Agriculture as Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race? Anthropology 2.

Jared Diamonds breakthrough 1987 article, Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race claims agriculture did not deliver the splendors of civilization but was instead a highway to hell. This section examines the traditional progressivist perspective on agriculture and the sources for Diamonds revisionism, including passages that seem plagiarized from earlier anthropological work. This section is an introduction to an archaeology and anthropological investigation of domestication, hunting-and-gathering, agriculture, and the rise of state government. It is impossible to consider these issues without tackling the writings of Jared Diamond, whose works on agriculture and its implications for modern life are very widely read, influential with powerful people like Bill Gates. For more on human nature, evolution, and race see my Kindle e-Book:

This section examines Diamonds initial article Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race that would enable him to become an authority on archaeology and world historylater sections follow his trajectory. For an evaluation of Diamonds latest, The World Until Yesterday see The Yanomami Ax Fight: Science, Violence, Empirical Data, and the Facts.

Agriculture, Traditional View: Progressivist Watershed Moment

By around 15,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had spread to every major habitable landmass, as a single, inter-breeding species. There were no other significant populations of bipedal hominid species likeNeandertals or Denisovans. People were in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. People lived from gathering and hunting. Around 15,000 years ago, in some parts of the world, this would change, as people began more intensively cultivating plants and herding animals. These processes are known as domestication or the transition to agriculture, conceived as a watershed moment in human history, the time when human history begins. Note the similar root words behind culture, agriculture, and cultivation.

According to dominant mythology, prior to cultivation, humans lived in a wild man state, not very different from the non-human animals they hunted. With domestication, humans tame and control these wild animals, and in the process begin to tame and control themselves. Again, in the traditional view, agriculture makes possible craft-specialization, urban life, writing, and the state. Agriculture is the watershed moment when humans began taming themselves and controlling their environment, eventually leading to the splendor of civilization. The traditional view reinforces some pretty vile feelings about fellow human beings. Although Charles Darwin sympathetically understood the continuum of humans with the natural world, he had some pretty nasty stuff to say about some of the people he met in Tierra del Fuego during his 1831-1836 Voyage of the Beagle: The language of these people, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate. . . . We have no reason to believe that they perform any sort of religious worship. . . . The different tribes have no government or chief. . . . They cannot know the feeling of having a home, and still less that of domestic affection. . . . Their skill in some respects may be compared to the instinct of animals, for it is not improved by experience. (2001:183,191-2) No religion, no government, no home, no domesticity, not even language or skills. For Darwin, and many others, the savage-primitive is closer to non-human animal than to civilized humans. As Tim Ingold comments: Biologically, Darwin seems to be saying, these people are certainly human beings, they are of the same species as ourselves, yet in terms of their level of civilization they are so far from being human that their existence may justifiably be set on a par with that of the animals. (Ingold 2000:65) Not everyone agreed with Darwin, and there was a counter-tradition of celebrating the noble savage (see section on Anthropology and Human Nature and for a June 2013 update, see Epigenetics on The Edge of Human Nature). However, for the most part this evil-versusnoble debate shared the premises that agriculture led to free time and civilization. A new perspective, a revisionist approach, emerged in the 1960s, questioning the benefits of agriculture. In The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Jared Diamond rhetorically overstated the case, pushing the revisionist line past its limits. First published in 1987 in DiscoverThe Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Raceremains famous, and is still a staple for anthropology readers: although it disappears from the 2012 edition of the four-field Applying Anthropology it curiously still appears in the 2013 edition of Applying Cultural Anthropology.

Writing with characteristic verve, Diamond summarizes an impressive amount of material in just three pages. At the top of the second and third pages, he headlines the main point: The adoption of agriculture, supposedly the decisive step to a better life, was in fact catastrophic. With agriculture came the curses of social and sexual inequality, disease, and despotism (1987:65-66). Diamond drew on several sources for this revisionism:

a) Anthropologists re-evaluated gathering and hunting

Many anthropologists have worked with gatherers and hunters, but Richard Borshay Lees work with !Kung San in the Kalahari most challenged prevailing paradigms. Lee did not just live with the !Kung to learn their wisdom: he was an expert at weighing game, counting calories, and calculating work hours. Lees seminal article was What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources(1968), which has been retitled for some anthropology readers as The Hunters: Scarce Resources in the Kalahari. The titles are misleading. Lee actually changed ideas of these groups as exclusively hunters, empirically demonstrating the importance of gathering: the basis of Bushman diet is derived from sources other than meat. . . . plant foods comprise over 60 per cent of the actual diet (1968:43). Lee also fought against the idea of scarce resources: Life in the state of nature is not necessarily nasty, brutish, and short. The Dobe-area Bushmen live well today on wild plants and meat, in spite of the fact that they are confined to the least productive portion of the range in which Bushman peoples were formerly found (1968:43). Diamond uses Lee for his very first piece of contrarian evidence: It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadnt emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world? (Diamond 1987:65) The quote about mongongo nuts is directly from Lees article, but Diamond does not cite or mention Lee. As the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race continues to circulate, people now associate the quote more with Diamond than with Lee. However, it is a direct reference to Lees work. (See for example the 2009 BBC blog-post by Tom Feilden Do huntergatherers have it right? which mentions one Kalahari Bushman quoted by Jared Diamond.) Much of Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race appears in Diamonds book The Third Chimpanzee (1991). Here, Diamond again uses the quote about mongongo nuts, and

again does not cite Lee. Diamond mentions Lees work one time, at the end, in a suggestion for further readings. Although such lack of citation might be somewhat excused in his shorter magazine article, it seems to border on unethical plagiarism in a longer book. As I point out below, Diamond borrows more from Lee and DeVores Man the Hunter than he acknowledges: he lifts some passages in Man the Hunter for Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Another prominent source exploring the implications of Lees work was The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins. This began as a conference comment on Lees work, later published as a more complete essay in Stone Age Economics (1972), a book that would be required reading for a generation of anthropologists. Sahlins placed anthropological research in a wider economic context, arguing hunters were affluent, not because of how much they had, but because of how little they needed: There is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate (1972:2). [ClickMarshall Sahlins and Napoleon Chagnon for more on contemporary implications.] Lee and Sahlins, as later popularized but unacknowledged by Diamond, were fundamental for re-evaluating the idea of gatherers and hunters as barely scratching out an existence. Agriculture increased necessary work time and drudgery, although it did make possible specialization, so that not everyone had to be directly involved in procuring food. Some people could then specialize in other pursuits. But agriculture did not directly increase free time or leisure.

b) Historians document deprivation and management

Another angle for the revisionist perspective was the historical documentation of how much conditions had changed for gatherers and hunters. The people who were gathering and hunting when observed by anthropologists, or even by Charles Darwin, were often those pushed off their original lands, decimated by introduced diseases, forced into labor, or recruited to provide commodities, like for the fur trade. Anthropologists like Lee and Sahlins already knew this, and said as much. Sahlins writes, I must raise the possibility that the ethnography of hunters and gatherers is largely a record of incomplete cultures. Fragile cycles of ritual and exchange may have disappeared without trace, lost in the earliest stages of colonialism, when the intergroup relations they mediated were attacked and confounded (1972:38-39). Diamond also makes reference to the deprivation gatherers and hunters experienced, noting their lives arent nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the worlds worst real estate (1987:65), again condensing Lees wording.

Lee and Sahlins aimed to disprove stereotypes and capture what might have been. Anthropologist Eric Wolf was the one who really put the pieces together, exploring the history of encounter, interaction and mutual creation between what are called tribes and the emerging Western colonial powers. Wolfs truly great work Europe and the People Without History (1982) drew the connection between anthropological case studies and historical process. The title is ironic: Wolf was bringing a sense of history to the people anthropologists study: Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents (1982:18). Wolfs book was republished in paperback in 2010. It remains important, especially since Wolf was writing world history long before the idea of globalization became fashionable. The 2010 edition includes a new foreword by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the author of Engaging Anthropology. For more, see Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History Geography, States, Empires. In his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005), Charles Mann pushes this approach. Mann opens with a chapter on Holmbergs Mistake in reference to anthropologist Allan Holmbergs 1940s studies of the Sirion in South America: The wandering people Holmberg traveled with in the forest had been hiding from their abusers. At some risk to himself, Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving. (2005:10) Manns work emphasizes how Native Americans were skilled managers of their ecosystems. Mann draws on historical studies that show how what European explorers saw as a natural Garden of Eden was actually a managed landscape. In North America, much of the management resulted from large-scale burning: Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both (2005:282). In the South American Amazon, we do not know exactly how people transformed the landscape, but it was not an untouched tropical forest. About the Amazon, Mann goes further: For a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything (2005:349).

As Europeans displaced Native Americans, their landscapes degenerated, and non-human animal populations becoming dangerously unbalanced. The Garden of Eden was not that way because of untouched natural processes, but because of the unnoticed gardening skills of the native inhabitants. [See also Myths of the Spanish Conquest Indigenous Allies & Politics of Empire for a reconsideration of these processes.]

c) Archaeologists did paleopathology

As Diamonds Worst Mistake notes, archaeological techniques became more sophisticated, leading to studies in paleopathology. Diamond announces an astonishing result: Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5 9 for men, 5 5 for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5 3 for men, 5 for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. (1987:66) Since height can often be used as a proxy for health, it would appear adopting agriculture had a deleterious effect. Diamond uses the Greece and Turkey skeletons, but again gives no reference. I have also seen this study used in anthropology textbooks, including my preferred introductory anthropology textbook, but I have been unable to track it down, even as my students point out the lack of references for both Diamond and anthropology textbooks. Diamond says the same result can be found in the Mississippi Mound burials, which offer literal layers of evidence for bodies before and after agriculture. Diamond here cites work by George Armelagos and colleagues showing a drastic decline in health and life expectancy on adopting maize-based agriculture. The title of the study, Death and Disease at Dr. Dicksons Mounds (Goodman and Armelagos 1985) seems to say it all. Like Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, the Death and Disease article is a staple of introductory anthropology readers, including the 2012 edition of Applying Anthropology

d) The Third World could not be ignored

Linked to the historical documentation of tribal deprivation was the growing realization that it was impossible to write the history of development and industry in Europe and the United States without considering the exploitative relationships of colonialism and resource extraction.

