Group items tagged

While Torres Strait Island populations were agriculturalists who supplemented their diet through the acquisition of wild foods the remainder of Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers. Indigenous Australians along the coast and rivers were also expert fishermen. Some Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders relied on the dingo as a companion animal, using it to assist with hunting and for warmth on cold nights.

Torres Strait Islanders

Indigenous Australians did practise agriculture.

sugar cane, taro and sweet potato as well as husbanding pigs

To enable men and women to find suitable partners, many groups would come together for annual gatherings (commonly known as corroborees) at which goods were traded, news exchanged, and marriages arranged amid appropriate ceremonies. This practice both reinforced clan relationships and prevented inbreeding in a society based on small semi-nomadic groups.

mainland Australia no animal other than the dingo

Indigenous diet included a wide variety of foods, such kangaroo, emu, wombats, goanna, snakes, birds, many insects such as honey ants and witchetty grubs. Many varieties of plant foods such as taro, nuts, fruits and berries were also eaten.

A primary tool used in hunting was the spear, launched by a woomera or spear-thrower in some locales. Boomerangs were also used by some mainland Indigenous peoples. The non-returnable boomerang (known more correctly as a Throwing Stick), more powerful than the returning kind, could be used to injure or even kill a kangaroo.

Permanent villages were the norm for most Torres Strait Island communities. In some areas mainland Indigenous Australians also lived in semi-permanent villages, most usually in less arid areas where fishing could provide for a more settled existence. Most Indigenous communities were semi-nomadic, moving in a regular cycle over a defined territory,

Many Indigenous communities also have a very complex kinship structure and in some places strict rules about marriage. In traditional societies, men are required to marry women of a specific moiety

In contrast Australian Aborigines did not cultivate any crops and lacked any domestic food animals

The Indigenous Australians lived through great climatic changes and adapted successfully to their changing physical environment

These impoverished peasants often moved to the cities, providing cheap labor essential for the growth in urban manufacturing

Eastern Europe (especially Poland) and Latin America, exhibited characteristics of peripheral regions.

In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests destroyed indigenous authority structures and replaced them with weak bureaucracies under the control of these European states.

served as buffers between the core and the peripheries

According to Wallerstein, the semi-peripheries were exploited by the core but, as in the case of the American empires of Spain and Portugal, often were exploiters of peripheries themselves. Spain, for example, imported silver and gold from its American colonies, obtained largely through coercive labor practices, but most of this specie went to paying for manufactured goods from core countries such as England and France rather than encouraging the formation of a domestic manufacturing sector.

Similarly, Protestants, who were often the merchants in Catholic countries, found they were targets of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, a trans-national institution, found the development of capitalism and the strengthening of the state threatening.

During this period, workers in Europe experienced a dramatic fall in wages.

This powerful merchant class provided the capital necessary for the industrialization of European core states.

European states participated in active exploration for the exploitation of new markets.

With the independence of the Latin American countries, these areas as well as previously isolated zones in the interior of the American continent entered as peripheral zones in the world economy. Asia and Africa entered the system in the nineteenth century as peripheral zones.

the core enriched itself at the expense of the peripheral economies. This, of course, did not mean either that everybody in the periphery became poorer or that all citizens of the core regions became wealthier as a result.

Wallerstein asserts that an analysis of the history of the capitalist world system shows that it has brought about a skewed development in which economic and social disparities between sections of the world economy have increased rather than provided prosperity for all.

This was the first time that an economic system encompassed much of the world with links that superseded national or other political boundaries

Institutions in many African countries are derived from developed countries’ institutions. This makes the whole idea of independence derisory.

elimination of proxy wars that were constantly blamed for the underdevelopment of the third world, third world leaders would re-channel their resources in worthy directions, such as health care, education and poverty eradication.