Anthropology’s Guns, Germs, and Steel Problem
Kerim suggested Savage Minds mount a response to the recent “PBS special”:http://www.pbs.org/previews/gunsgermssteel/ (link courtesy of Kerim) on the theories of self-described polylingual polymath “Jared Diamond”:http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010805G.shtml (scroll down to “about the author”). Rex, our Melanesianist and thus an obvious choice to take up the task, was unfortunately departing for China just at that time. None of the rest of us leapt at the job, though we all conceded it was a worthy idea. Our collective reluctance points, I think, to anthropology’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393317552/qid=1122176923/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-8361077-2211200?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 problem.
Has this ever happened to you? You are at a party, or perhaps a family gathering, or maybe even just standing in line at the DMV when the person next to you strikes up a conversation. If they don’t start talking to you about Indiana Jones at the mention of anthropology, there is a fair chance they’ll bring up GG&S – expecting that you just love the book. Now you’re in a pickle. Diamond showily positions GG&S as *the* definitive anti-racist take on human history. If you say you don’t really care for it, your interlocutor is likely to get a slightly baffled look on her face. What could you possibly mean, you don’t like Diamond’s noble tome? Are you… a racist? To explain why you don’t like the book would take more time than most people making friendly small talk want to spend, and – worse yet – your explanation will necessarily impugn the motives of people who do like it, a group that you now know includes the person with whom you are speaking. My own usual reaction in such encounters is to say that unfortunately I have not read the book but that boy, it sure does sound interesting.
Alas, I did read most of the book several years ago. Diamond’s argument in GG&S is in three parts, supported by a magpie’s trove of evidence. _Part the first is_: white people are immeasurably superior to everyone else on the planet, in terms of technology, wealth, store of knowledge, and actual power, and have been so for a long time. _Part the second is_: this is not because non-white people are lazy and stupid. _Part the third is_: it’s because of the determining force that geographical and ecological constraints have exerted on human history.
Predictably, racists have pooh-poohed the book as yet another left-wing conspiracy theory, this time starring leftists’ erstwhile paramour Mother Earth in the role usually played by the Man. See “this”:http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003206.html for example from the folks over at Gene Expression (read all the way to the end – I’ll get back to their gleeful ‘exposé’ of Diamond’s past) (thanks to Tak for this link). But the more general response has been to assume that the book is a canonical text of political correctness and that cultural anthropologists, who are indeed anti-racist, must therefore subscribe wholeheartedly to it. Take “this”:http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/tv/balter_guns_germs_review_2005.html (thanks to Kerim for this link) which asserts
“If you haven’t heard of Diamond’s book, these ideas may nonetheless seem familiar. That is because they are essentially the same arguments made by Franz Boas and other early anthropologists who focused on human cultures as primarily differing for ecological and geographic reasons. Diamond adds a strongly Marxist element, placing the mode of production and its geographical prerequisites as necessarily causal…”
In fact, this utterly misrepresents the history of anthropological theory, how most working cultural anthropologists think about the human story, and the bases of anthropological anti-racism. Franz Boas was very clear that “we have no evidence of a creative force of environment… It is sufficient to see the fundamental differences of culture that thrive one after another in the same environment, to make us understand the limitations of environmental influences” (_Race, Language, and Culture_ 1982 [1940]: 255-256). Likewise, Diamond’s thesis would be anathema to any Marxist anthropologist. Diamond does not take “modes of production” as the causal motor of his thesis. This is because any mode of production is a social product of human history. Diamond’s explanations are located much anterior to this – in geography and ecology, which are taken to stand outside of, apart from, and entirely antecedent to human productive action.
To illustrate, let’s take each portion of his evidence in turn. I don’t have the book with me, so can’t exactly remember the Eurasian landmass part of the argument. If memory serves, it is that the Eurasian landmass is the largest contiguous landmass all in one climactic zone – that is, it’s the biggest landmass going “sideways” as opposed to “up and down” on the globe as it is conventionally represented. This brute fact facilitated the exchange of genetic material (domesticated plant, domesticated animal, human, and pestilential germ) across a large region over several thousand years, and therefore the development of powerful multiple disease resistance across this contiguous area. This, of course, set the epidemiological conditions for the eventual cataclysmic demographic encounter of European colonizers with American Indians. I don’t have any grounds for critiquing this part of the argument. It sounds like a plausible hypothesis to me, but (given the caliber of the rest of Diamond’s case) might be ridiculous. Please jump into the comments section if you know better.
