The thematic through line is how did agriculture lead homo sapiens away from egalitarian social arrangements to inequitable kingdoms or empires and thThe thematic through line is how did agriculture lead homo sapiens away from egalitarian social arrangements to inequitable kingdoms or empires and then to nation states — or did it? The authors cite the rich complexity of recent research which the archaeological community as a whole has — paradoxically — yet to embrace.
There are hundreds of a-ha moments in this book. Perhaps the biggest one for me was a result of something called the "indigenous critique." That is, the valuation of European society, institutions, and mores by well-known indigenous Americans, the foremost example being Kandiaronk of the Wendats. Kandiaronk said many wise things of which this is one.
"Come on, my brother. Don't get up in arms . . . It's only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they've heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely. However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit [Jesus], any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I've always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly . . . He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true." (p. 53)
*Cited here from Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled (1703), by Louis-Armand de d'Arce, Baron de la Hontan (Lahontan).
This "indigenous critique," gleaned from figures like Kandiaronk, was published by a number of European authors, some of them Jesuits. That's how it made its way from wilderness America to the salons of Paris and into the heads of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, et al. — therby having a major influence on The Enlightenment....more
I agree with David Brooks who reviewed this book in January 2013 that much of its essential idea— that the West can learn from traditional and small-sI agree with David Brooks who reviewed this book in January 2013 that much of its essential idea— that the West can learn from traditional and small-scale societies—doesn’t really leap off the page. Brooks’s point is that the reader doesn’t really get to meet individuals of traditional and primitive societies, and that undermines Diamond’s arguments that the West try alternatives to its present justice system. One idea that I Iiked was emotional mediation in some cases of murder. Here the killer and his victims are brought together to face each other over a table and talk about how the loss of a loved has affected them or, in the case of the killer, a show of remorse. This may seem preposterous on its face, but for those so inclined such an approach can provide closure for the parties that most present Western systems of justice cannot, since parties in Western disputes tend to talk at each other through adversarial intermediaries called attorneys. I can also see why Diamond sticks to discussing traditional and small-scale societies from the perspective of populations, since a divagation to an individual’s story might skew his arguments unduly. Having said that I also see how the populations approach appears inherently anti-individualistic and even Marxist. Marxist intrusions into the social and behavioral sciences in the second half of the 20th century were horrendously counterproductive, but I do not believe that is the author’s intent here. Nevertheless, the lack of human stories makes for rough sledding. There are some, but very few. So a bit of a narrative Catch-22....more
A fascinating book about the "fierce people." The Yanomamö—a "demographically pristine" stone age population occupying a remote expanse of the OrinocoA fascinating book about the "fierce people." The Yanomamö—a "demographically pristine" stone age population occupying a remote expanse of the Orinoco straddling Brazil and Venezuela. The author spent 30 years with them and came back with robust comparative data that will never be equaled, since, the Yamamanö are now acculturated. That is, their violent but pristine way of life has by now been diluted or admixed irrevocably by our culture.
Three quarters of the book is about the tribes themselves. Chagnon had to spend years in the field. He started by learning the Yamamanö language from scratch. Eventually, he would discover that it was without precedent. That is, without marked similarities to nearby languages. This suggests the Yamamanö are an exceedingly ancient people, having lived in considerable isolation, perhaps for millennia. Along with the New Guinea Highlanders, they were perhaps the last such pre-contact stone age people to survive into the twentieth century. And Chagnon worked with groups that had never before seen a white man.
There exists among the Yanomamö—a name taboo. Not only is it considered offensive to use the name of someone who has recently died, but even to call a living person by their name out loud is unseemly. Now try to imagine how this affected Chagnon, one of whose tasks was to gather genealogies and censuses. It makes for quite a story, especially when the tribe, the Bisassi-teri, which loved a good scatological joke, deceived him for months on end about the names he was collecting. Naturally, he was furious, but what could he do?
• "On one trip, again with Rerebawä as my guide, we were followed all the way from our canoe to the edge of the village by a jaguar, a walking distance of four hours"; • "The Yanomamö express distance by the number of 'sleeps' it takes to get somewhere"; • The Yanomamö technique of asphyxiating armadillo in their burrows and digging precisely where their quarry has fallen is an astonishing thing to read about; • "The most vile and vulgar insult you can utter in Yamamanö is 'Wa bei kä he shami!' ('Your forehead is filthy!') Any allusion to blemishes, warts, pimples, etc., on someone's skin, especially on or near the forehead, is potentially insulting."
Then there's the time when a monk from the Salesian Mission asks Chagnon—an atheist—to murder one of the mission's fellows, who, it has been discovered, has sired several children with a Yanomamö woman. Now get this, the proposed murder was seen by the monk, Padre Cocco, as a means of saving the Church from further embarrassment. The Salesians were evil, but Chagnon had to remain on good terms with them if he was to get his work done. The monks would take Yanomamö children downstream to mission encampments "...where they were put into dormitories, taught Spanish, and discouraged from using their own language. They were away from their parents and their villages for months at a time." Moreover, in the ongoing struggle to out perform the Protestant missionaries, the Salesians began giving the Yanomamö—a war-making people previously limited to bows and arrows—shotguns.
Noble Savages is also a book of searing, irrefutable truths, of reputations regained. A book by an author who underwent decades of smears. Here is the bottom line: Chagnon determined empirically that of the men in the many tribes he studied over decades, those who killed one or more enemies on raids, had almost three times greater reproductive success (more wives, more offspring) than those who did not kill. See the fascinating tables on pages 275 and 276.
This, Chagnon's biggest finding, connecting Yanomomö war-making with reproductive success started an academic war. For empirical proof that the Yanomamö went to war over women completely upset the anthropological orthodoxy of the day. That orthodoxy said that the "...theory of human behavior had no room for ideas from biology, reproductive competition, and evolutionary theory." That's right, the cultural anthropologists were anti-science! War in primitive societies, they decreed, had to be due to competition over scarce material resources or a reaction to the repression of the western colonial powers. To say otherwise was "contrary to the prevailing anthropological wisdom derived from Marxism."
Now imagine poor Prof. Chagnon. He was 28 at the time the first of his findings were published, and he faced a backlash from the "purists" who smeared him baselessly and who argued without evidence that he was wrong. But he was not wrong. He was correct. The Yanomomö did indeed go to war over women. Thus, the vast sphere of Cultural Anthropology as it was then defined went to war with itself.
Loading...
