Aborigines

ABORIGINES. - Indigenous people native to the place where they live (autochthons). In the ethnological sense, those inhabitants of a land are called aborigines whose civilization proves to be the most ancient among all those flourishing around them.

They are: in Africa the Pygmies of the Ituri, and some groups of the same to the west, furthermore the Pignandi Batwa (Belgian Congo and Rwanda), and finally the Bushmen in the Kalahari desert; in North America some Joshua and Selish tribes in the northwest, the Algonquins (Lenâpe, Winnebago, Sauks, Foxes, Arapaho, Cheyenne, etc.), some tribes of central California (Maidu, Pomo, Wintu, etc.), in South America the Gê (Brazil) and then the Fuegians (Tierra del Fuego); in Asia some Arctic peoples such as the Samoyeds, certain Koryaks, the Tungus, the Eskimos, and also the Ainu in Japan, the Andamanese of the archipelago of the same name, the Semang of the Malay peninsula, and the Negritos of the Philippines; in Australia certain tribes of the southeastern zone of the continent (Kurnai, Kulin, Kamilaroi, etc.).

All peoples, then, who live in secluded places, and often on the margins of the continents, on islands, in dark forests, among mountains difficult of access, in desert wastes, far from the great and obligatory routes of traffic, almost as if forcibly driven back into natural refuges by the impetus of successive migratory waves. Their cultures differ, in general, from the more advanced civilizations by the absence of pottery, of weaving, of metalworking, and by the fact that they practice neither agriculture nor pastoralism. The men provide faunal foods by simple individual hunting; the women gather herbs, roots, wild fruits. These are, in short, that type of culture which goes under the name of Simple Hunters and Gatherers. They have a marked sense of the family, predominantly monogamous, with free choice on the part of the girl. Abduction or purchase of the bride is unknown. The woman has equal rights, or at least enjoys relative independence in the domestic sphere. The birth rate is high despite nomadism. Infanticide is absent. Few of those tribes are governed by chiefs because of the great pre-eminence of the family. Respect for the individual is lively, cannibalism and slavery are unknown. The concepts of individual and family property are clear. Faith in a supreme Being, creator, legislator, judge, owner of all that is needed for existence, is marked. He is the object of a cult expressed through prayers, ceremonies and offerings (first fruits of the hunt and of the gathering). The myths are very rich which treat of him, of his teachings, of creation, of paradise, of the first sin and of its corresponding sanction: death. This is the form of civilization that, through broad comparisons, reveals itself as the most ancient, and we have confirmation of this from linguistics, which often shows us how the speech of many of these peoples constitutes an island among those surrounding them, and from anthropology, whose scholars now agree on the antiquity of those peoples. It is understood, however, that in the type of civilization in question one should not see absolutely primordial civilization, but only the most ancient among those known, that is, the oldest stratum of the civilizations today ethnologically attainable. - See Pl. VII.

Michele Schulien