Moving on. Diamond additionally argues that the inhabitants of this Eurasian landmass started off with a better array of potentially domesticable plants than did prehistoric humans living elsewhere on the planet. There are pages and pages of discussion of wild plants with a large, oily seed yield – the kinds of plants that would be good candidates for domestication. At first reading, my problem with this argument was that it is utterly post-hoc: he insists that there just plain are (and thus, by inference, were) more such plants in Eurasia than elsewhere, but I wondered about ongoing hybridization between wild ancestor plants, land races, and domesticated plants across thousands of years of domestication and whether that may have transformed what he takes to be the “wild” baseline. But my fuzzy doubts are mere amateur ankle-biting as compared to the expertly rear-end-kicking article lead-authored by John Terrell of the Field Museum (full reference below).* It demolishes the bright line demarcating agricultural domestication in human prehistory that sustains this entire portion of Diamond’s argument. It also offers a thoroughgoing critique of Diamond’s thesis and evidence. Highly recommended reading.
Next. Diamond likewise argues that the Eurasian landmass offered a uniquely amenable population of potentially-domesticable proto-livestock. His principal contrast here is to the Americas, where Amerindians puzzlingly domesticated nothing but the llama, the alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the (yum!) (awwww) (yum!) (awwww) guinea pig (the foregoing being the Andeanist version of the tastes great/less filling debate). Now, again, this argument runs into the a posteriori problem. He asserts that it is possible to infer that undomesticated animals are and always have been undomesticable animals. But this is unpersuasive. It supposes that we moderns (or specifically Jared Diamond) could (for example) look at a jungle fowl and infer, finger lickin’! even in the absence of domesticated chickens. He surveys the world outside Eurasia and declares it deficient in proto-goats, proto-chickens, proto-pigs, proto-cows, proto-sheep… Make of this what you will, in essence it is hand-waving.
Furthermore, in the lowland South American context at least, there is considerable evidence that human-animal relationships are in important respects conceptualized and experienced as relations between social equals, such that a pastoral, dominating, domesticating relationship is rendered “no good to think” (apologies to Stanley Tambiah). Philippe Descola is writing about this, and the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro lends itself to the same interpretation. This sounds a bit New Age & woo-woo as I’ve thumbnailed it here, but (I promise) it is compelling and thought-provoking when properly expounded. Given the many parallels between Melanesia and Amazonia, I wonder if a similar analysis would be applicable there (and, perhaps, elsewhere too). The point, though, is that given the presence of potentially useful animals, it is not a foregone conclusion that humans will set about domesticating them. It is simply not valid to read back from a present absence of domesticated animals a past dearth of proto-domestic animals.
Hang in there: this is winding down. I will admit I never finished reading GG&S, but I gather that Diamond claims it necessarily follows from the all of the above that given such overwhelming, built-in Eurasian advantages (which somehow condensed to the particular advantage of the Western European part of Eurasia) that it was inevitable that that part of the world would become the global cradle of innovation, invention, and subsequent armed exploratory excursions on the part of its disease-ridden, disease-resistant, bristling-with-lethal-technology inhabitants. We know the rest. Bad news for the rest of the world’s inhabitants. Just as inherently smart, just as inherently plucky… but damned unlucky.
Reportedly (because I didn’t see it), the PBS special ends with Jared Diamond in a truly tragic contemporary African hospital, the kind with lots of sick and dying children. He breaks down weeping. Apparently it is a genuinely touching moment, and why not? The death of innocents is terrible.
But I think the “pow” delivered by that moment is two-fold. It’s Greek tragedy sad: one weeps at the cruelty of the fates, while simultaneously being exquisitely affected by one’s own capacity for empathy (I weep at the cruelty of the fates, and at the touching testament my very weeping renders to my own humanity: namely, that I am the sort of tender-hearted person who cannot help but weep at the cruelty of the fates). One sticks it out through the long boring journey (have you ever watched Oedipus Rex being performed in Greek, with masks? It’s a lot like reading GG&S) in order to arrive, at the end, at the truth of one’s own essential goodness.
This is a punchline about race and history that many white people want desperately to hear. Those dying black kids at the end of the special – we know, because We Are Not Racist, that they don’t deserve what they are getting. They are not inferior. In fact, there but for the grace of god… thus affirming that no one but god has any historical responsibility, and that the world as we know it is a regrettable inevitability. Diamond’s account loudly insists that alea jacta wast (pardon the pig latin conjugation) before we even got going. And it poisonously whispers: mope about colonialism, slavery, capitalism, racism, and predatory neo-imperialism all you want, but these were/are nobody’s fault. This is a wicked cop-out. Worse still, it is a profound insult to all non-Western cultures/societies. It basically says they’re sorta pathetic, but that bless their hearts, they couldn’t/can’t hep it. Such an assertion tramples upon all that anthropology holds dear, and is a sham sort of anti-racism.