The idea of economic development promoted in the 1950s was that each country was on its own path to development and only needed encouragement. W.W. Rostows influential book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto includes a chart which places Britain at the top and India at the bottom, each with its own arrow of development (1960). That India was a colony of Britain for several hundred years, that Britain used Indian textile techniques and copied designs to fuel its industrialismapparently unimportant. The idea of each countrys independent path to development was in desperate need of revision. Andr Gunder Franks Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America explicitly argued that many of these so-called backward regions were very much part of an extractive capitalist system (1967). Rather than bringing advancement and development, capitalism had made them backward. This idea became known as dependency theory and part of a critique of capitalist-style development: There is the notable quip of Mahatma Gandhi, who, when asked, Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization? responded, It would be a good idea Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World as We Know It, 1999:174 Diamond knew any consideration of the benefits of agriculture had to consider the world as a whole, not just certain parts: To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an lite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice? (1987:66)

e) Feminists focused on untold inequalities

In the early 1970s, anthropology graduate student Gayle Rubin wrote The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex. Rubins article would for many years be one of the most cited articles in anthropology, and has been reprinted many times. The brilliance of Rubins argument was how she took existing anthropological accounts and simply exposed the injustices. When world-renowned anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss portrayed the exchange of women as a source of affective richness, Rubin counters: Why is he not, at this point, denouncing what kinship systems do to women, instead of presenting one of the greatest ripoffs of all time as the root of romance? (1975:201). Rubin drew on an already-existing critique that agriculture was a source for sexual inequality, most clearly seen in Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Rubins injunction remains unfinished: Eventually, someone will have to write a new version of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, recognizing the mutual interdependence of sexuality,

economics, and politics without underestimating the full significance of each in human society. (Rubin 1975:210) Diamond likewise makes the connection, stating how farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes and how women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden, then launching into anecdotes from his bird-studying trips to New Guinea (1987:66). Regardless of the political agenda of feminists like Rubin, such analysis made it less possible to describe social life without considering the implications for women and as Rubin put it, the sex/gender system. Archaeology, traditionally a male-dominated profession, began to take issues of gender much more seriously. Heather Pringles article New Women of the Ice Age (1998), also featured in anthropology readers, provides an excellent example of how more sophisticated archaeological techniques, ethnographic analogy to new facts about the importance of gatherers, and a feminist orientation, have led to reinterpreting the famous Venus figurines.

f) People became nervous about a human future

Revisionists were perplexed and concerned about the possibility of human self-destruction. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis pushing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. Pollution and environmental damage were literally choking urban areas. Population growth seemed unstoppable and unsustainable. The 1973 film Soylent Green expresses the dystopian pessimism of the time. People like Richard Borshay Lee linked the issue of the destructive present to gathering and hunting sustainability. From the 1968 book Man the Hunter (obviously titled before the feminist critique!), Lee and Irven DeVore explicitly view their work through this lens. It is interesting here to compare Lee and DeVores introduction with Diamonds conclusion:

Lee and DeVore in Man the Hunter (1968:3)

To date, the hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved. Nor does this evaluation exclude the present precarious existence under the threat of nuclear annihilation and the population explosion. It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself. If he fails in this task, interplanetary archaeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long and stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology and society leading rapidly to extinction. On the other hand, if we succeed in establishing a sane and workable world order, the long evolution of man as a hunter in the past and the (hopefully) much longer era of technical civilization in the future will bracket an incredibly brief transitional

phase of human historya phase which included the rise of agriculture, animal domestication, tribes, states, cities, empires, nations, and the industrial revolution.

Diamonds Wost Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987:66)

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, were still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and its unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agricultures glittering faade, and that have so far eluded us? Lee and DeVore should have sued Diamond for plagiarism. And, as discussed in Real History versus Guns Germs and Steel, the fact that Diamond was not called on this borrowing allowed his work to supplant other versions of history. Nevertheless, Diamond puts the alternatives bluntly. Agriculture delivers the Splendors of Civilization. Or agriculture set us on the Highway to Hell. But these are inaccurate alternatives as the next section on Many Ways of Gathering and Hunting begins to discuss.

Next: 2.2 Many Ways of Gathering and Hunting Previous: 1.13 Human Biologies and the Biocultural Naturenurtural

To cite: Antrosio, Jason, 2013. Agriculture as Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race?,Living Anthropologically, http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-thehuman-race/. Last updated February 3, 2013.

Yanomami Ax Fight: Jared Diamond, Science, Violence & the Facts

February 6, 2013 by Jason Antrosio in Anthropology

Update July 2013: As Bill Gates reads Jared Diamond, I urge Gates to consider the real ethnographic record, as well as Myths of the Spanish Conquest as a corrective to Guns, Germs, and Steel. See alsoPublic Anthropology and Bill Gates: We Cannot Abandon Humanity.

The Yanomami Ax Fight, an ethnographic film by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon, is a classic in anthropology and beyond. I first saw it as an undergraduate in an English class on travel writing. I have shown it in my classes to illustrate how what we may initially see as chaos or senseless can with another look be seen as part of a logical pattern. Much has been said about the Yanomami and The Ax Fight, but here I want to concentrate on just one point: steel axes. The Yanomami used iron and steel long before anyone ever filmed them for classroom consumption. As Brian Ferguson writes in Yanomami Warfare: A Political History, the Yanomami have long depended on iron and steel tools. All ethnographically described Yanomami had begun using metal tools long before any anthropologist arrived (1995:23). As noted in Myths of the Spanish Conquest, steel arrived with the Spaniards, but steel tools were quickly seized upon and traded far in advance of any European contact or conquest. In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann argues that the very form of slash-and-burn cultivation practiced by the Yanomami and often portrayed as so traditional, was a product of European axes (2006:341).

Similarly in Papua New Guinea, including for the famously and only-recently-contacted New Guinea highlands, steel axes had been in use for many years before anthropologists arrived. From Aaron Podolefskys classic article Contemporary Warfare in the New Guinea Highlands: Enter the ubiquitous steel axe, exit the stone axe. No one in Mul today would use a stone axe. Indeed it was difficult to find someone who recalled how to attach the stone to a handle (345). Keep in mind that when Podolefsky says today, he is describing his fieldwork in the early 1970s! It is very strange that Jared Diamond, who sold the world on the importance of steel as a formidable weapon of conquest, has so little to say about steel axes in The World Until Yesterday. Jared Diamond mentions people in the New Guinea highlands received a few steel axes, which were prized. But this doesnt sound at all like what Podolefsky describes as steel axes being ubiquitous by the early 1970s, so much so that no one knew how to make a stone axe anymore. Jared Diamond also mentionswith regard to the Solomon Islands in the 19th centurythat steel axes can behead many humans without losing their sharp edge. But those are the only two mentionsotherwise steel axes are unnoticed, even among the Yanomami. Steel axes are not the cause of violencerather, they indicate centuries of trade and interconnection, of the interactions between state and non-state societies since well before Europeans arrived and outrunning European contact. It is in this context that we need to investigate the empirical data about violence in non-state societies.

Counting Violence and the Shaky Science of Jared Diamond

Following on an overview of what accounts for the rise of European polities 800-1400AD and then a re-appraisal of the colonial enterprise in the Americas, this post means to draw out the major theme running through the earlier work: that anthropological studies are inevitably studies of interconnection. People have never been isolated, but in constant connection, from before the time of European expansion. Moreover, the effects of European expansion outran direct contact with Europeans, as items like steel axes and a host of agricultural products were traded around the world, often without any direct European involvement whatsoever (Charles Manns 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Createdhas a host of examples, in many cases based on previous anthropological and historical work that paid attention to global flows). We need to put to rest the idea of Ruth Benedict in 1934that primitive peoples are a kind of scientific laboratory, each an independent cultural whole. At a time when Angry Papuan leaders demand Jared Diamond apologizes, this task acquires additional urgency. Prominent claimants to the science mantle close ranks with Jared Diamond. Steven Pinker tweets: Noble savage myth strikes againJared Diamond has data on his side; Survival Internationalconfuses human rights with factual claims. Skeptic Michael Shermer raises the hyperbole: Another example of the Lefts War on Science: Survival International attacks Jared Diamond (whose data is solid). Prominent economist Tyler Cowen: Mood affiliation aside, the facts are on Diamonds side.

Science blogger Razib Khan takes a strangely different turn. After remarking that Jared Diamond has been trading in glib and gloss for years, Khan revs up his favorite diatribe apparatus against cultural anthropology. Khan concludes that Jared Diamond may be wrong on facts, but he has the right enemies. Hey, no use bothering with boring facts when terrific Twitter sensationalism awaits. Real scientists know better. Jared Diamond has a lot of anecdotes, but very little empirical evidence. The few numbers he does use are suspect, and in any case doing math on numbers does not make it science. Before numbers can count as evidence, as empirical data, as facts, as science, it is crucial to understand the context of those numbers. Numbers usefully summarize what we count as important. Numbers offer glimpses into relationships and processes. But we should not confuse the manipulation of numbers with an understanding of those relationships and processes. We do need to review some facts. Looking at the empirical evidence reveals a very different story. The story matches what Brian Ferguson wrote about the Yanomami, with ideas developed over 20 years ago: Although some Yanomami really have been engaged in intensive warfare and other kinds of bloody conflict, this violence is not an expression of Yanomami culture itself. It is, rather, a product of specific historical situations: The Yanomami make war not because Western culture is absent, but because it is present, and present in certain specific forms. All Yanomami warfare that we know about occurs within what Neil Whitehead and I call a tribal zone, an extensive area beyond state administrative control, inhabited by nonstate people who must react to the far-flung effects of the state presence. (1995:6) In other words, the whole idea that we are able to compare state and non-state societies based on ethnographic data collected in the past two centuries is unsustainable. These are all people who are reacting to state presence in various ways, and might just as well be conceptualized as being on the poor margins of state societies as being independent non-state units. Before launching this investigation of interconnection, I do need to clarify a few points:

I love numbers. I love counting. I love math. Numbers, counting, and math are especially useful to counter and debunk stories we like to tell about ourselves and other societies. This is not about personal quirks or fieldwork ethics. The idea that steel axes were ever introducedby anthropologists is not supported. The point is that the steel axes were there long before the anthropologists.

I am in no way making a counter-claim of peace, harmony, and gentleness. Countering the claim that others live in a state of constant warfare or endemic violence is not to idealize or prop up equally invalid constructions. I am in no way saying that steel axes cause violence. It is simply to say that the influence of steel axes and other trade goods, as well as contact with other peoples and with both European and non-European states, must be considered before we decide that a certain type of people are inevitably violent or warlike.

Investigating Jared Diamonds Empirical Evidence

The Yanomami. Brian Ferguson already did a complete empirical revision on the Yanomami evidence 20 years ago. After that work, no reputable scholar should be uncritically citing Napoleon Chagnon for empirical evidence. That this even must be done over again is a farce. Jared Diamond cites only Napoleon Chagnon on the Yanomami. He does not mention Ferguson in his book, nor do we ever hear that there may have been a debate about Yanomami warfare. Somewhat ironically, Ferguson and others cleared this up in the scientific journals years ago, but Jared Diamond gets the scientist label without paying attention to science. [Update: I wrote about Jared Diamond's uncritical use of Chagnon as a farce before Chagnon's Noble Savages was published. Click Napoleon Chagnon for more and see also The Times, it is Outragin by Jonathan Marks.] As Charles C. Mann notes in a February 2013 review of Chagnon, Fierce Controversies: Prior to 1492, these researchers say, this portion of central Amazonia was a prosperous, cosmopolitan, multiethnic network of big villages, fed by fish from the great river and reliant upon a multitude of forest products. When that network was thrown into turmoil by the arrival of European slavers and European diseases, the Yanomam and many other groups fled into the hinterlands, where they now reside. If this is correct, these people are not pure or pristine; they are dispossessed. And their existence in small bands is reflective not of humankinds ancient past but of a shattered society that has preserved its liberty by retreat. It would be risky to base conclusions about the evolution of society on the study of posses of refugees, perhaps especially those who have survived both a holocaust and a diaspora. The Nuer. Jared Diamond uses E.E. Evans-Pritchards classic ethnography on the Nuer to highlight their prevalence of formalized violence. However, Evans-Pritchard studied the Nuer because the British colonial government was trying to figure out why they were being so rebellious to colonial rule and how they were organizing their rebellion. As Evans-Pritchard explains, in 1920 large-scale military operations, including bombing and machine-gunning of camps, were conducted against the Eastern Jikany and caused much loss of life and destruction of property. There were further patrols from time to time but the Nuer remained unsubdued (The Nuer 1940:135). I should not need to say that a period of widespread resistance to colonial

