Reading Ingold’s article about trust and domination made me think about an issue that has come up in many of my classes and in conversations with people outside of class. This happened during our first discussion as well. The issue is a problematic idea of what progress is and what it means and implies. I apologize in advance if this doesn’t make much sense, but I’ll do my best.
Progress is a term that has many ideas wrapped up in it that don’t seem incredibly obvious at first glance. Progress implies a movement toward in a direction that is better than the current state of things. The better that is implicit in this turns the idea of progress into a value judgement. Progress is a good thing because it leads to something better.
The problem with this idea is that the way that we, being us in the class, define better is very subjective and based on our own cultural experiences. Our idea of better is not the same as another culture’s idea of better. Therefore, our ideas about progress can not be applied to other cultures because of the disconnect between idea’s of what is good. When we lose sight of this disconnect, we try to superimpose our idea’s of progress on other culture’s and end up being judgmental in an unfair way.
Ingold mentions this in the first part of his article. Darwin talked about the hunter-gatherers he encountered on his voyage around the world and compared them to the culture he knew and deemed them backwards and without many redeeming qualities. The rest of Ingold’s article discusses why this is an unfair judgement. Hunter-gatherers were and are not any worse than other cultures because they lack technology, they simply live differently. Judging their progress as a culture or civilization based on the Western standard of how much can they produce is unfair because, as Ingold describes, production as we see it is irrelevant to the hunter-gatherers. Their conception of nature as something to be trusted to provide as opposed to something to be dominated is so different from what Darwin knew as good, that his judgements ultimately do not mean anything.
Unfortunately, unfair judgements like Darwin’s are not limited to 19th century naturalists. It seems that many people in the present day do the same thing to Native Americans. In my experience, many people think Native Americans were backward because they did not have the technology that colonists had. The colonists helped Native Americans progress by introducing their technology to North America. They helped the Native Americans progress beyond their unsophisticated hunter-gatherer ways. This narrative is unfair because it imposes a Western cultural standard on the Native Americans. It is also unfair because Native Americans lived much better than early colonists.
I don’t think that people do this purposefully. I think it is mostly that people don’t think about the implications of the word “progress.” By more closely examining what we say in class, I think we can better analyze the arguments that we read. Again, I apologize if this seems like a rant.