So that’s my take on Diamond; why he’s popular, why he’s wrong, why it’s not in fact very surprising that he’s long been obsessed with measures of racial difference (this is the tie-in to that Gene Expression link, above) and, finally, why I usually don’t get into the whole long take-down with laypeople. If any of you are still with me, and didn’t pass out drooling 6 long paragraphs ago, SM seems like a great space for accumulating more references and adding on to this take. This was never intended to be definitive – just a little something ;) to start what we hope will become an ongoing conversation.
*(2003) “Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication” by John Edward Terrell, John P. Hart, Sibel Barut, Nicoletta Cellinese, Antonio Curet, Tim Denham, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Kyle Latinis, Rahul Oka, Joel Palka, Mary E. D. Pohl, Kevin O. Pope, , Patrick Ryan Williams, Helen Haines, and John E. Staller. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 10:323-368.
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- zenblitz » Comment on Anthropology’s Guns, Germs, and Steel Problem by Allison
joe foucault-
I’m still reading the post and its comments(from the bottom/new up to the top/old) but that
“…because they are evil, greedy, blue-eyed devils…”
deserves a return.
It isn’t a choice between noble superior blessed-and-chosen, and evil greedy blue-eyed devils.
How about people?
They’re all humans, doing human things to each other. The problem is the assumption of moral superiority rising out of, and based entirely on, physical dominance.
The resistance comes from a culture that has to see itself as morally superior, or its legal system, its culture really, collapses from hypocrisy and untruth.
Not that the Incas weren’t harsh and self-interested, not that the Aztecs weren’t cruel – but that their conquerors were no better, by their own codes.
Too much of what we’re asked to accept, in order to support the culture we’re born into, is founded on its being morally centered and just. And way too much evidence contradicts that completely.
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Can someone tell why the “fertile crescent” with all its technological advances (writing, steel, paper, etc) became a third world area? Why, with all the advances did they not become the most intellectually advance society in the world. Please tell me what I can read to help me understand. Thank you.
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“Can someone tell why the “fertile crescent” with all its technological advances (writing, steel, paper, etc) became a third world area? Why, with all the advances did they not become the most intellectually advance society in the world. Please tell me what I can read to help me understand.”
They did become the most intellectually advanced society in the world, for a time. Try the recent book “No God But God” for a good overview of Muslim history.
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Diamond discusses this late in the book. Unsurprisingly, he blames geography: The Fertile Crescent’s ecosystem is not very resilient, due to sparse rainfall and other factors. After thousands of years of overfarming and deforestation, the Middle East has become more arid and hostile to farming than it was 10,000 years ago. In contrast, northern Europe gets tons of rain and has thick soil, so farming is still going strong there 10,000 years later.
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I read the book and know what he said but it just seems that there must be other factors because of the technology. That had should not have been destroyed as if it were a crop.
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Also we haven’t been doing that much agriculture in northern europe for 10,000 years. A thousand years ago a lot of it was thick forest.
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I apologize in advance if I’m about to repeat any points made in any of those 62 comments up there, but there are 62 of them.
Anyway. My problem with GG&S is that it seems sketchy and simplistic, which I think I recall being points Diamond concedes in the text; I don’t have the formal education and academic credentials to climb on a high Expert horse about this stuff, but nevertheless large parts of it strike me as quite plausible based on my years of reading whatever looks interesting.
As for the picture of Native Americans as being such gentle creatures that they (that is, my grandmother’s people) didn’t domesticate animals because they felt too equal to them, well, in the first place the fact that they ate every animal that looked tasty strikes me as fundamentally non-egalitarian — few things better express “superiority” than chewing, swallowing and defecating something — and they certainly understood and fostered inequality among people (and ate some of those too). So not only does this “gentle Injun” stereotype fall short of the facts, it’s also a damned insult of the condescending variety. That “argument” implies that America’s Natives lost “the New World” because they were too soft and wussylike to keep it, too busy weeping over litter, instead of having the continent stolen from them by main force by a more vicious, dishonorable, numerous and powerful enemy that happened to carry contagious diseases they’d never seen before.
As far as allegations of racism goes, I get a kick out a bunch of white people (and most American academics and “intellectuals” are, for reasons of structural racism, white people) sitting around calling each other racist. It’s also funny that people seem to think that unless one has a “high-level degree from a reputable institution of learning” one is automatically too dumb to say anything about it. Do you need a PhD in bovine husbandry to grill a steak?
