Capitalism Threatens Indigenous Way of Life

Any time I read about another native culture biting the dust, I truly go through a grieving process. Maybe its the part of me that wants to throw my lifeless laptop out my second story window and learn to live out in the woods. Its the part of me that riles against the ugliness and monotony of modernity, the part of me that wants to return to something less complicated. In a world full of gadgets and TV dinners, sometimes I just want to understand what it means to be a human, plain and simple.

That’s why when The New York Times printed an article Sunday about the Ogiek people of Kenya and their battle against cultural extinction, I had to set aside a little alone time for myself. The Kenyan government is currently attempting to kick them out of the Mau Forest, their traditional ancestral ground, in a purported attempt to preserve the environment. Whatever their claims, the Times made it clear that the Kenyan government’s eviction is more than likely a power grab to attain timber and other valuable resources. The Ogiek are yet another group of indigenous people fighting the tides of modernization, capitalism, and globalization in the hopes of preserving a genuine part of themselves.

Indigenous cultures embody a way of life the rest of us tossed aside somewhere along the line in the name of “progress.” They are humans that exist on the most fundamental and raw levels. Anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers have long marveled at what these cultures have to tell us about ourselves. Their distinct relationships with nature, unique languages, and seemingly strange ways help explain where we came from and how all humans relate to one and another.

The recently deceased Claude Lévi-Strauss, father of modern anthropology and prime spokesman for structuralism, studied indigenous culture as a means to understand underlying connections and narratives that played themselves out throughout humanity. While most of western civilization saw these cultures as “primitive,” Strauss believed there was more to it than this ignorant write off. He pieced together many unique cultures over his years of study and came to remarkable conclusions about how all humans share similar characteristics, such as language formation and belief systems, that actually unite us.

In our own time, we are beginning to witness a new spin on Strauss’s observations. As humanity increasingly becomes a homogeneous culture dictated by capitalism, our unique parts disappear and we all become the same. But this unity lacks the myths and depths that ordinary make cultures so amazing. Instead, it is a solidarity solely driven by corporations whose only desire is profit. It is an ugly force which carries no substance in itself, one we must be wary of if we desire to preserve our varying world.

It may come to pass that the only indigenous cultures remaining will be stored away on dusty shelves of libraries (or should I say the internet?). They will be words instead of flesh, studies instead of real humans. Their pain, sweat, and way of life will exist only as an afterthought. I myself may never be able to return to my hunter-gathering past, but I see no reason to disturb those who have retained something so beautifully human.