Hacker News Reader

Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

The drawings survived 30K years on the wilderness, but couldn't last more than a few decades on civilization!

Implying what’s existed in Australia for thousands of years doesn’t constitute ‘civilization’ :)

Depending on your definition of "civilization", indeed what existed in Australia for thousands of years probably does not qualify.

Can you explain why thousands of years of aboriginal society doesn't qualify as a civilization?

That pretty much boils down to Euro-centric judgement, early British, Dutch, and French reporting, different ideals of what constitutes "culture", destruction of effective but hard to see artifacts (wells, river and ocean fish traps, degradable townsites), etc.

"Culture" and "civilization" are different things. Chimpanzee tribes have culture, as do orcas and dolphins, but I don't see how you can call their societies "civilizations". The group of people here on HN have a "culture", but this is not a "civilization", it's just a website (though it's part of a civilization). Humans lived in hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands of years or more before they invented agriculture and created what we now call "civilization". I really don't see how you could properly apply the term "civilization" to any group of people that live in tribes.

It's nice that we can agree that this come down to a Euro-centric judgement as to what constitutes "civilisation".

If it's a matter of long establish trade routes, borders, territory, stone housing, multi generational aqua culture infrastructure, agriculture, oral transmission of history, etc. then yes, civilised.

If it's a case of a bunch of euro colonisers going "Yeah, Nuh" then no, not civilised.

So you think that you, personally, should be able to decide the proper definitions of words?

Clearly not.

Well that's exactly what you seem to be advocating.

Not at all, you might like to reread and perhaps identify the point at which I assert that I "personally, should be able to decide the proper definition" of "civilised".

I merely pointed out that if one adopts a Euro-centric definition them, indeed, Australian Aboriginals are not civilised.

This is historically what happened when the English declared Terra Nullus - a concept that was later overturned.

If you're unsure of how to reason forward and contrast varying axioms and definitions then this HN thread might of some interest and shed some insight:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34127524

Enjoy!

Civilisation as a value judgement is distinct from the literal description that defines the word, which is the development of cities.

The development of cities is the origin of the word, it's not the current meaning, at best, it's one part of that meaning.

Pretty much all words work this way - see the joke thread under this one saying that the perpetrators in this case shouldn't be called vandals because that's originally the name of a specific German tribe.

The current colloquial definition of civilization almost certainly includes aboriginal society, and from what I can see from a quick online search, the current academic definition often does too - at least, I was able to find several references to Aboriginal civilization in a quick and casual search. However I also checked a few definitions of the word and it seems that's technically incorrect - large scale technical achievements (for example, but not exclusively, cities) are a requirement to be considered a civilization.

Looking a bit deeper, however, I did find some articles pointing out that this definition of civilization is a Eurocentric view and that we should broaden the official scope of the word to include Aboriginal culture since they had a very high level of development in other areas, just not the ones that led to building cities. That seems reasonable to me. It's important not to get hung up on the historical origin of words. Instead we should focus on the most useful definition for us modern humans who are hopefully working towards a more inclusive understanding of the world.

https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/australian-aboriginal...

You lose the meaning of the word if it becomes too inclusive, and you'd simply have to use a new word to distinguish between societies that developed cities and other major technological advancements and those that did not. There were key and fundamental differences between pre-colonial Indigenous Australian nations and the way people lived in say, England, at the same time.

While the origin of the word itself is quite literally Eurocentric, being a judgement and description invented by Romans, the consensus has been for a long time that civilisation did not start in Europe which undermines the idea that it's simply a Eurocentric/racist idea.

You can also certainly argue that civilisation has major faults and ignored local indigenous knowledge in colonial contexts due to a misguided sense of superiority. If I may suggest a good book on this kind of thing, check out Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. I don't buy into the idea that civilisation is inherently superior (although I do like a lot of the things that come with it) which is probably why I don't see a need to make the word more inclusive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com