(The Case for Retiring “Civilization” as a Category — Ehret Proposing That We Gain a More Balanced Understanding by Calling These Societies by Terms More Mat…

(The Case for Retiring “Civilization” as a Category — Ehret Proposing That We Gain a More Balanced Understanding by Calling These Societies by Terms More Materially and Objectively Descriptive — Early Centralized and Stratified Societies and Early Urban Societies — and That We Ought to Be as Direct and Unblinking in Evaluating Their Failings as We Are of Oppressive Societies of More Recent History, Continuing to Apply “Civilization” in Its Usual Fashion Conveying the Nineteenth- and Earlier Twentieth-Century Western Division of Peoples into Civilized Versus Barbarian or Savage, Those Not Belonging to a Civilization Classed by Default as Less Accomplished and Historically Peripheral): We can and should appreciate the human and material accomplishments of those worlds. But we gain a more balanced understanding of their cultural worlds if we call them by terms more materially and objectively descriptive of their features: they were early centralized and stratified societies, and they were early urban societies in the sense that they possessed at least some towns and cities. And we ought to be as direct and unblinking in our historical evaluations of their failings as we are of oppressive societies of more recent history. To continue to apply “civilization” in its usual fashion — with some regions viewed as having “civilization” and others as not — is to continue to convey to the readers of history, whether we mean to or not, the nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century Western division of the peoples of the world into “civilized” versus “barbarian” or “savage.” Those who do not belong to a “civilization” are thus, by default, classed as less accomplished human beings and viewed as historically peripheral. This approach tends to give short shrift to all the variety of notable developments taking place around the world in all eras — developments that fed into and contributed every bit as much to our overall human material accomplishments and to what we now are, culturally and socially, as human beings. The proposal is not merely semantic. It is epistemological. The word “civilization” does not describe a neutral category. It performs a hierarchy. It sorts humanity into those who matter and those who do not, those who produced monuments and those who produced “only” agriculture, monotheism, iron smelting, cotton weaving, musical instruments, and the intellectual foundations of Christianity. The villagers who invented iron smelting in central Africa four thousand years ago were not civilized, by the standard definition, because they did not build pyramids. But they transformed the material conditions of human life more profoundly than any pharaoh. The women who invented ceramics in the Sahara twelve thousand years ago were not civilized, because they did not live in cities. But they created a technology that every subsequent civilization would depend on. To call some societies civilized and others not is to privilege the products of oppression over the products of ingenuity, and it is time — as Ehret says with quiet finality — to stop.