rule, answered with brutal massacres by the colonial state, may not exactly be the most reliable time to objectively tally instances of violence in a non-state society. The Siriono. I have already objected to Jared Diamonds use of the Siriono as described by anthropologist Alan Holmberg. David Brooks then splayed the Siriono into The New York Times. The first chapter of Manns 1491 concerned Holmbergs Mistakethe problem of drawing conclusions about people who were basically a persecuted fragment, a shattered remnant of a former society (see above for Manns similar comments with regard to the Yanomami). Even Holmberg admits in his ethnography that The Siriono are an anomaly in eastern Bolivia. Widely scattered in isolated pockets of forest land, with a culture strikingly backward in contrast to that of their neighbors, they are probably a remnant of an ancient population that was exterminated, absorbed, or engulfed by more civilized invaders (Nomads of the Long Bow 1950:8, and I thank the Amazon reviewerRon Cochran for the reference). No wonder then that according to Jared Diamond for the Siriono Indians of Bolivia, the overwhelming preoccupation is with food, such that two of the commonest Siriono expressions are My stomach is empty and Give me some food. Certainly such statements are a testament to something, but they hardly constitute evidence about life in a non-state society. The !Kung. For the !Kung, Jared Diamond uses Richard Lees numbers to calculate 22 homicides from 1920-1969. Diamond then notes that referred to that base population, the homicide rate for the !Kung works out to 29 homicides per 100,000 person-years, which is triple the homicide rate for the United States and 10 to 30 times the rates for Canada, Britain, France, and Germany. Diamond then says that state intervention reduced the homicide rate. Three points: First, Jared Diamond makes a strange comparison to contemporary homicide rates in the industrialized world. If we instead look at intentional homicide rates around the world, the !Kung numbers are roughly equivalent to the country of South Africa todayin other words, there seems to be a broader regional issue. The homicide rates were not worse for the !Kung, and may have even been reduced in comparison to other African locales at the time. Second, grabbing a local homicide number can be trickyWashington, D.C. had an intentional homicide rate in the low 40s in the early 2000s, which has since come down to mid-20s. I would hope no one suggest Washington D.C. is a non-state society, but Diamond would come close to making such a claim: Urban gangs in large cities dont call the police to settle their disagreements but rely on traditional methods of negotiation, compensation, intimidation, and war. Third, and most importantly, Richard Lee and Jared Diamonds choice of time period is instructive. Robert J. Gordon has been for years trying to bring to wider attention The Forgotten Bushman Genocides of Namibia. Gordon examines the Bushman genocide of 19121915 which, despite overwhelming evidence of its having occurred, has been largely ignored by both scholars and the local population (2009:29). If Gordon is correctand he is one of the only people delving into the German archives for evidencethen the indigenous populations were decimated, with both state and para-state involvement, during the years just before the 22 homicides calculated from 1920-1969. Ive always wondered if that was one

forgotten factor in why Richard Lee got that famous quote about so many mongongo nuts perhaps because the population of people had been so decimated 50 years earlier (seeAgriculture as Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race?). In any case, and as Robert Gordon and Stuart Sholto-Douglas argue in The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass, by 1920-1969 these populations were hardly detached from wider society. The !Kung may have been more like the Sirionoa persecuted remnant of a former societythan we have hitherto realized. Papua New Guinea. Jared Diamond here makes the case that a strong state government decreases violence. Following directly from the !Kung material: This course of events illustrates the role of control by a strong state government in reducing violence. That same role also becomes obvious from central facts of the colonial and postcolonial history of New Guinea in the last 50 years: namely, the steep decrease in violence following establishment of Australian and Indonesian control of remote areas of eastern and western New Guinea respectively, previously without state government; the continued low level of violence in Indonesian New Guinea under maintained rigorous government control there; and the eventual resurgence of violence in Papua New Guinea after Australian colonial government gradually yielded to less rigorous independent government. Here again, three points. First, as noted above, Diamond seriously underplays the influence of trade and pre-contact transformation. Even before the steel axes, the New Guinea highlanders had incorporated sweet potato horticulture into their diet. As Stephen Corry notes, while there is still debate about where the sweet potatoes came from, the probable answer is from the Americas in the last few hundred years: Most New Guineans do little hunting. They live principally from cultivations, as they probably have for millennia. Diamond barely slips in the fact that their main foodstuff, sweet potato, was probably imported from the Americas, perhaps a few hundred or a thousand years ago. No one agrees on how this came about, but it is just one demonstration that globalization and change have impacted on Diamonds traditional peoples for just as long as on everyone else. (Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamonds The World Until Yesterday Is Completely Wrong) The incorporation of the sweet potatojust like other food crops from the Americas in other parts of the worldmost probably led to denser populations in the highlands than had been previously supported. Add steel axes from tradewhich by the time of fieldwork in the 1970s had become ubiquitousand the conditions were surely ripe for an escalation of intertribal conflict.

Anyone interested in the dramatic global interconnections of Papua New Guinea should watch the truly classic ethnographic film, again from the early 1970s, Ongkas Big Moka: The Kawelka of Papua New Guinea. Ongkas Big Moka can certainly be used to illustrate gift exchange and traditional lifebut it is also instructive to see the appropriation of all kinds of elementsthe Do It In the Road T-shirt, dentures, money counted in pidgin English, motorbikes, bank accounts for cash-crop coffee growingall of which seem to not be destroying the traditional exchanges but intensifying them. That was the situation in the New Guinea highlands in the 1970s, and yet Jared Diamond announces on The Colbert Report that they might not know what to do with an electric can opener, that they might try sticking it through their nose or over their ears. Second, Aaron Podolefsky and other anthropologists explicitly sought to explain this somewhat puzzling resurgence in tribal violence in the 1960s and 1970s. Here again, Robert Gordon provided evidence that this could not simply be explained by a less rigorous government. Gordon pointed out the paradox that in many of the conflicted areas, police patrols had actually expanded and the jail penalties enhanced, but with no deterrent effect. Podolefskys article emphasizes the importance of tradesince highlanders no longer had to go far afield to obtain valued goods, there had been a decrease in intertribal marriage. This decrease in intertribal marriage led to situations in which there were fewer relatives to argue for peaceful relations (we might also recall the role of affines in Ongkas Big Moka for reducing the intertribal conflict). In other words, Podolefsky argues that it is in fact the decline or abandonment of traditional methods of dispute resolution which led to this resurgence. Finally, those ethnographers who are most intimately familiar with the violence and warfare in Papua New Guineaand who do not in any way dismiss itnevertheless have suggested that state societies may have something to learn: Acephalous societies may have some advantages rather than disadvantages vis vis centralized ones in the settlement of disputes including the handling of violence. The projection of disputes in terms of sorcery and witchcraft can be considered in this context. Our observations here turn ideas of the evolution of society upside down: primitive societies, rather than being forms to be transcended, may themselves provide valuable models for contemporary postmodern society on how to reintroduce community-based elements into dispute resolution, and on the mediation and transformation of violence into positive forms of exchange. (Stewart and Strathern,Violence: Theory and Ethnography 2003:153) The Ach. Jared Diamond also brings up the Ach of Paraguay. Here, Im just going to go withWikipedia: The Ach suffered repeated abuses by rural Paraguayan colonists, ranchers, and big landowners from the conquest period to the 20th century. In the 20th century the Northern Ach began as the only inhabitants of nearly 20,000 square kilometers, and ended up

confined on two reservations totaling little more than 50 square kilometers of titled land. In recent times they have been massacred, enslaved, and gathered on to reservations where no adequate medical treatment was provided. This process was specifically carried out to pacify them and remove them from their ancestral homeland so that absentee investors (mainly Brazilian) could move in and develop the lands that once belonged only to the Ach. Large multinational business groups (e.g. Industria Paraguaya) obtained title rights to already occupied lands and then sold them sight unseen to investors who purchased lands where Ach bands had roamed for thousands of years, and were still present. The fact that Ach inhabitants were present and living in the forests of Canindeyu and Alto Paran on the very lands being titled in Hernandarias, Coronel Oveido, and other government centers seems to have bothered nobody. The Inuit. Jared Diamond uses the Inuit example more in passing, so I originally did not include it in my reviewthis responds to a comment below. For the Inuit, Diamonds claim is that the visits of traders to the Inuit also had the effect of suppressing Inuit war, even though neither the traders with the Inuit nor those with the !Kung purposely suppressed war. Instead, the Inuit themselves abandoned war in their own self-interest in order to have more opportunities to profit from trade, and the !Kung may have done the same. In other words, Jared Diamond uses this as an example of how European contact, in the long term, suppresses violence and war, and that for the Inuit they do it in order to profit from trade. Such an account is typical of Diamonds rather narrow definition of European contact. It is instead far more likely that the fur tradealong with weapons and other technologiesarrived far in advance of direct European contact. Undoubtedly Inuit warfare pre-existed European contact, but became mixed up with introducing alcohol and guns for furthe subsequent observed pacification could very well have been the aftermath of local competition for access to resources. Again, this is not to claim a peaceful pre-Contact Inuit, but to question the idea that European trade was what suppressed Inuit war. There is one other comment about almost all of the cases Jared Diamond uses: much of the evidence is based not just on the unproblematic acceptance of these texts, but on the stories people told about the old days of raiding and warfare. And here we should remember that war stories are war storieslike fishing stories and hunting stories, the talk of past exploits sometimes needs to be taken with a few grains of salt. I had been attempting to not support the Jared Diamond juggernaut by purchasing The World Until Yesterday, but for the sake of science Ive plunged ahead. After reviewing the empirical data, Im even more surprised than I expected at how Diamond treats the ethnographic record. Im even more amazed I have not yet heard mention of this from anthropologists who have reviewed the booksee Anthropology on Jared Diamond The World Until Yesterday. Are we really so far from empirical evaluation that these reviews were conducted on whether or not we

support Jared Diamonds philosophy, his politics, his methods, his field experience, or his writing style? Where are the anthropologists who have taken Jared Diamond to task for his absurd absorption of the Yanomami, the Nuer, the Siriono, the Ach, the !Kung, and in Papua New Guinea? Even Razib Khan says I want to be clear that I think Jared Diamond is wrong on a lot of details, and many cultural anthropologists are rightly calling him out on that. But who are the cultural anthropologists calling Diamond out on the empirical and the ethnographic record? Please let me know! Lest I be misunderstood, I have no desire to dismiss classic ethnographies. Indeed, I urge that we read, teach, and learn from them. But we need to be clear about what these texts can and cannot provide. We also need to place ethnography in the context of critical assessment. Not a critique of writing or literary deconstruction, but an investigation of empirical claims in the light of history. Put differently: While empirical data never speak for themselves, anthropologists cannot speak without data. Even when couched in the most interpretive terms, anthropology requires observation indeed, often field observationand relies on empirical data in ways and to degrees that distinguish it as an academic prcatice from both literary and Cultural Studies. That such data is always constituted and such observation is always selective does not mean that the information they convey should not pass any test for empirical accuracy. The much welcome awareness that our empirical base is a construction in no way erases the need for such a base. On the contrary, this awareness calls upon us to reinforce the validity of that base by taking more seriously the construction of our object of observation. Ideally this construction also informs that of the object of study in a back and forth movement that starts before fieldwork and continues long after it. But the preliminary conceptualization of the object of study remains the guiding light of empirical observation: What is it that I need to know in order to know what I want to know? (Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World2003:128)

What does anthropologys empirical record reveal about violence and warfare?
It is important to first underscore that we cannot read anthropologys ethnographic record for evidence of whether or not violence is inherent to human nature, as some have attempted. Fortunately, on this point Jared Diamond is clear and correct: It is equally fruitless to debate whether humans are intrinsically violent or else intrinsically cooperative. All human societies practise both violence and cooperation; which trait appears to predominate depends on the circumstances.

