Endangered Cultures

One of the “truisms” of Cultural Anthropology is that in an encounter between two cultures, the more “aggressive” and “dynamic” culture will inevitably swamp and dominate the more passive partner. Does this mean that smaller, pastoral or steady-state cultures are doomed to disappear from the human mosaic?

A perfect case in point is the spectacular and almost extinct culture which gave us the startling stone statuary staring out to sea on the Easter Islands, politically attached to Chile but culturally part of Polenesia. Check out the following analysis from the LA Times…

Often called the loneliest place on earth, Easter Island is now caught up in the swirling changes of globalization and is on the front line of a broader effort to preserve the world’s endangered languages.

Every year, more languages pass into extinction. In the Chilean archipelago north of the Strait of Magellan, the last dozen or so speakers of the Kawesqar Indian language are aged. Inevitably, Kawesqar will join Kunza and Selknam on the list of Chile’s dead languages.

Only an end to “Chileanization,” local leaders here say, can rescue Rapa Nui — the term applies to the language, the 2,000 people who speak it and the island itself. Rapa Nui leaders want political autonomy from Chile or independence so they can control the migration of Spanish-speaking “Continentals” to the island.

“You realize something of your people is being lost, the spirit of our people,” said Virginia Haoa, who runs the immersion classes for students from kindergarten through fourth grade.

For Haoa and others, saving Rapa Nui means saving Easter Island’s uniqueness — “our culture, our cosmology, our way of being,” Haoa said. If Rapa Nui dies, so will a living connection to ancestors who built an exotic, mysterious civilization on an island just a few miles wide in a vast, otherwise empty stretch of the Pacific, 2,300 miles from the South American mainland.

from The Los Angeles Times