Life on the Great Plains

Anthropologist Fred Eggan proposed that environmental pressures of living in the Great Plains  compelled each tribe to create similar family types which they called BANDS.  This meant, a bachelor looking for a wife was compelled to "marry out," that is, marry someone from another band lest he commit incest. 

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 For these tribes living on the Great Plains, their definition of "family" meant the BAND.  From a concept-innatist's perspective, their definition of "family," manifested in history a misrepresentation of a Divine Norm aka ETIC DIVERGENCE. Man and society have the freedom to replace an inherent or Divine meaning aka “etic” with a meaning derived from SOCIAL EXISTENCE in a particular environmental context. 

 

When, for example, horticultural tribes in the East moved into the Great Plains, they all changed their "family" types in order to be successful in hunting buffalo. SOCIAL EXISTENCE on the Great Plains compelled them to constructed a family type called a "band."  The family type selected "fit" the material environment where hunting buffalo was the key to survival. 

 

The band, as a kind of “family,” became the dominant social unit of each tribe.  Members of tribes of the Plains, tribes like the Kiowa-Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho all believed that a super-family called a “band” which ascribed specific functions to their members could do a better job at reducing their existential anxieties than a group of independent nuclear families choosing to work together. 

 

In the words of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, "SOCIAL EXISTENCE PRECEDED AND RULED ESSENCE,” that is, one’s life-way or operating system of values, rules, and beliefs. For the existentialist or contextualizing missionary, no word or concept had an inherent meaning which is fixed and absolute.  The theory is not without merit.

 

Supporting the position that SOCIAL EXISTENCE and environmental pressures did indeed shape the life-ways of the Plain's tribe was anthropologist Fred Eggan. He pointed out that "Tribes coming into the Plains with different backgrounds and social systems ended up with similar kinship systems ...this is in large measure an internal adjustment to the uncertain and unchanging conditions of the Plains environment -- ecological and social -- rather than a result of borrowing and diffusion."  

 

It was a great insight, a perspective ignored by most social scientists, anthropologists, and missiologists. But there is a problem. If SOCIAL EXISTENCE PRECEDES AND RULES ESSENCE as proposed by Sartre, then why did environmental pressures fail to change the life-way of the settlers who moved into the Plains and believed that the basic unit of society was the nuclear family and that its dominant dyad was that of husband-wife rather than some biological dyad selected by environmental fitness? 

 

When the Puritans, who believed ESSENCE transcended the "material elements of the environment" (Col. 2:8),  landed in New England, unknown them, they had entered a Continent  in which SOCIAL EXISTENCE in a particular environment determined the kind of operating system or life-way they would have. Divergence from the Ideal was the cultural norm.  

 

But for the settlers moving west into the Plains, what it meant to be "created in the image of God" declared that ESSENCE aka etic data or archetypes PRECEDED and RULED EXISTENCE.  SOCIAL EXISTENCE in a new environment failed to shape their life-way and force them to rearrange the internal structure of the nuclear family. They refused to have their Bible-based life-way shaped by the "elements of the environment" they were entering. Their behavior and Biblical worldview eventually made America Great. 

 

Convictions.

1. Whenever man and society replace God as Provider in order to relieve their existential anxieties, they must also replace God’s design for living with a man-made defensive system, each shaped by SOCIAL EXISTENCE in a particular environment.

2. CONTEXTUAL SOCIAL EXISTENCE demands a rejection of the nuclear family as the basic unit of society, the replacement of the covenantal dyad of husband-wife with a biological dyad, the creation of a new type of "family" by the merging of mutually exclusive status positions, and finally, the rejection of the rules of logic. 

 

Gilbert Prost

June, 2020