It is also important to underscore that human groups have had varying levels of violence, both historically and across both state and non-state societies. Diamond also realizes this point. What I object to is that following these two acknowledgements, Jared Diamond then portrays non-state societies as generally more violent than state societies, and believes that the longterm effect of European, Tswana, or other outside contact with states or chiefdoms has almost always been to suppress tribal warfare. The short-term effect has variously been either an immediate suppression as well or else an initial flare-up and then suppression. (Of course, the duration of this initial flare-up could be for centuries as Diamond writes a few sentences earlier, that in some cases warfare had been endemic long before European arrival, but the effects of Europeans caused an exacerbation of warfare for a few decades (New Zealand, Fiji, Solomon Islands) or a few centuries (Great Plains, Central Africa) before it died out.) I hope to have shown above that the empirical evidence for those claims is not reliable. Again, this is not to make a counter-proposal of harmonic peace, but to lessen the distance between ideas of the modern us and the non-modern them. If we do give sufficiently wide berth to historical variability and intra-societal variation, I would propose the following as more general observations: 1. Up until about 12,000 years ago, there is little evidence for much violence or warfare: If you review the published information on the fossil record of humans and potential human ancestors from about six million years ago through about 12,000 years ago you are provided with, at best, only a few examples of possible death due to the hand of another individual of the same species. . . . Examination of the human fossil record supports the hypothesis that while some violence between individuals undoubtedly happened in the past, warfare is a relatively modern human behavior (12,000 to 10,000 years old). (Fuentes Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You2012:130-131) In other words, if by yesterday we really do mean 12,000 years ago, pre-agriculture, then these non-state societies are indeed examples of non-violence. This was a point that was first tremendously popularized by none other than Jared Diamond in his breakout 1987 article Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Widely re-printed and still shared today, if anyone is responsible for promoting Noble Savage ideas in the last quarter century, its Jared Diamond. Heres Diamond in 1987: Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. 2. Non-state horticultural, agricultural, and herding societies have demonstrated historically variable levels of violence and warfare. 3. Almost all of those non-state horticultural, agricultural, and herding societies, along with almost all of the hunting and gathering peoples in the last several thousand years or so, have lived in interaction with state societies. Some of them have been incorporated into

states, others displaced, and those displaced have sometimes displaced other groups. All these groups have been linked by trade. This was happening before European contact, but has certainly intensified in the last 500 years. These state and non-state interactions have sometimes diminished violence and warfare, but have sometimes exacerbated it. 4. If, following Max Weber, we define a state as the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory, then indeedalthough the argument is a bit circularit may be that a modern state can reduce violence. However, making that claim as a definition should not impede understanding how the establishment of a monopoly on legitimate physical violence was often itself a violent process, and in many case still depends on high levels of everyday violence, surveillance, incarceration, border patrols.

A Final Thought
In the early 1960s, we came very close to an intercontinental nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. How precisely close we were is a matter for some debate, but it was a distinct possibility that may have only been averted by personality quirks and fortuitous occurrence, not exactly the better angels of our nature. This was something the scholars of the 1960s and 1970s seem to know better than we do today: How dangerously close we once came to ending this whole discussion of the-modern-versus-the-traditional. Or as Richard Lee and Irven DeVore put it in Man the Hunter: It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself. If he fails in this task, interplanetary archaeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long and stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology and society leading rapidly to extinction. (1968:3)

Update: See Jonathan Marks, Diamonds and Clubs for an important contribution to understanding the history of political attacks on anthropology. For many of the issues discussed in points #1-4 aboveand in the comment stream belowsee the new edited volume War, Peace, & Human Nature (2013). For more on the new Napoleon Chagnon memoir, see Napoleon Chagnon Noble Savages and Epigenetics on The Edge of Human Nature.

Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture: From Culture to cultures

January 23, 2013 by Jason Antrosio in Anthropology

Ruth Benedict scores a blockbuster publishing international bestseller withPatterns of Culture . Inevitably Ruth Benedicts extremely popular work will be compared to Jared Diamonds The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Ruth Benedict will surely be on Bill Gatess summer reading list. Early reviews give the edge to Ruth Benedicts Patterns of Culture, for its conceptual framework; for elaborating the ethnographic record without romanticizing or resorting to politically-correct euphemisms; for clarity of writing and accessibility; and for attention to impact in todays society. Even more amazingly, Ruth Benedict accomplishes all this with a book published in 1934! The 1934 review in the New York Times testifies to the enormous interdisciplinary accomplishment: The sciences no longer work alone, each behind its own walls. They have pooled their front yards and from their windows as they labor they look up and down the row and see what the others are doing. And also they have developed a great common garden where all the sciences and the arts meet and walk about hand in hand while they discuss and compare and combine the results of their specialties. Out of such a combination has grown this book by Ruth Benedict, of the faculty of Columbia University. By training, vocation and chief interest she is an anthropologist, but a quartet of sciences, anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy, is responsible for the volume, which is expertly conceived and brilliantly developed.

Ruth Benedict on Race, Environment, and the Concept of Culture

The primary message of Patterns of Culture is the paramount importance of learned behavior in human existence. In contrast to prevalent notions of racial or biological determinism, or of human life as determined by the surrounding physical environment, or of humans confined by their place on an evolutionary hierarchy, Benedict posits that culture provides the patterning.

Benedicts first chapter, The Science of Custom is beautifully written and crystal clear: No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. (1934:2) On the issue of race, or ideas of biological determinism, Benedict is succinct: Not one item of his tribal social organization, of his language, of his local religion, is carried in his germ-cell. . . . Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior. . . . Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex (1934:12,14). Benedict also wrote, with Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 85): Teaching journals from the era reveal the tremendous popularity of The Races of Mankind in English, science and social studies classes across the nation. As publication approached one million copies, The Races of Mankind was released as an illustrated childrens book, an animated film, a set of 15 posters and a traveling exhibit. It remains the most popular text written by an anthropologist for teachers and young students to clear up the confusion of the race concept in simple, inexpensive and appealing formats.The Races of Mankind would play a major role in transforming the way American teachers spoke and taught about the race concept. Most importantly, this text assured teachers and students that culture, not race, was the key to understanding human diversity. (Zo Burkholder, Franz Boas and Anti-Racist Education 2006:25) Ruth Benedict was also the first great anthropologist cited by Martin Luther King, Jr.: The idea of an inferior or superior race has been refuted by the best evidence of the science of anthropology. Great anthropologists, like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Melville J. Herskovits agree that although there may be inferior and superior individuals within all races, there is no superior or inferior race. (Strength to Love, 37-38) On the question of how much human behavior was influenced or determined by the physical environment, Benedict is likewise brief but potent: The institutions that human cultures build

up upon the hints presented by the environment or by mans physical necessities do not keep as close to the original impulse as we easily imagine. These hints are, in reality, mere rough sketches, a list of bare facts. They are pin-point potentialities, and the elaboration that takes place around them is dictated by many alien considerations (1934:35). In short, Benedict endorses and popularizes what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms the Boasian conceptual kernel of U.S. anthropology: 1. Human behavior is patterned. There exist within historically specific populations recurrences in both thought and behavior that are not contingent but structurally conditioned and that are, in turn, structuring.

2. Those patternes are learned. Recurrences cannot be tied to a natural world within or outside the human body, but rather to constant interaction within specific populations. Structuration occurs through social transmission and symbolic coding with some degree of human consciousness. (Adieu Culture: A New Duty Arises 2003:99) Compare to Jared Diamond. Diamond has of course acquired some fame for arguing against biological determinism, and his Race Without Color was once a staple for challenging simplistic tales of biological race. But by the 1990s, Diamond simply echoes perceived liberal wisdom. Benedict and Weltfishs Races of Mankind was banned by the Army as Communist propaganda, and Weltfish faced persecution from McCarthyism (Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home 1998:196,224). Boas and Benedict swam against the current of the time, when backlash could be brutal. In contrast, Diamonds claims on race and IQ have mostly been anecdotal. They have never been taken seriously by those who call themselves race realists (see Jared Diamond wont beat Mitt Romney). Diamond has never responded scientifically to the re-assertion of race from sources like A Family Tree in Every Gene, and he helped propagate amedical myth about racial differences in hypertension. And, of course, although Guns, Germs, and Steel has been falsely branded as environmental or geographical determinism, there is no doubt that Diamond leans heavily on agriculture and geography as explanatory causes for differential success.

Ruth Benedict: What Can We Learn from Primitive Societies?

From the beginning, Benedict begs us to break out of the prism of white culture and parochial thinking: The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable. We interpret our dependence, in our civilization, upon economic competition, as proof that this is the prime

motivation that human nature can rely upon, or we read off the behaviour of small children as it is moulded in our civilization and recorded in child clinics, as child psychology or the way in which the young human animal is bound to behave. It is the same whether it is a question of our ethics or of our family organization. It is the inevitability of each familiar motivation that we defend, attempting always to identify our own local ways of behaving with Behaviour, or our own socialized habits with Human Nature. (1934:6-7) In 1934, Benedict had already pinpointed the problem of only analyzing what everyone is now calling the WEIRD, Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic. Greg Downeys We agree its WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough? remains the best analysis. As Downey puts it, I worry that some of our cultural ideology and self deception may be smuggled in under the terms themselves, especially Western, industrialized and democratic (see also Race, Monogamy & Other Lies They Told YouAgustin Fuentes as Anthropology 101). As seen above, Benedict also has little use for gender neutral pronouns or politically-correct euphemisms. Benedict explicitly considers primitive cultures as a kind of laboratory: With the vast network of historical contact which has spread the great civilizations over tremendous areas, primitive cultures are now the one source to which we can turn. They are a laboratory in which we may study the diversity of human institutions. With their comparative isolation, many primitive regions have had centuries in which to elaborate the cultural themes they have made their own. They provide ready to our hand the necessary information concerning the possible great variations in human adjustments, and a critical examination of them is essential for any understanding of cultural processes. It is the only laboratory of social forms that we have or shall have. (1934:17) Moreover, Benedict has no use for romanticizing Noble Savages. Her chapter on Dobu zips the Dobuans with so many wonderful barbs its difficult to choose the best zinger. Benedict begins by noting the Dobuan reputation as the feared and distrusted savages of the islands surrounding them and then proceeds to confirm the Dobuans amply deserve the character they are given by their neighbours. They are lawless and treacherous. Every mans hand is against every other man. . . . The social forms which obtain in Dobu put a premium upon ill-will and treachery and make of them the recognized virtues of their society (1934:131). The fun continues: As Dr. Fortune says, The Dobuans prefer to be infernally nasty or else not nasty at all (1934:171). And perhaps the last lines are the best: The Dobuan lives out without repression mans worst nightmares of the ill-will of the universe, and according to his view of life virtue consists in selecting a victim upon whom he can vent the malignancy he attributes alike to human society and to the powers of nature. All existence appears to him as a cutthroat struggle in which deadly antagonists are pitted against one another in a contest for each one of the goods of life. Suspicion and cruelty are his trusted weapons in the strife and he gives no mercy, as he asks none. (1934:172)

