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本帖最后由 草蜢 于 2015-2-28 12:07 编辑
俺抄袭了维基的一段, 这个假说显然是有争议的
俺个人比较倾向人类学家Tooker的观点, 前代的人搞错了, 根本没有真正理解到伊洛魁人不是想象中的代表民主制。 伊洛魁人是母系社会,酋长由老太太指定比较靠谱。:
Influence on the United States[edit]
Historians in the 20th century have suggested the Iroquois system of government influenced the development of the United States's government. Contact between the leaders of the English colonists and the Iroquois started with efforts to form an alliance via the use of treaty councils. Prominent individuals such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were often in attendance. Bruce Johansen proposes that the Iroquois had a representative form of government.[109] The Six Nations' governing committee was elected by the men and women of the tribe, one member from each of the six nations. Giving each member the same amount of authority in the council ensured no man received too much power, providing some of the same effect as the United States's future system of checks and balances.
Consensus has not been reached on how influential the Iroquois model was to the development of United States' documents such as the Articles of Confederation and United States Constitution.[110] The influence thesis has been discussed by historians such as Donald Grinde[111] and Bruce Johansen.[112] In 1988, the United States Congress passed a resolution to recognize the influence of the Iroquois League upon the Constitution and Bill of Rights.[113] In 1987, Cornell University held a conference on the link between the Iroquois' government and the U.S. Constitution.[114]
Scholars such as Jack N. Rakove challenge the thesis. Stanford University historian Rakove writes, "The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois" and notes that there are ample European precedents to the democratic institutions of the United States.[115] Historian Francis Jennings noted that supporters of the thesis frequently cite the following statement by Benjamin Franklin, made in a letter from Benjamin Franklin to James Parker in 1751:[116] "It would be a very strange thing, if six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union … and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies," but he disagrees that it establishes influence. Rather, he thinks Franklin was promoting union against the "ignorant savages" and called the idea "absurd".[117]
The anthropologist Dean Snow has stated that although Franklin's Albany Plan may have drawn inspiration from the Iroquois League, there is little evidence that either the Plan or the Constitution drew substantially from that source. He argues that "...such claims muddle and denigrate the subtle and remarkable features of Iroquois government. The two forms of government are distinctive and individually remarkable in conception."[118]
Similarly, the anthropologist Elizabeth Tooker has concluded that "there is virtually no evidence that the framers borrowed from the Iroquois." She argues that the idea is a myth resulting from a claim made by linguist and ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt that was exaggerated and misunderstood after his death in 1937.[119] According to Tooker, the original Iroquois constitution did not involve representative democracy and elections; deceased chiefs’s successors were selected by the most senior woman within the hereditary lineage in consultation with other women in the tribe.[119] |
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