Woody writing over at GM’s Corner has identified a news statement issued across the Pond titled Tribal peoples are not stone age or primitive. Highlights include:

The Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), the UK’s professional body for anthropologists, has condemned the use of terms like ‘stone age’ and ‘primitive’ to describe tribal and indigenous peoples alive today. The condemnation comes in the wake of controversial comments made on the BBC by Baroness Jenny Tonge, the Liberal Democrat peer, who called the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert ‘stone age’ and ‘primitive.’

Survival International’s Director, Stephen Corry, said today, ‘It is a great boost to our campaign that the ASA has come on board. Journalists and editors need to understand that the use of these kinds of terms directly contributes to the suffering of tribal and indigenous peoples all around the world.’

[emphasis mine]

Quite a mouthful here to digest. Though first, I would note that this is a very strange statement to post on a professional society’s office news site, in that there is no explanation as to the process by which this statement was issued nor is any human agency listed as taking responsibility, just “the ASA”. Nothing about a resolution voted on by members, or an executive board, or even officers.

This omission is especially striking when the statement states that “all anthropologists”…I guess I missed the news stories about that unanamous worldwide vote of all anthropologists. Or even the unanamous vote of all the social anthropologists in the UK agreeing to sign on professionally to the political opinions and the political campaign being sponsored by Survival International.

Or perhaps all means those who agree with us – the rest don’t count.

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In any case, we now need to update our PC approved language list, tribal and indigenous are good; stone age, primitive and savage are bad, or perhaps bad only if it’s a negative use.

Now, note how the use of the proscribed words stone-age, primitive, and savage become transmuted to racism in the media and ideas that cause suffering and even more amazingly become directly responsible for human suffering – no human agency needed. It’s amazing how powerful these few English words are.

Following the ASA link to the Survival International website, the stakes rise even further. There we read:

Terms like ’stone age’ and ‘primitive’ have been used to describe tribal people since the colonial era, reinforcing the idea that they have not changed over time and that they are backward. This idea is both incorrect and very dangerous. It is incorrect because all societies adapt and change, and it is dangerous because it is often used to justify the persecution or forced ‘development’ of tribal peoples. The results are almost always catastrophic: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, disease and death.

In other words, before the colonial period and the use of the words stone age and primitive, these societies were rich, always sober, sexually pure, totally healthy, and immortal. The colonial settlers came, spoke The Deplorable Word, ideas sprang forth like the horsemen of the Apolcalypse, and suddenly these societies descended into poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, disease, and death.

Really? I guess they must believe so, since their solution is for everyone to look for these words being used and then report these words to the central authorities in order to stamp out the usage. I guess when the last use has been stamped out, we’ll return to paradise – or perhaps just these tribes – the rest of us are beyond redemption, I guess, since our known history has never been free of poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, disease, death…

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Guess what, folks? Time for a new revision to the PC-dictionary. Following the other ASA link to Black Britain, we hear from Dr. Liz Henry:

But Dr Henry believes that whilst Survival and the ASA condemn the use of terms like ‘Stone Age’ and ‘primitive’ they should also examine their use of the terms ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal.’

He points out that Professor Ekwe Ekwe from the Centre of Cross Cultural Studies in Dakar, Senegal, maintains that in African languages there is no term that equates to the European notion of tribe, which really means ‘non-people.’

I’ve never seen that definition for tribe before in any dictionary I’ve read. Though I guess it shouldn’t matter since we need to proscribe these words too: tribe, tribal.

Of course, that doesn’t answer what African languages would call those people groups whom its perfectly okay to fight wars against, kill, sell into slavery, rape, expel. But then again, in the world these academics inhabit, rather than to deal with the past and present consequences of tribalism – there I’ve said it – it more important to launch campaigns against words you don’t like because they represent reality intruding into your fanstasy worlds.

For people that intellectually vapid and divorced from the real world consequences of their idiocy, there’s probably no cure. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us need to be lemmings. Certainly not to take into our city this Trojan Horse that would perpetuate this anti-West victim mythology that it’s all our fault

Yes, words do have power. And I won’t let my words be circumscribed by PC thugs. Nor enter into suicide pacts with these new totalitarians!