Thats not WEIRD the acronym, thats just weird! [And please see below for alternative explanations] Benedict similarly skewers the Kwakiutl for their megalomaniac paranoid tendencies: The sulking and the suicides on the Northwest Coast are the natural complement of their major preoccupations. The gamut of the emotions which they recognized, from triumph to shame, was magnified to its utmost proportions. Triumph was an uninhibited indulgence in delusions of grandeur, and shame a cause of death. Knowing but the one gamut, they used it for every occasion, even the most unlikely. (1934:220) Compare again Jared Diamond. Diamond has accused anthropologists of falsely romanticizing others, but by subtitling his book What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies, Diamond engages in more than just politically-correct euphemism. When most people think of a traditional society, they are thinking of agrarian peasant societies or artisan handicrafts. Diamond, however, is referring mainly to what we might term tribal societies, or hunters and gatherers with some horticulture. Curiously, for Diamond the dividing line between the yesterday of traditional and the today of the presumably modern was somewhere around 5,000-6,000 years ago (see The Colbert Report). As John McCreery points out: Why, I must ask, is the category traditional societies limited to groups like Inuit, Amazonian Indians, San people and Melanesians, when the brute fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people who have lived in traditional societies have been peasants living in traditional agricultural civilizations over the past several thousand years since the first cities appeared in places like the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yellow River, etc.? Talk about a big blind spot. Benedict draws on the work of others, like Reo Fortune in Dobu and Franz Boas with the Kwakiutl. Her own ethnographic experience was limited. But unlike Diamond, Benedict was working through the best ethnographic work available. Diamond, in contrast, splays us with a story from Allan Holmberg, which then gets into the New York Times, courtesy of David Brooks. Compare bestselling author Charles Mann on Holmbergs Mistake (the first chapter of his 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus): The wandering people Holmberg traveled with in the forest had been hiding from their abusers. At some risk to himself, Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving. (Mann 2005:10) As for Diamonds approach to comparing different groups: Despite claims that Diamonds book demonstrates incredible erudition what we see in this prologue is a profound lack of

thought about what it would mean to study human diversity and how to make sense of cultural phenomenon (Alex Golub,How can we explain human variation?). Finally there is the must-read review Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamonds The World Until Yesterday Is Completely Wrong by Stephen Corry, Director of Survival International: Diamond adds his voice to a very influential sector of American academia which is, naively or not, striving to bring back out-of-date caricatures of tribal peoples. These erudite and polymath academics claim scientific proof for their damaging theories and political views (as did respected eugenicists once). In my own, humbler, opinion, and experience, this is both completely wrongboth factually and morallyand extremely dangerous. The principal cause of the destruction of tribal peoples is the imposition of nation states. This does not save them; it kills them.

Ruth Benedict: Amazing Writer, Accessible, and Fourteen Languages

Before entering anthropology, Benedict was an English major and a poet. Her prose is crisp and direct, unencumbered by footnotes and academic citation garb. Before publishing Patterns of Culture, Benedict debated with friends and her editor the merits and demerits of over fifty titles for the book, worried about the colour of its cover, rewrote its blurb several times, insisted that its price be as low as possible, and got [Margaret] Mead to publicize it in conversations and reviews (MacClancy, Popularizing Anthropology, 1996:32). Alex Golub at Savage Minds sees Benedicts writing as guidance for contemporary anthropology blogs: Another thing that has fallen of our radar is concision and elegance in prose. When I read this Benedict piece, I feel like blogging is in our disciplinary DNA. Benedicts prose is clean, forthright, argument driven, and easy to understand just like a bloggers is (or should be). True, this was a speech written to be read, but anyone familiar with her work knows Benedict wrote like this for all occasions. And she is not the only oneMead and Linton also produced prose like this. Wouldnt it be great if we could get back to this sort of style? (Commentary on Ruth Benedict Anthropology and the Humanities) Patterns of Culture also features an extremely accessible pricenew paperbacks are available for $6 on Amazon, with used copies available for around $2. It is already on the shelves of many local and public libraries. Many of Ruth Benedicts writings are freely available Open Accesssee the recently discussedAnthropology and the Humanities. Compare that with Diamonds $20 e-Book! Moreover, Patterns of Culture has been translated into at least fourteen languages, although fewer than the 25 languages claimed by Guns, Germs and Steel. Indeed, Jared Diamond has been praised for his writing, for making science popular and palatable. Others have been less convinced. As David Brooks reviews: Diamonds knowledge and insights are still awesome, but alas, that vividness rarely comes across on the page. . . . Diamonds writing is curiously impersonal. We rarely get to hear the people in traditional societies speak for themselves. We dont get to meet any in depth. We

dont get to know what their stories are, what the contents of their religions are, how they conceive of individual selfhood or what they think of us. In this book, geographic and environmental features play a much more important role in shaping life than anything an individual person thinks or feels. The people Diamond describes seem immersed in the collective. We generally dont see them exercising much individual agency. (Tribal Lessons; of course, Brooks may be smarting from reviews that called his book The Dumbest Story Ever Told)

Ruth Benedict: Contribution and Impact

Benedicts final points outline the idea of cultural relativism. Benedict believed this new understanding could make a difference: The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it its own values . . . It challenges customary opinions and causes those who have been bred to them acute discomfort. . . . As soon as the new opinion is embraced as customary belief, it will be another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence. (1934:278) As Patterns of Culture was re-printed and re-issued, it was almost always promoted as a gateway to tolerance. From a 1974 New York Times review: Patterns of Culture is a signpost on the road to a freer and more tolerant life, liberating in its implicit assumption that American middle-class culture is merely one of many possible ways in which people may organize their social relationshipsa way no better than any other (Jean Zorn). In many ways, Ruth Benedict does exactly what Wade Davis wanted Jared Diamond to do rather than providing a how-to manual of tips we can learn, to really investigate the existence of other possibilities: The voices of traditional societies ultimately matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space. This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of non-industrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny therefore is not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise. By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet. (Wade Davis review of Jared Diamond; and perhaps one of the

best contemporary versions of this project is Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World)

Ruth Benedict and Jared Diamond: What Should Anthropology Do?

Benedicts words from 1934 remain as fresh and important as ever, perhaps becoming even more relevant in the past decade: Modern existence has thrown many civilizations into close contact, and at the moment the overwhelming response to this situation is nationalism and racial snobbery. There has never been a time when civilization stood more in need of individuals who are genuinely cultureconscious, who can see objectively the socially conditioned behaviour of other peoples without fear and recrimination. (1934:10-11) With that in mind, what should anthropology say about Jared Diamonds The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Should anthropology simply declare allegianceas many anthropologists already haveon the grounds of cultural relativism, tolerance, appreciating diversity, and fighting ethnocentrism? Should anthropology ride Jared Diamonds fame as a good-enough Ruth Benedict, or as a substitute for Margaret Mead? My answer is no. Its not simply because Ruth Benedict did it better three-quarters of a century ago, although Patterns of Culture should not be overlooked. Its because of all anthropology has learned since Benedict portrayed the peoples of the world as relatively isolated laboratories. Benedict does not go quite as far as Holmbergs Mistake, but she fails to present the full picture of historical encounter and the ethnographic situation. Benedict knows better than to spin possibly libelous tales as fodder for human nature, but she misses the historical depth and positioning of the ethnographer (see also James Mulloolys Does Jared Diamond do Ethnography?). In short, as Benedict moves from the general concept of culture in the first pages to the notion of specific cultures in her accounts, the peoples become isolates, shorn from history: Anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict and Ralph Linton emphasized the wholeness of distinct cultures, a theme later revived by the work of Clifford Geertz (Trouillot, Adieu Culture 2003:103). Although ideas of cultural relativism and tolerance do not need to depend on a cultural wholeness, thats what happens in Benedict and a lot of later anthropology. About her three case studies, Benedict writes they are travelling along different roads in pursuit of different ends, and these ends and these means in one society cannot be judged in terms of those of another society, because essentially they are incommensurable (1934:223).

This history reveals the major theme missing from both Benedict and Diamondan anthropology of interconnection. That as Eric Wolf described in Europe and the People Without History peoples once called primitivenow perhaps more politely termed tribal or traditionalwere part of a co-production with Western colonialism. This connection and co-production had already been in process long before anthropologists arrived on the scene. Put differently, could the Dobuan reputation for being infernally nasty savages have anything to do with the white recruiters of indentured labour, which Benedict mentions (1934:130) but then ignores? Could the revving up of the Kwakiutl potlatch and megalomaniac gamuts have anything to do with the fur trade? It would take many years before an ethnography challenging the Fortune-Benedict story of Dobu became available, and Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island by Susanne Kuehling is still hardly read in comparison to Patterns of Culture. As Wolf announced in the first sentences of Europe and the People Without History: The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like nation, society, and culture name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding. (1982:3) In follow-up posts, Ill attempt to outline how we can avoid the misleading inferences and increase rather than decrease our share of understanding. I agree with Alex Golub about taking care with hyperbole and strident rhetoric. But we still need a take-the-fight-to-thestreets moment for that better understanding of humanity. Interestingly, that take-the-fight-to-the-streets moment may have been best provided by Eric Wolf himself in a 1980 New York Times piece about the 79th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, They Divide and Subdivide And Call It Anthropology: An earlier anthropology had achieved unity under the aegis of the culture concept. It was culture, in the view of anthropologists, that distinguished humankind from all the rest of the universe, and it was the possession of varying cultures that differentiated one society from another. Each people was seen as having a distinctive, internally coherent repertoire of artifacts and customs, whichpassed from generation to generationcreated an enduring compact between the living and the dead. Looking at culture in this way, anthropologists had found seemingly secure explanations of why people behaved in certain ways and not others: it was in their culture. Similarly, changes in the way people behaved could be accounted for by pointing to changes in their culture. Other disciplines, especially psychology, sociology and history, acknowledged anthropologys special jurisdiction over the study of cultural phenomena. . . . What was once a secular church of believers in the primacy of Culture has now become a

holding company of diverse interests, defined by what the members do rather than by what they do it for. There are unvoiced concerns within the profession about what anthropology has become and where it is headed. The old culture concept is moribund. But in its time, it unified the discipline around a concern with basic questions about the nature of the human species, its biological and socially learned variability, and the proper ways to assess the similarities and differences. Ultimately, a discipline draws its energy from the questions it asks. Whether anthropologys basic questions are still those that marked its beginnings or new ones, the task of articulating them may be the meetings hidden agenda.

Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History Geography, States, Empires
January 26, 2013 by Jason Antrosio in Anthropology
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Eric Wolfs Europe and the People Without History (1982) is a foundational work for anthropology, history, and global studies. I read parts of Europe and the People Without History my first year of college for a seminar titled Imperialism, Slavery, and Revolution with Shanti Singham. I tackled the rest over the summer when I returned home to Montana. Eric Wolf made sense of the worldI remained a history major, but I eventually studied anthropology because of Europe and the People Without History. Taking aim at portrayals of a world of relatively isolated peoplesaccounts like Ruth Benedicts Patterns of CultureEric Wolf describes a world of connection: The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality (1982:3). Given this central assertion in the very first pages, its sad that sometimes this lesson seems lost, even on some who had Eric Wolf himself as a professor, like Napoleon Chagnon. Its also sad that people like Bill Gates were never exposed to this way of understanding the world. The central assertion of interconnectedness rests on recapturing the historical details of European expansion in the last 500 years. Even for The World in 1400 Eric Wolf explains that everywhere in this world of 1400, populations existed in interconnections (1982:71). The

world from the 16th century knits together every continent, plying trans-oceanic linkages. The question is to understand how it was Europeans who directed this expansion, a question critical for world history and contemporary realities: An observer looking at the world in A.D. 800 would barely have taken note of the European peninsula. Rome had fallen, and no effective centralized power had taken its place. Instead, a host of narrow-gauged tributary domains disputed rights to the shattered Roman inheritance. The center of political and economic gravity had shifted eastward to the new Rome of Byzantium, and to the Muslim caliphate. Six hundred years later, in A.D. 1400, an observer would have noted a very different Europe and a marked change in its relation to neighboring Asia and Africa. The many petty principalities had fused into a smaller number of effective polities. These polities were competing successfully with their neighbors to the south and east and were about to launch major adventures overseas. What had happened? (1982:101) Starting in the 1960s, Eric Wolf was already asking what Jared Diamond in the 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel called Yalis Question: Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? Answering that question, as Eric Wolf understood, means accounting specifically for how Europe went from being a land that in A.D. 800 was of little account in the affairs of the wider world (1982:71) to those effective polities that could launch overseas adventures. Diamond would have us believe that the answer lies in the shape of the continents, latitude and longitude gradients, and agriculture, particularly large domesticated animals. Although this much older story may account for the fact that many of the most powerful polities have been in Eurasia, it cannot account for the rise of Europe 800-1400 A.D. Everyone agrees that geography matters. Eric Wolfs survey of the world in 1400 is full of maps, descriptions of terrain, and accounts of available resources. But serious historians reject Jared Diamonds rationale for the rise of Europe. To truly get a grip on Yalis Question, we have to turn back to Eric Wolf in 1982.

The World in 1400: Political Geography, Agriculture, Empires, Trade

By 1400 A.D., cities, states, and empires had already risen and fallen throughout Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. In effect, there were surely hundreds of local varieties of Yalis question: Why is it that you Turk Mongol Mali Bantu Indian Chinese Sriviyaya Chimu Inca Chibcha Maya Aztec Cahokia (to name a few) people developed so much and conquered us? Just as surely there were people and rulers who justified their power by

invoking divine authorities, or claiming biological, cultural, intellectual superiority. There were also those who would marvel at the sometimes quite rapid rises and declines, the shifting balances of power. (See Rob Gargetts short but potent Other Africas story of African kingdoms.) Geography is of course important. As Eric Wolf sets forth, to understand this world of 1400, we must begin with geography (1982:25). And undoubtedly agriculture, especially intensive agriculture, is important in this story. Agriculture may not be necessary for sedentary existencethe peoples on the Pacific Coast of North America had settled life through fishing. Agriculture may not have even been necessary for the rise of some of the first states. As textbook authors Robert Lavenda and Emily Schultz explore through their account of state formation in the Andes, if the first complex societies on the Peruvian coast were based on a steady supply of food from the sea, rather than agriculture, the notion that village agriculture must precede the rise of social complexity is dealt a blow (Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? 2012:208). Nevertheless, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to run an empire without intensive agriculture. There may also be geographical features which encouraged city and state formation. [Update April 2013: Some of the latest findings indicate Maize was key in early Andean civilisation, and so it would seem almost all urban-state forms have relied on agriculture.] But this kind of large-scale geography cannot account for the rise and fall: Can anyone say that the present balance of economic and political power will be the same in 2500 as it is today? For example, in the year 1500 some of the most powerful and largest cities in the world existed in China, India, and Turkey. In the year 1000, many of the mightiest cities were located in Peru, Iraq, and Central Asia. In the year 500 they could be found in central Mexico, Italy, and China. In 2500 B.C.E. the most formidable rulers lived in Iraq, Egypt, and Pakistan. What geographic determinism can account for this? (McAnany and Yoffee, Questioning Collapse 2010:10) Moreover, it is important to note that although there could be shifts of power and rapid declines, this rarely meant a complete end to the social system: Over two decades ago the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt wrote that societal collapse seldom occurs if collapse is taken to mean the complete end of those political systems and their accompanying civilizational framework. . . . More recently Joseph Tainter, after a search for archaeological evidence of societal overshoot and collapse, arrived at a conclusion similar to Eisenstadts: there wasnt any. When closely examined, the overriding human story is one of survival and regeneration. Certainly crises existed, political forms changed, and

landscapes were altered, but rarely did societies collapse in an absolute and apocalyptic sense. (Questioning Collapse 2010:5-6) Finally, and of extreme importance as we turn back to Eric Wolf, these places exist not in isolation but interconnection: Groups that defined themselves as culturally distinct were linked by kinship or ceremonial allegiance; states expanded, incorporating other peoples into more encompassing political structures; elite groups succeeded one another, seizing control of agricultural populations and establishing new political and symbolic orders. Trade formed networks from East Asia to the Levant, across the Sahara, from East Africa through the Indian Ocean to the Southeast Asian archipelago. Conquest, incorporation, recombination, and commerce also marked the New World. In both hemispheres populations impinged upon other populations through permeable social boundaries, creating intergrading, interwoven social and cultural entities. If there were any isolated societies these were but temporary phenomenaa group pushed to the edge of a zone of interaction and left to itself for a brief moment in time. Thus, the social scientists model of distinct and separate systems, and of a timeless precontact ethnographic present, does not adequately depict the situation before European expansion; much less can it comprehend the worldwide system of links that would be created by that expansion. (1982:71) In many introductory anthropology textbookseven my preferred textbook for Introduction to Anthropologythere is a curious juxtaposition of the sections on the archaeology of complex societies and the state with a leap from there into cultural anthropology, the culture concept, and ethnography. Such juxtapositions perpetuate the view that cultural anthropology studies others as relatively isolated laboratories who can reveal something about human natureand this takes us back to the themes considered in my Amazon-available Kindle e-book on human nature, evolution, and race. Yet 500 years before anyone who called herself an anthropologist arrived on the scene, these peoples were neither isolated nor static. Eric Wolfs paragraph, or something like it, should be in every Introduction to Anthropology textbook. As should some account of the rise of the European powers that would eventually create anthropology as an academic discipline.

Eric Wolf Europe, Prelude to Expansion: Long-Distance Trade, Political Consolidation, State Making
The first factor Wolf considers for explaining the rise of Europe from provincial backwaters to powerful polities 800-1400 A.D. is the shift in patterns of long-distance trade. Before 800 A.D. much of Europe was more likely to be conquered than to do any conquering:

Islam expanded quickly from its center in the caravan city of Mecca, and in the course of the seventh century A.D. it overran North Africa. During the second decade of the eighth century, Muslim armies occupied most of the Iberian peninsula; in the ninth century Sicily fell to the Muslims. When the capital of the Islamic caliphate moved from Damascus to Baghdad in the mid-eighth century, however, the Islamic center of gravity moved eastward away from the Mediterranean, in a movement parallel to the eastward shift of Byzantium. Trade with the Caucasus, Inner Asia, Arabia, India, and China grew more important than trade connections with the western Mediterranean. (1982:103) [See also Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 12501350. Abu-Lughod (1991:40) calls Wolf's book "a breath of fresh air in an otherwise selfcentered literature."] In other words, the balance of trade and power was firmly in the East. Europe provided raw materials and even some slaves: Europe furnished mainly slaves and timber, receiving some luxury goods in return. European slaves reached the Near East not only across the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean but also, along with precious furs and other products, down the Russian rivers into the Black Sea. They were brought by the Varangian Rus, a branch of the seafaring and sea-raiding peoples who had fanned out from their viks, or inlets, in Scandinavia to harass the European littoral and to carry off slaves to Near Eastern markets (1982:105). One can imagine yet another perplexed European Yali, seeing a bustling Near Eastern city for the first time after being sold into slavery from a forest hinterland! The key shift would be the rise of the Italian ports, especially Venice and Amalfi, then later Pisa and Genoa: Through their success in trade and war, these Italian towns began to tilt the balance of exchange between the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean in favor of the West. Largely deprived of an agrarian hinterland of their own, their frontier of expansion lay in sea-borne commerce. They were thus in a position to become the main beneficiaries of the new conjuncture of power and influence in the Mediterranean after the year A.D. 1000. By then, Byzantium had initiated a policy of military consolidation on land, relying on its armed peasantry to defend it against growing attacks on all sides. Venice became virtually the commercial agent of Byzantium and engrossed most of its sea-borne trade. (1982:104) The second factor Eric Wolf turns to is political consolidation. Here after A.D. 1000, there was an intensification and extensification of cultivation. This was particularly true of areas north of the Alps, where the introduction of triennial rotation by means of the heavy horse-drawn plow resulted in an absolute increase of the surplus product. Clearing of the dense forest

cover of continental Europe and plowing up of the European plain expanded the arable from which surpluses could be taken. Both processes took place under the aegis of tribute-taking overlords, and both, in turn, increased the political power of the dominant class. Increased production of surpluses further enhanced the military capability of this class, which rested upon the ability to sustain the high cost of war horses and armor. (1982:105) Here Wolf is obviously discussing things related to Diamonds Guns, Germs, and Steel: horsedrawn plows, agriculture, war horses and armor. And it is true that you need non-human animal muscle power and certain technologies to increase surplus production. However, Wolf explains this all under the heading of political consolidation: the key factors are political and economic. Plows, non-human animal muscle power, and armor were available across Eurasia. What needs to be explained is how they were coming together in the northwest part of the continent during this period, and under the aegis of relatively small-scale polities. Here again, the key motivations were political and economicWolf describes how these polities used war abroad, commerce, and enlarging the central domain. As Wolf outlines (1982:105-108), the war abroad tactic was important for the Iberian peninsula as they carried out a long Reconquista of Muslim Spain; commerce became important shifting north from Italy; France and England followed the expansion of the central domain: All the European states grew slowly, as composites of many different segments and accretions. Their boundaries might well have been drawn differently, creating a map of Europe quite different from the arrangement of countries that we think of today as inalieanable national entities. The map might have shown a sea-based empire, comprising Scandinavia, the northern seacoast of Europe, and England; a polity comprising western France and the British Isles; a union of eastern France and western Germany, or a state comprising the valleys of the Rhone and the Rhine intervening between German and France; a union of Germany and northern Italy; a state uniting Catalonia and the south of France; an Iberian peninsula divided into a northern Christian tier of kingdoms and a southern Muslim tier. Each of these represents a possibility that in fact existed at some time, and each suggests that the geopolitical boundaries segmenting Europe today require explanation and should not be taken for granted. (1982:108) Wolf proceeds to discuss state making and expansion. Interestingly, this seems driven in part by what has been called a crisis of feudalism around A.D. 1300: Agriculture ceased to grow, perhaps because the available technology reached the limits of its productivity. The climate worsened, rendering the food supply more precarious and uncertain. Epidemics affected large numbers of people debilitated by a poorer diet. . . . The solution to the crisis required an increase in the scale and intensity of war (1982:108-109). In other words, to a certain extent there were both internal strengthsand weaknessesthat spurred increased militarization and the search for new frontiers.

