12vii26
A bunch of links gathered up as I consider what I think about Jared Diamond. Turned out to be an interesting exercise
Guns, Germs, and Steel: Jared Diamond, reply by William H. McNeill
NYRB June 26, 1997 issue
in response to
History Upside Down from the May 15, 1997 issue...To understand the tragedy of World War II, you must understand the contrasting cultures of Germany, France, and other European countries in preceding decades. That is the traditional approach to history, and its value needs no defense. But if you instead wish to understand why Eurasian societies destroyed Native American societies, by developments leading after 13,000 years to guns, germs, and steel in Eurasia but not in the Americas, you must explore the differing biological and physical environments within which human cultures operated. Alas, the answers depend critically on biogeography, crop cytogenetics, microbial evolution, animal behavior, and other fields remote from historians' training.McNeill replies:
...Much more powerfully than any other species, we change the environment around us; and have done so ever since our ancestors began to control fire and to use tools. Learned behavior, channeled along innumerable different paths by divergent cultures, is what allows us to do so. Human beings do indeed often "approach limits imposed by environmental constraints" only to find a way to overcome and escape those constraints, as the history of technology repeatedly illustrates. I hasten to add that failures also figure largely in the historic record when environmental constraints disrupted human schemes and drastic depopulation and cultural collapse ensued.Clifford Geertz Very Bad News
(reviewsCollapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
and
Catastrophe: Risk and Response by Richard A. Posner)
...the empirical study of how societies die, the comparative examination of cases and the systematic calculation of possibilities, has barely begun. There are not, as yet, any life expectancy tables for civilizations, and the autopsies, partial and archaeological, are inconclusive about the cause of death.
...Whether societies waste away in ecological neglect or are destroyed by foreseeable disasters they have failed to prevent, for both writers vigilance and resolve are the price of survival. Awareness is all. However much they may differ in style and method (and they occupy the poles of the social sciences—dogged, fact-thick empiricism on the one side, model-and-calculate political arithmetic on the other), these are consciousness-raising books, tracts for the time. It is later than we think. Later even than we have thought to think
on Posner:
... The main problem, over and above their mind-bending dimensions, is that these various sorts of megacatastrophes seem to most people either so far off, so unlikely, or so thoroughly beyond what they have even vicariously experienced—psychologically off-scale, conceptually out-of-sight—as to be beyond the range of rational estimation or practical response. We are both emotionally disinclined and intellectually ill-equipped to think systematically about extreme events. Absorbed as we are in the dailiness of ordinary life, and enfolded by its brevity, the calculation of remote possibilities and the comparison of transcendent cataclysms look pointless; comic, even...Genetically modified crops? Artificial life? Mechanical super-intelligence? Species loss? Greenhouse pollution? Cyberterrorism? Posner reviews them all in turn, in a hectic flurry of piled-up fact-bites, speculative calcula-tions, passing quarrels, and offhand policy dicta—an orderless mixture of assertion, guess, remark, and opinion for which the term "farrago" would seem to have been invented. The result, perhaps unsurprisingly, is rather like a lawyer's brief. If one line of reasoning fails to carry, try another. If one expert demurs, find one who doesn't.
...For all their differences—Diamond's pageant and panorama, Posner's hodgepodge and swirl, Diamond's materialism, Posner's utilitarianism, Diamond's earnest prophesying, Posner's belligerent policy mongering—both are engaged, at bottom, in the same sort of exercise: engineering a social mood. They are out to alter attitudes, redirect mind-sets, refocus worries; transform the currents of popular feeling. They ask, in somewhat different ways, the same question: "Is the modern way of life globally sustainable?" And they give, on the basis of somewhat different material, the same answer: "Not as it stands."
...What is most striking about both Diamond's and Posner's views of human behavior is how sociologically thin and how lacking in psychological depth they are. Neither the one, who seems to regard societies as collective persons, minded super-beings intending, deciding, acting, choosing, nor the other, for whom there are only goal-seeking individuals, perceiving and calculating rational actors not always rational, has very much to say about the social and cultural contexts in which their disasters unfold. Either heedless and profligate populations "blunder" or "stumble" their way into self-destruction or strategizing utility maximizers fail to appreciate the true dimensions of the problems they face. What happens to them happens in locales and settings, not in culturally and politically configurated life-worlds—singular situations, immediate occasions, particular circumstances. But it is within such life-worlds, situations, occasions, circumstances, that calamity, when it occurs, takes intelligible shape, and it is that shape that determines both the response to it and the effects that it has. However "natural," "physical," or "material" they may be, and however unpredictable or unintended, collapse and catastrophe are, like coups and recessions, riots and religious movements, social events.
Life on the Edge Geertz on Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing's In the Realm of the Diamond Queen
...A loosely organized group of mountain people in southeastern Kalimantan (that is, "Borneo"), that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, a young Asian-American anthropologist, has devoted her study, perhaps the most detailed and certainly the most self-conscious examination of marginalization yet to appear. The product of more than two years of exceedingly difficult fieldwork conducted during the 1980s in a "densely forested and rough terrain occasionally dotted with fields and houses and crisscrossed with trails whose paths may change after a night of rain," it traces the fortunes and misfortunes of a people called, in her own invention, "The Meratus" (to avoid the vernacular and derogatory Bukit, "hillbilly," by which they are locally known), who have been forced into progressively more mountainous terrain by state-sponsored development activities in the hills and lowlands—industrial timbering, in the first instance (export volume, mostly to Japan, in the region rose 1,000 percent in a decade), plus a wide variety of resettlement, welfare, and civil construction programs, and an increasing penetration of marketplace commerce, modern education, and centralized military control. At once excluded from "the new Indonesia" as backward, immoral, and "not yet ordered" and resistant to that exclusion, "actively engaged" in "protesting, reinterpreting, and embellishing it," the Meratus are the very image of "the cultural and political construction of marginality," thirteen thousand "runaways from state discipline," in a province of nearly two million people, whose "everyday ...existence offends official ideals of order and development."...She has much to say, finally, about the poems, narratives, and ecstatic pronouncements of marginals among the marginals—st about every intellectual current now abroad in the human sciences, from deconstruction, environmentalism, and cultural studies to developmentalism, relativism, and most especially feminism—and drawing on Foucault, Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, James Clifford, Frederic Jameson, bell hooks, and Luce Irigaray—erful are doing to the world
...a process that is occurring all over the world—in Chiapas or the Amazon, in Sicily or the South Bronx, as powerful and determined central governments move toward what they conceive of as the destined future