ABSTRACT
Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home. Civilized peoples and civilized disciplines have, therefore, been particularly sensitive to political action on the part of "backward" peoples, which created the possibility of autonomous societies and alternative cultures. Writing was one of the original mysteries of civilization, and it reduced the complexities of experience to the written word. The dynamics of archaic civilization reveal the pathology of wealth—wealth as power, or luxury as "well-being"—and the inadequacy of the distribution of wealth. Exploitation, then, is the hidden process which contradicts all totalitarian or amelioristic rationalizations for state power. All revolutionary theory is based on the civilizational process. The political component is obscured by deterministic arguments from natural law, natural history and natural science. Anthropology as a civilized discipline has, despite the pretentious relativism of many of its practitioners, "reluctantly" shared the ethnocentric notions of historical inevitability.