Eric Wolf among the Historians Why Europe?

Eric Wolf was hardly the only one trying to explain, or better re-explain, the European transformation that set the stage for colonialism and global capitalism. In addition to the traditional histories, Wolf was in dialogue with Immanuel Wallerstein, and his work on The Modern World-System. He read Andre Gunder Franks World Accumulation which details the global scope of the stockpiling of mercantile wealth, although he calls capitalist what I would, with Marx, treat as the prehistory of capital (1982:408). Wolf also cites several books from J.H. Parry. In Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (2003:58-73), Patrick Manning nicely summarizes this scholarly ferment re-investigating the question of why Europe and why capitalism, in a global context. When I first read and taught Guns, Germs, and Steel, I thought Jared Diamond would be in some kind of dialogue with this earlier work. But search the text for Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf, even for John H. Parry. Nothing. Sure, one could claim all these arguments are irrelevant for this enormous time-scale, but thats hardly an adequate answer, or even the beginning of an answer, to Yalis Question. These scholars recognize the importance of geography, but this geography does not explain the reasons for European expansion. Contemporary historians broadly verify that Jared Diamonds account in Guns, Germs, and Steel is inadequate. In an otherwise positive review, The World According to Jared Diamond, historian J.R. McNeill makes precisely this point. First, although he is generally quite appreciative about Diamonds approach, McNeill comments that it is probably not so surprising to see the most formidable societies arising in Eurasia: The fact that Eurasia spawned the worlds most formidable societies does not pose a truly vexing question. Eurasia accounted for some eighty percent of humankind over the past 3,000 years, and probably well before that. Even if formidability were randomly distributed, one would expect to find it more often in Eurasian societies than elsewhere. Indeed because greater population ordinarily means greater interaction, more intense intersocietal competition, and the faster and more thorough acquisition of a broader array of disease immunities, the probability would be even higher than eighty percent that Eurasia should at any given moment have produced historys most formidable societies. The deck was stacked even without Diamonds biogeographical factors. So Diamond has proposed some excellent new answers to a less-than-perplexing question. Then McNeill goes on to ask a more vexing question, and one more familiar to historians is, why Europe? and investigates Diamonds answer in Guns, Germs, and Steel. McNeill contends that Europes emergence in modern centuries cannot be put down to geography and states that Diamond has oversold geography as a substitute for history (my thanks to Patricia Galloway for the link). Other historians tell the same tale. There are several global histories of empire and attempts to account for the rise of Europe that do not even mention Jared Diamond. Neither The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, And the World Economy, 1400 to the Present by Kenneth

Pomeranz and Steven Topik nor The Human Web: A Birds-Eye View of World History (2003) by J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill mention Diamond. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2006) by Robert B. Marks includes minor references to Jared Diamond, but not for explaining the rise of Europe. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper briefly discuss what they term the steel and germs explanation, only to dismiss it (Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference 2010:163)see the follow-up Myths of the Spanish Conquest Indigenous Allies & Politics of Empire for a full assessment. I also turned to the November 2012 New Yorker review by Adam Gopnik, Faces, Places, Spaces: The renaissance of geographic history. Jared Diamond is unmentioned in this review of those seeking to reassert the importance of geography. Gopnik pans this renaissance, which is all about retrospective unfalsifiability: If you compress and expand the time scale just as you like, you can make any event look inevitable. Gopnik is rightly unconvinced: Once the sight of a Viking prow coming down a river was as terrifying a sight as any European could imagine. Now the Scandinavian countries are perhaps the most pacific in the world. Whatever changed, it wasnt the shape of Scandinavia. In short, some historians cite Diamonds ideas for the big Eurasian overview. Its a safe citation, since the time-scale is outside their customary purview, and sometimes lends popular gravitas. Patrick Mannings summary is apt: Diamonds argument, while it has been contested by other scholars, is an elegant simplification of a major issue in world history and an effective illustration of long-term trends in history. Yet when he attempts to use the same reasoning to explain the comparatively short-term changes of imperialism and racism in recent centuries, his results are far less satisfactory (Navigating World History 2003:100). More bluntly, I dont find any reliable historians who use Diamonds work to ponder the truly more vexing question for world history, for anthropology, for contemporary understandingsWhy Europe?

Eric Wolf and Yalis Question

As I stated in Real History versus Guns, Germs, and Steel, I am sympathetic to Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertzs interpretation that Yalis Question was not actually about getting more stuff, but about being recognized as fully human, about being treated with dignity and respect: Yali and many other Papua New Guineans became preoccupied with the reluctance, if not refusal, of many whites to recognize their full humannessto make blacks and whites equal players in the same history (Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in the Telling of History 2010:335). If anything, Eric WolfsEurope and the People Without History could be criticized for a similar materialistic focusof bringing an essentially Marxian political economy to the explanation of world history. While that may be the case, it seems nevertheless important to do the materialist answer to Yalis Questionwhy was it the European peoples?if only for the revised understanding of European power in the past 500 years. Eric Wolf did the spadework in 1982 for answering Yalis Question. In 1997, Jared Diamond inexplicably dialed back our knowledge, in a book that still seems to captivate the world. But if

anthropology wants to build on anything, wants to deliver a true understanding of the global transformations shaping our modern world, then Eric Wolfs Europe and the People Without History remains the best place to begin. Thomas Hylland Eriksens new introduction remarks that Wolfs perspective is even more sorely needed than it was when Europe and the People Without History was written in the early 1980s (2010:xvii). I agree.

Eric Wolf: Why Not More Influential?

Eric Wolfs book and work are extremely influentialmany anthropologists mention him forAnthropology: The Landmark Books and his titles are still the source of inspiration for riffs like Humans and the Animals Without History. But Eriksens remark raises the question of why this perspective is more sorely needed now than in the 1980s. After all, Ive suggested that Wolf could have been a key influence for Questioning Collapse but he does not appear. Europe and the People Without History is also absent from the accounts by Burbank and Cooper, McNeill and McNeill, Pomeranz and Topik, or Robert B. Marks cited above. Eric Wolf gets a footnote for Charles Manns 1491 and 1493. What happened? Update: Thank you to Ryan Anderson at Savage Minds for highlighting this piece and Keith Hart, The limits of Karl Polanyis anti-market approach in the struggle for economic democracy. Please check interesting comment streams at both articles. Part of it may be the titleits difficult to pull off irony. I remember trying to explain Europe and the People Without History to friends in Ecuadortheir first reaction was quite negative! Ulf Hannerzs assessment of a title like Exotic No More could be equally applied: When the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland commissions a volume to present a more current understanding of the discipline, it gives it the titleExotic No Moreonce again providing above all a negative statement, which might at worst be taken to mean that anthropology has given up its attempt to understand human lives across boundaries and is now all anthropology at home. The wide-ranging contents of the book in question show that this is not the case, but I would have preferred a more positive formulation up-front. (Anthropologys World 2010:48) The book also was a long time in writing: The project for this book emerged from the intellectual reassessments that marked the late 1960s. . . . I began to write this book in the spring of 1974; the final draft was completed in 1981 (1982:x). Obviously for a book of such magnitude, scope, and eruditionas well as trying to write histories for regions which had

hardly received historical attentionits ludicrous to expect rapid writing. However, in the intervening years Clifford Geertz came out with The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), which helped revive the notion of cultural wholes. On this matter, Eric Wolfs 1980 New York Times piece about the 79th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, They Divide and Subdivide And Call It Anthropology, was a call for a new agenda, a call that may never have been answered (see also Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture: From Culture to cultures). Not long after Europe and the People Without History, the Writing Culture (1988) volume took a quite different tack from Eric Wolfs vision. Anthropology seemed to be turning both elsewhere and inward upon itself, as the Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf Reply to Michael Taussig (1989) illustrates. The New York Times obituary for Eric Wolf headlines him as an Iconoclastic Anthropologist. For Manning, part of the issue was the books organization: The book is made hard to follow by the alternations in themes: a general introduction, a survey of the world in 1400 (ranging as much as several hundred years earlier), an analysis of modes of production in general, a survey of Europes prelude to expansion, and chapters of European impact elsewhere. While the work focused on the creation of the world community as a capitalist order, it provided no clear chronology on the creation of that community. . . . A stong concluding section underscored the need to examine the history of culture in the modern world. But the text itself looked mainly at economics and the influence of Europe beyond the seas. (Navigating World History2003:69) This may help explain why the Wikipedia page on Europe and the People Without History is presently an unfinished stub. It could also have been the Marxian framework. Even though it was much updated and a fluid concept rather than a straitjacket, Wolfs Modes of Production chapterwedged between the two chapters I have discussed the most, The World in 1400 and Europe, Prelude to Expansionmay have served too much as an argumentative detour. In what is probably the most famous review, Are There Histories of Peoples Without Europe?, Talal Asad concentrates mostly on that modes of production chapter, with pages of arguments that seem more than a bit arcane today. Nevertheless, Asads ideas on history are instructive, especially given the everenticing idea that history can be mined as a science of natural experiments: I wish merely to question the utility of defining a precapitalist mode of production in terms of kinshipespecially as that concept is taken (as Wolf explicitly takes it) as an heuristic device. I suggest that the history of noncapitalist societies can not be understood by isolating one a priori principle, that the important thing always is to try and identify that combination of elements (environmental, demographic, social, cultural, etcetera) in the past of a given population that will serve to explain a particular outcomein the narrative (or weak) sense of explain, not in the natural science (or strong)

sense, because the past of human societies cannot be tested, it can only be made more or less plausible as part of the same story as the present. If it is objected that such an approach would make a predictive science of society impossible, I can only agree. (1987:602; for some related thoughts on the uses of history, see Black Swan Anthropology Lessons)

What the Histories of Peoples Without Europe Once Were

In 1968 I wrote that anthropology needed to discover history, a history that could account for the ways in which the social system of the modern world came into being, and that would strive to make analytic sense of all societies, including our own (1982:ix). Almost a half-century later, it seems anthropology needs to rediscover history. Returning to Eric Wolfs Europe and the People Without History would be a good place to start. It seems fitting to conclude here with Asads call for another book by Eric Wolf: This is an admirable bookerudite, politically committed, thought provoking. Few anthropologists would have had the courage to write it. Many readers from a variety of disciplines will admire it. But another book remains to be written by Wolf telling another story, the story of transformations that have reshaped those conditions which are not of peoples choosing but within which they must make their history. We should not think of those conditions as though they merely set varying limits to preconstituted choices. Historical conditions construct those choices, just as distinctive choices constitute historically specific subjectivities. It is when we have anthropological accounts of what those constructions were, and how they have changed, that we may learn what the histories of peoples without Europe once were, and why they cannot make those histories any longer. We may then also understand better why and in what ways so many peoples are now trying to make other histories both within and against the hegemonic powers of modern capitalism that had their origins in Western Europe. (1987:607) To my mind, the two books that would most answer this call are Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History and Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. At the same time, if I remember correctly, one of Trouillots comments about Eric Wolf was that he worked in Max Webers tradition of the ideal typeit was something that Wolf could pull off from individual brilliance, but so very difficult to emulate. Or as Manning notes, over the longer run [Europe and the People Without History] seems to have been most successful in demonstrating the difficulty of carrying out a coherent analysis of the topic (Navigating World History 2003:69).

