(“But not for me”)

Also acorn dust. Anyway, who need teeth after 30, amrite?

Switzerland being associated with chocolate is the most ridiculous thing ever. How many cocoa trees are there in Switzerland?

I do wanna push back on this and the views expressed by others in reply to you.

Many indigenous peoples have written and spoken extensively on their views on traditional life: and by and large they fall on the side of prefering it, or at the very least not wanting it to be lost.

For example Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “as we have always done” or Patricia A. Monture and Patricia D. McGuire’s “first voices: an aboriginal womens reader” give perspectives of a variety of indigenous women who were active in the big anti pipeline mobilisations. They very much emphasise that their traditional ways have been a source of strength. This isnt even just “well ofc people who’ve always lived like that enjoy it”; many of the people most enthusiastic about reviving traditional ways are the youths who were forced into the modern schooling system.

This isnt some new view. Edited compilations of indigenous peoples speeches and writings going back to the 1600s (see for example penny petrone’s “first people, first voices”) show a 400 year record of indigenous peoples speaking strongly in support of their traditions and ways of being in face of chauvinists claiming their ways are better.

Another resource id suggest looking at is “schooling the world” a documentary on youtube

https://youtu.be/oDxYWspiN-8

It contains many interviews with traditional peoples (mostly in Peru, India, and Nepal) talking about their perspectives on modernity. The older people arent a fan. The younger people who couldnt get a good job in the city (which tbc, in the context of india, peru and nepal, is the majority of them) arent fans either, and often express regret that they havent learnt any traditional skills, so they cant even help their parents on the land while unemployed. This is important to emphasise it isnt just hunter-gatherer peoples (“primitive communists”) who express preference for traditional ways. Even among those who “toil” there is a lotta support for those traditional ways.

Tbf some of that is the results of specifically capitalist modernity. “Modernity” in the global south ofc means levels of toil that are basically incomprehensible in the service economies of the north, so the comparison these people make is between a traditional life of e.g. working their own plot of land and a “modern” life of working 16 hour days in a monoculture plantation. But other aspects (particularly the youths and elders who regret the loss of traditional knowledge, either on sentimental grounds or on practical grounds) dont seem to disappear under better modernities (see for example indigenous peoples in the global north described above), or even under socialism.

For example, Yuri Slezkine in “arctic mirrors” talks about the ways the ussr treated the arctic peoples of siberia and, while they did better than Canada or Yankland, they still fell into chauvinistic European supremacism, for example forcing youths into schools in Moscow to try and drive superstitions and backwards ways from the brightest of the youth. There wasnt starvation or epidemics of sexual assault like in Canadian residential schools, but slezkine does describe several mothers sobbing and cursing the government officials out for taking their kids.

Caroline Humphrey’s “Karl Marx Collective” describes a lotta similar things in the buryat collective farms she examined: notably the elders and youths both wanted to pass on traditional knowledge, but were forbidden from doing so wrt e.g. herding (despite the best herders being the most traditional) bc it contradicted the idea that the methods developed c.1600-1900 by western europeans are always superior to every other way of herding.

There’s many benefits to modernity, but its incorrect to dismiss all criticisms of it. If we do so, we will fall into these same chauvinistic patterns (which ofc are famously part of why the AIM split with the political left in the 80s, but this reply is already too long)

Punching down on traditional peoples ways of life from the high ground of capitalist modernity (especially capitalist modernity in a city or in the global north generally) is frankly chauvinistic and will only lead these peoples (who are on the front lines of the struggle against capitalism in the most viscious and hard fought battles of the last few decades) to distrust the left as just another group of chauvinists who want them to give up their lands and ways of life.

Edit to be clear: whats going on in tibet is clearly very different, with the herders expressing happiness and support for the policies and clearly being able to herd in their own ways

I think it’s because it’s a way of reframing real, material crimes against people into something intangible and idealist. Like when ranchers send mercenaries in to drive indigenous people from their homes so the ranchers can steal the land, that’s a violent crime being committed by Capital against real people for capitalist reasons, depriving them of shelter, food sources, etc and further marginalizing them. Liberals don’t want to cast blame onto Capital or look at things in a material way, so they talk about this “destroying traditional ways of life” and frame it as some mystifying crime that’s just sort of happening because some people are mean instead of facing the reality that it’s capitalists doing capitalism things and hurting real people in real, material ways.

That also, conveniently, lets them level the same condemnations against leftist projects that are modernizing rural communities and improving their standard of living, because when the crime of a rancher displacing indigenous people is some intangible harm to a cultural treasure rather than the ways he is materially making their lives more precarious and desperate, then communists providing a rural village with running water and electricity and medical care and education and industrial farm equipment is also that same crime because it’s disrupting the “traditional” culture as well.

Toil (agrarian toil, at least) is romanticized by those who are at enough of a remove from it to idealize it. We must preserve traditional ways of life so we can pay to gawk at the people who are living authentic lives unspoiled by modernity (which is terrible)!

And isn’t nomadic life by definition always changing?

Conservatives are usually racist. But they are so racist they will even Noble Savage^TM their own in-group. Listen to how fascists talk about white people or men, and it sounds the same way a liberal would fetishize any culture in the global south.

Probably part of the lack of community that many in the modern world feel. I see it all the time when foreigners see the indigenous people. They act like life would be much better if they lived like the more traditional members.

It’s true that those who continue to live that way are happier but I don’t think anyone used to modern life would enjoy living “traditionally” in a tundra. Early hours, late nights, and most of your time spent on agriculture.