Savage Anxieties: The Invention Of Western Civilization

Description

From one of the world's leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples' human rights comes an original and striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society. Historical conflicts between the Western world and tribalism are said to be grounded in irreconcilable differences in culture, governing institutions, religion and worldview. Throughout the centuries, conquest, war, and unspeakable acts of violence and dispossession have all been justified by citing civilization's opposition to these differences represented by the tribe. Robert Williams, award-winning author, legal scholar, and member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, proposes a wide-ranging reexamination of the history of the Western world, told from the perspective of civilization's war on tribalism as a way of life. Starting from the foundations of Western political theory and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome to show how the West's war on tribalism influenced and shaped Christianity, the Renaissance and Enlightenment Eras, the African slave trade, Darwin's theory of evolution, the Vietnam War, and even today's environmental movement, Williams shows us how what we thought we knew about the rise of Western civilization over the tribe is in dire need of reappraisal.

Author description

ROBERT A. WILLIAMS JR. is a member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe as well as the Professor of Law and Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, USA. He is the author of the classic work on Indian rights under US law, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, which won the Gustavus Meyer human rights award recently. The recipient of awards from the MacArthur, Ford, and Soros foundations, Williams is also well known for his work defending tribal groups before the United Nations and the Supreme Court.