Thirty endangered languages in the Philippines

There are 6,809 languages spoken in the world today. Conservative estimates are that the world\u27s languages are currently dying at the rate of at least two languages each month, and linguists predict that most of today\u27s languages will die out in the next 100 years. Since 1962, the author has been gathering field data on some of the smallest language groups in the world-the Philippine Negritos. This paper will explain why the thirty-plus Negrito languages in the Philippines are endangered, and what the projected future is for these numerically tiny post-foraging societies in the 21st century. The argument will be supported by a review of the population sizes, interethnic human rights problems, and the environmental destruction of the rainforests of these marginalized peoples

Holocene Foragers and Interethnic Trade: A Critique of the Myth of Isolated Independent Hunter-Gatherers

It is popularly thought that today's existing hunter-gatherers lived until recently in isolation, independent of food-producing peoples. The present thesis takes a different view, proposing that middle-to-late Holocene foragers followed an economy based heavily on trade relationships with neighboring food producers. It is argued here that the symbiosis observed today among such groups as Southeast Asian Negritos, the !Kung Bushmen, and the African Pygmies is neither recent nor anomalous but reflects a subsistence strategy that has been followed by most hunter-gatherers for millennia

Hunter-Gatherers and Their Neighbors from Prehistory to the Present

It is widely assumed that modern hunter-gatherer societies lived until very recently in isolation from food-producing societies and states and practiced neither cultivation, pastoralism, nor trade. This paper brings together data suggesting a very different model of middle to late Holocene hunter-gatherer economy. It is argued that such foraging groups were heavily dependent upon both trade with food-producing populations and part-time cultivation or pastoralism. Recent publications on a number of hunter-gather societies establish that the symbiosis and desultory food production observed among them today are neither recent nor anomalous but represent an economy practiced by most hunter- gatherers for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Psychological and political reasons for Westerners' attachment to the myth of the "Savage Other" are discussed

Making Sense of Institutional Change in China: The Cultural Dimension of Economic Growth and Modernization

Building on a new model of institutions proposed by Aoki and the systemic approach to economic civilizations outlined by Kuran, this paper attempts an analysis of the cultural foundations of recent Chinese economic development. I argue that the cultural impact needs to be conceived as a creative process that involves linguistic entities and other public social items in order to provide integrative meaning to economic interactions and identities to different agents involved. I focus on three phenomena that stand at the center of economic culture in China, networks, localism and modernism. I eschew the standard dualism of individualism vs. collectivism in favour of a more detailed view on the self in social relationships. The Chinese pattern of social relations, guanxi, is also a constituent of localism, i.e. a peculiar arrangement and resulting dynamics of central-local interactions in governing the economy. Localism is balanced by culturalist controls of the center, which in contemporary China builds on the worldview of modernism. Thus, economic modernization is a cultural phenomenon on its own sake. I summarize these interactions in a process analysis based on Aoki's framework