著者

尾本 惠市 Kaiichi Omoto

雑誌

桃山学院大学総合研究所紀要 = ST.ANDREW'S UNIVERSITY BULLETIN OF THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE (ISSN:1346048X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.29, no.3, pp.101-120, 2004-02-20

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This paper attempts to answer some important questions such as, “Who are indigenous people?” and “What are human rights?” from the standpoint of anthropology. Usually, these are regarded as questions of law, political, or historical sciences. However, as an anthropologist with experiences of field work among the indigenous hunter-gatherers or affluent foragers in Asia, such as the Ainu of northern Japan and the Negritos of the Philippines, I believe that these questions are of fundamental importance in the integrated, new human science at which I am now aiming. After having examined the various definitions of the indigenous people, I tried to compare the histories of the Ainu and the Native Americans with special regard to the problem of human rights. It was found that the two groups show a number of similarities or parallelism in the ways of being invaded, deprived of their land, and ill-treated, as well as suffering from the assimilation policy of the colonists or the national majority group, who were the Japanese for the Ainu and the Europeans for the native Americans. The four wars of the Ainu against the Japanese colonists under the government of the Edo period were compared with the similar events of contemporary northern America. These were the wars of Koshamain (1457), Henauke (1643), Shakushain (1669), and Kunashiri-Menashi (1789). It was argued that the basic ideology of the colonists who invaded the land and ill-treated the indigenous peoples was monotheism and/or ethnocentrism. I do not support the view of “civilized” people that the hunter-gatherer groups of today living as a tiny minority of the world population are the stragglers left behind by civilization. I rather consider these groups to be the invaluable eyewitnesses on the original way of life of modern humans with spirits based on animism. Today, when humans are said to be approaching the end of existence, I think we should hear their messages to the modern civilized world.