Indigenous Communalism by Carolyn Smith-Morris

Author:Carolyn Smith-Morris [Smith-Morris, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Indigenous Studies, Medical, Public Health
ISBN: 9781978805453
Google: ovy9DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2019-10-18T05:25:31+00:00

HYBRIDITY AND HUMAN COMMUNITY

The idea behind my first three foci in this book—belonging, generation, and representation—is fundamentally a Rousseauian lesson: that all societies are groups in which every individual has some personal investment. Communities are built such that individuals can feel that they belong. Members are generated to be “good” according to communal values and come to use or embody various representations of their larger community in its perpetuation.

I now add the most flexible element in this process, by which different members of the society can express their commitment to the group in varying ways over time. Because communalism and individualism are values informing choices and actions, they are enacted in impossibly diverse ways. They are not rigid typologies. Far from destroying individualism, communal forces inform and populate the myriad ways that individuals express themselves. Individualism is channeled into a limited set of prescribed models by each cultural community.

I turn, therefore, to the concept of hybridity. This commonly used idea is simply a mixture of two different elements. In my use of it, I am not suggesting that Indigenous peoples have some metaphysical character different from other humans. In fact, with hybridity I am referring to a universal human capacity to blend contradictory virtues into a meaningful but complex self-identity.1 It is this capacity for both the individual and the communal together, the synergy of group and person, the hybrid experience within each of us, that ensures communalism is never without its interest in individuals. Hybridity also allows for changing priorities within a person’s lifetime, making necessary adjustments to ancestral or traditional forms—as may be necessary when Indigenous peoples no longer have access to sacred spaces, to communal property, or to a viable living in a shared residential space. And last, hybridity between communalism and individualism is not only a human capacity but also a community capacity. As it does for individuals facing decisions across a lifetime, hybridity acknowledges the creative/productive process in which communities (re)generate themselves. As Lightfoot puts it, “Global Indigenous ultimately rests on a universal right to maintain difference” (2016, 202), a right intended to last into the future.

Despite historic presumptions about societal types—collectivist versus individualist societies—the scientific literature does not always bear out such extreme formulations. Even Melford Spiro was careful to express this hybridity in his ethnography of the kibbutz, a community built on equality among individuals, individual liberty, and the moral ideal of self-realization through labor:

The group, in kibbutz culture, is not only a means to the happiness of the individual; the group and group processes are moral ends in their own right. This has three aspects. It means, first, that the interests of the individual must be subordinate to the interests of the group. When the needs of the individual and those of the group come into conflict, the individual is expected to abdicate his needs in favor of the group’s.… A second aspect of the emphasis on the ethical value of the group involves the assumption that the individual’s motivations will always be directed to the promotion of the group’s interests, as well as of his own.

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