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The four chapters in Part II are stage setters. Their purpose is to provide a general description of the social systems that are known to have characterized native American societies in the past as well as now. Most of the examples in these chapters, however, concern recent historical events in modern European, African, and Asiatic societies with which the reader is already familiar—chosen because they show the general social characteristics we wish to explain. The chapters in the following section of the book, “The Matrix of Lives,” will describe the same social philosophies at work in the native American Big Six. The reader will also ¤nd the statements in this and the following three chapters to be rather repetitive. With due apologies, I have purposely said the same thing a number of times in different ways with the expectation that such repetition will etch the primary concepts with which we must deal indelibly on the reader’s mind. The Forest vs. the Trees To begin, it is worth pointing out, as we did in the introduction, that there is enough archaeological and ethnohistorical data available to describe the workings of most of the larger independent American polities at the end of the ¤fteenth century in considerable detail. To do so society by society in this chapter, however, would cause the fabric of the forest to vanish because of the individual trees. We will consequently leave such a discussion to the six chapters of the “Matrix of Lives” section and concentrate our attention here solely on an abbreviated description of the larger overall views, distilled from the whole by description of the overriding social philosophies of thought and action most readily seen in those societies’ kin systems. It was these concept sets that characterized native American life then, as they still do today. 3 Native Philosophies of Life One should also not lose sight of the fact that the Big Six were but the tip of the iceberg, the most successful of the native American societies. There were hundreds of other smaller native groups productively following their own lifeways as well. The lack of data and description of these equally valid social expressions should not be taken as an indication that they were unimportant . It is again, rather, a case of wanting to show the dominant characteristics of the most visible American societies that had developed organizational structures similar to the European nation-state at the time of European intervention. The social philosophies of the Big Six, delimiting behavior in every walk of life, were in some cases not dissimilar to European philosophies, but most were distinctively different, some radically so. It is here that one can see the rationale for native American actions, what the peoples’ goals were and how they reached toward them. It is these underlying philosophies that determined the manner in which the American societies interacted both with each other and with the European invaders. Such social philosophies, however, it should hastily be pointed out, do not determine anyone’s behavior. They do not dictate how an individual must behave . Rather they give a set of viable socially accepted options from which to choose a course of action. One may not, however, go outside such options without incurring disapproval or punishment from the other members of the society. The goal in this section is to describe the broadly de¤ned sets of positive options available to members of the native American Big Six in 1492. Social Systems and the Scheme of Things The considerable amount of data we have from social anthropology, archaeology , ethnohistory, and native literatures indicates that in all the cultural and linguistic diversity of the pre-Columbian New World, only the three social option sets we described earlier (unitary, dualistic, and trinary) were used. These are not just New World themes, however, for they also occurred then and do now in European, African, Asian, and Paci¤c societies. They are distributed , though, in a quite different manner in native America than in other parts of the world. We have suggested that solid data make it evident that these three varying themes and their incidence around the world form everywhere the fabric of human alliances and consequent international, intercultural relationships. It was clearly the differences between these themes that determined the nature of European-American interaction in the ¤fteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it was such contrasts that created the New World problems that appeared rapidly after 1492. 42 part ii. the inner man...

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