> >be private property.
> >
> >Sorting out rights and wrongs after a theft is difficult.  I think the
> >real value of the ongoing dialogue is the ongoing theft from indigenous
> >people -- whether taking of their plant genome, their land, or their
> >genes.
>
> How'd we go from "no conception of private property" to "their plant
> genome"? Whose genome is it anyway?
>
> Doug
>

--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb@xxxxxxx