Public Anthropology and Bill Gates: We Cannot Abandon Humanity

July 11, 2013 by Jason Antrosio in Branding

Update: For more on the issues discussed below, especially reflecting on 2012-2013, see The hour of anthropology may have struck by Rick Salutin in The Toronto Star.

Was thinking about being an American Anthropologist, the journal American Anthropologist, Public Anthropology and America at a time near the 4th of July, 2013. Then as Bill Gates read Jared Diamond had to get ready for forthe biggest Jared Diamond review of all time. With 12 million Twitter followers and over 72 billion dollars, the American Bill Gates recently reclaimed the richest person in the world crown from Mexicos Carlos Slim Hel. I am left repeating the delusional chant from the Celebrity Net Worthblog: USA! USA! USA! For all those who doubted Jared Diamonds effect on the telling of world history: None of the classes I took in high school or college answered what I thought was one of the biggest and most important questions about history: Why do some societies advance so much faster and further than others? While people disagree with minor parts of Diamonds argument, the basic ideathat the differences between societies are largely explained by geographyis very persuasive. Well, Bill Gates, if you would have taken some real history and anthropology classes, the ones where you read books like Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, perhaps geography as justification for power may not have been so excusable. But if you do have time to

read into the ethnographic record, Ill take a re-tweet for Yanomami Ax Fight: Jared Diamond, Science, Violence & the Facts. Thanks!

Big Questions for American Anthropology: Who Are We? Qui SommesNous?
The 2011 American Anthropological Association Presidential Address by Virginia Dominguez, Comfort Zones and Their Dangers: Who Are We? Qui Sommes-Nous? has now been published: Who and what then is the AAA and, more generally speaking, the profession of anthropology (esp. in the United States)? When I think of the American Anthropological Association and the fact that it is old and very large, indeed by far the largest national association of anthropologists in the world today, I consider the question especially significant for the profession. National associations exist in many parts of the planet, and the AAA is arguably just one of them, formally existing to serve anthropologists in the United States (whatever their place of birth or origin). But is an association that includes so many colleagues from around the world, that is located in the arguably most powerful country in the world in 2012, and that is so much larger than all other national anthropological associations not worth a closer and more critical look? The evidence offered here does not really support the view that U.S. anthropology is all that progressive, liberal, or center left especially within its ranks, that is, especially when looking at serious arenas of inattention and inaction within the profession itself. (2012:404) Dominguezs lecture was pointedly aimed at anthropologys comfort zones, but it seems to have gone mostly unnoticed on the blogosphere. It is of course not-open-access, but it is right next to Why the AAA Needs Gold Open Access by Tom Boellstorffwhich did get blogosphere notice. The Virginia Dominguez article seems a bit more critical than my write-up of the lecture as Anthropologys Challenge: We can be better, and I will eventually try to re-visit that post in the light of the published article. In the meantime, a miniscule percentage donation from Bill Gates could easily make all the articles in American Anthropologist open access. Forever.

The Long Tail of the American Anthropologistand Bill Gates

On the issue of open access, Dougs Archaeology has a fascinating analysis of AAA digital downloads. Dougs post is aimed mostly at showing how important blogging can be, and the power of the AAA blog. However, what struck me (and Im grateful to Doug for this comment back-and-forth) is really how hugeAmerican Anthropologist is in comparison to the rest of the bundle. Its approaching the kind of winner-take-all dynamic discussed in Black Swan Anthropology. This made me wonder if perhaps everything else except American Anthropologist could go open access. But as Doug points out, that would mess up the metrics, and much more importantly, its the big bundle that counts. This also brought me back to the first thing I really published, Copyright 2002 American Anthropological Association, Inverting Development Discourse in Colombia: Transforming

Andean Hearths. I went back and looked at the original copyright form, and it reads Authors may post their articles on their own websites but are expected to notify AAA and to prominently display the following line: Copyright 2002 American Anthropological Association. So that seems pretty straightforward, Im displaying the line, and Ive sent an email via the AAA Reprints & Permissions site. There was a bit of hassle involved, but it seems that if enough authors examined their existing agreements, wed basically have effective open access to AAA publications. Which seems like a workable solution until that Bill Gates donation rolls in. It also strikes me how incredibly lucky I was to get an early article in American Anthropologist. I lucked out with two sympathetic reviewers who continued to insist there was potential and helped me pull out the main themes (the third reviewer was never convinced). I also lucked into some favorable editorial decisions. At the time, I thought publishing in AA would change my lifethat everyone actually read those journals. It didnt change my life that wayno one started calling or e-mailing out of the blue. Surprise, surprise. But it did change my life in that I was then able to look a whole lot better in theacademic job lottery. Not better enoughI was still able to completely blow an interview with Berkeleybut I did get an interview. Of course, if theres anyone who has shown us how winner-take-all can workeven with what was arguably inferior technologyits Bill Gates.

An American Anthropologist Looking Back July 2012-July 2013

Did American Anthropology just blow it with Bill Gates? Maybe, but consider this: Although some aspects of anthropology appeal to various sectors of the public, the fact is that a large part of what anthropologists have to say requires intellectual effort, and moreover is often rather disturbing to peoples peace of mind. Jonathan Benthall, Enlarging the context of anthropology: The case of Anthropology Today 1996:136 In a search for where I had used that wonderful quote from Benthall, an early editor of Anthropology Today, I re-visited a July 2012 post on What is American Anthropology. As I was composing that post, I learned that Michel-Rolph Trouillot had passed away. Trouillot was an incredible inspiration for me as an anthropologist and for this blog. Trouillot was very attune to the unwitting American-ness of so many anthropologistsI remember Trouillot reading Clifford Geertz in a seminar and remarking on how American Geertz was. It also seems that at the time of Trouillots passing, the issues facing anthropology were rather different. Sure, there were significant problems of anthropology not being involved in public debates, but there was at least a hint that when someone said anthropology, they were likely to think about David Graeber and Occupy Wall Street. In other words, Graebers Debt: The

First 5,000 Years was certainly the biggest bookin Trouillots termsto contest the Savage slot: Anthropologys future depends largely on its ability to contest the Savage slot . . . Solutions that fall short of this challenge can only push the discipline toward irrelevance, however much they reflect serious concerns. In that light, calls for reflexivity in the United States are not products of chance, the casual convergence of individual projects. Nor are they a passing fad, the accidental effect of debates that stormed philosophy and literary theory. Rather, they are timid, yet spontaneousand in that sense genuinely Americanresponses to major changes in the relations between anthropology and the wider world, provincial expressions of wider concerns, allusions to opportunities yet to be seized. (Trouillot 2003:9) So even as the value of anthropology had come under attack, there was also a sense in July 2012 that it may have been a Great Year for Anthropology. But that was all before the one-two-three punch of Jared Diamond, Napoleon Chagnon, Steven Pinker, who together bash anthropology at the same time as they completely resurrect the Savage slot that Trouillot spent his life trying to contest. Hardly a coincidence that Bill Gates is also a Steven Pinker fanboy. Looking back, the missing piece for me is still Newtown and the gun reform debate we never really had. As a whole, American anthropology had nothing to say about gun culture and gun violence. As Hugh Gusterson pointed outMaking a Killing in the U.K. based Anthropology TodayAmerican anthropologists had done almost no fieldwork or ethnography on such issues in the United States. There was no professional statement or prepared position. Recent anthropological articles regarding gun reform continue to be eclectic, from a statement that no gun control is possible without Second Amendment repeal, to the idea that we are in the evolutionary equivalent of a novel environment. And so, American anthropologists have studied violence in every other part of the world, in every other time, but we have hardly done enough in the United States. The DiamondChagnon-Pinker juggernaut claims of decreasing violence in modern states roll along, a comforting displacement in the wake of Newtown and drones and Afghanistan. Like Jared Diamonds displacement onto geography, American power becomes accidental. We ignore a history of interconnection with others, so that we can now deign to save them: enter the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. American anthropology has yet to shift the story-line. War, Peace, and Human Nature is a good start, but it is priced and targeted for academic audiences. Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing has a better price, a better picture, and a

disturbing message that all those computers might have something to do with terror. However, most non-academic readers will be unlikely to make it past the introductory paragraphs. Of course we also need to be careful not to fall into another common American assumption that things change simply by writing or blogging about them. Nevertheless, if American anthropologists were saying really smart things about gun reform, immigration reform, international aid, technological terrorif we could develop a position and keep plugging at it we may not have been in reactive mode when people like Brooks-Chagnon-DiamondFriedman-Pinker-Wade get their press splash. Or Bill Gates tweets out his Jared Diamond review.

Do American Anthropologists Really Need Saving?

Some strangely good news at the end of this pay-walled article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aid That Does Not Help: Lila Abu-Lughod will be publishing Do Muslim Women Need Saving? in October 2013. Abu-Lughods 2002 article was powerful: Could we not leave veils and vocations of saving others behind and instead train our sights on ways to make the world a more just place? The reason respect for difference should not be confused with cultural relativism is that it does not preclude asking how we, living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine our own responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves. We do not stand outside the world, looking out over this sea of poor benighted people, living under the shadowor veilof oppressive cultures; we are part of that world. Islamic movements themselves have arisen in a world shaped by the intense engagements of Western powers in Middle Eastern lives. (Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?, 789) However, the original was written during the first invasion of Afghanistan, and could not be a commentary on how much the world has turned through Iraqand now Egypt, Libya, Syria, Turkey. I hope my hopes are not too high for this book-length treatment, but Im already planning to use it for Anthropology 101. Similar signs of hope at upcoming public-themed anthropology conferencesat American University, thePublic Anthropology Conference (October 2013) and what will be the recordsetting annual meetings for the American Anthropological Association (November 2013), Future Publics. American Anthropology may be White Public Space. But hey, were not as white as The Edge or the Being Human conferences, or the Management Committee for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

American Anthropology We Cannot Abandon Humanity

We cannot abandon the four-fifths of humanity that the Gorbachev Club* see as increasingly useless to the world economy, not only because we built a discipline on the backs of their

ancestors but also because the tradition of that discipline has long claimed that the fate of no human group can be irrelevant to humankind. (Trouillot 2003:138) * At the 1995 closed-door meeting of the Gorbachev Foundation in San Francisco, members of what has become a global oligarchy calmly agreed that at some point in this twenty-first century only two-tenths of the worlds active population would be necessary to sustain the world economy. The middle classes as we know them are likely to disappear. Chunks of humanity will become irrelevant. John Gage and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems suggest the motto of that future: to have lunch or be lunch. And how will the prosperous fifth appease those who may not want to be someone elses lunch? Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbignew Brzezinski, the very one who coined the word globalization, provides the most successful answer: tittytainmenttitty as in tits and motherhood, that is, enough milk for the poor to survive poorly and plenty of entertainment to maintain their good spirits (Trouillot 2003:56, drawing on The Global Trap: Globalization and the Assault on Prosperity and Democracy)