The issue of why China didn’t conquer the world instead of England and Spain doesn’t bother me, and I doubt it would if I knew more about China; we could test that if someone wants to explain why there were no modern-style factories in Shanghai until the English gunboats showed up. As for calling Diamond racist, his point is that certain people just happened to luck out, which strikes me as the least racist explanation for what happened. Luck, remember, is always dumb, with no “merit” or “superiority” involved.
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And his new “Collapses” deserve being read. It’s about hte reasons of former societies collapses. He analyses what caused the falls down of many ancient and simply old societies and distinguishes several reasons.
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Sorry to break it to everyone, but Jared Diamond’s GGS theory is just “scientific predestination” theory rehashed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Criticism_of_Eurocentrism_and_determinism
Instead of Europeans being superior by their DNA, now Europeans are predestined to be superior by their ENVIRONMENT’S DNA. The “magic” remains Eurocentric, even though most major inventions prior to 1492 were NOT invented by Europeans (e.g. the wheel, cities, writing, guns, gunpowder, steel, crossbows, windmills, water wheels, geometry, castles, paper, books, printing press, magnetic compass, chariots, 360 degrees, zero, and on and on…)
Read James Blaut’s “Eight Eurocentric Historians” to see Diamond’s theory demolished point by point:
http://www.amazon.com/Eight-Eurocentric-Historians-J-M-Blaut/dp/1572305916/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0554598-3254430?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190739339&sr=8-1
Caution: For those infatuated with Jared Diamond’s theory, your heart will be broken after reading Blaut!
Reading Jared Diamond’s books are like Apple Macs: young White males are in love with it, and the rest seem indifferent to the gushing emotion-fest that is being displayed over it.
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Now that is a low blow.
Leave my MacBook out of this!
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I am a cultural anthropologist and just reading this book finally in 2007 wondering why I had not heard anthropologists engage with it constructively. I found this website tonight and am glad to see less of the usual academic bravado of straw men and the like, but certainly some of it. I find Randall’s posts very constructive, and I find the Field Museum article the most well articulated engagement with Diamond mentioned in this post. The book should not be dismissed as environmental determinism or you’ll go down the slippery slope of rejecting the entire field of archeology as material determinism. I would like archeologists to weigh in here. I find Diamond’s work one of the more environmentally INFORMED syntheses out there of a literature we cultural anthropologists aren’t great at perusing (paleobotany, prehistoric geography). I really want to hear from archeologists. Also, why in the world hasn’t an anthropologist put together as an accessible book sythesizing available prehistoric evidence they way Diamond did? He has done a great service to engage the public around these questions in such a widely read way. Shame on anthropology for letting a evolutionary bird specialist do this first, regardless of its criticisms.
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Not an expert nor an academic. I would like to add my two sense about something. I’ve seen commenters on this site as well as others referring to very recent (relative the time span covered in the book)systems such as capitalism to refute the book.
In my judgment, self-determination for various peoples has been declining rapidly for at least three centuries. “Advances” in military technology, communication, beaurocratic systems, economics, etc… make it much easier for the conquerers (particularly when conquering a people with significant technological disadvantages) to squelch any meaningful independent political, economic, or scientific acitivity deemed “undesireable” that begins to arise from the conquered.
Look at Israel and Palestine. Israel very deliberately and effectively tries to keep Palestinians as “backwards” as possible, regardless of what the Palestinians wish.
In fact, keeping people enslaved nowadays is much more subtle and “clean” than it oncce was. Corporations and governments,either very secretely or subtlely, maintain hegemony over nations and regions from afar using puppet figures willing to sell out their own people for cash and ego.
If anyone is still reading this thread and has any thoughts on what I’ve said, I’d like to hear.
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Thanks to all, has been an enlightening read (article and all 80 comments). My previous position is currently in the process of revision — but i’m finding it difficult to continue. It’s not just a matter of where to put the bricks that have been taken out of the GG&S model, which sits there in a more or less half dismantled state, but i am in need of an alternate, more factually accurate, more accountable, less skewed, less “crypto-racist”, more considering of structural racism, but perhaps steering clear of reverse racism, explanatory model.
i will read James Blaut next, as well as continue reading more of this blog. but no review of his work suggests that it will provide such an alternate model. i do hope i find something akin to what i am looking for somewhere but something tells me that maybe it doesn’t exist, or at least not in the concise form that i hope for — perhaps it is just too complex ???
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The human web : a bird’s-eye view of world history
Author: John Robert McNeill; William Hardy McNeill
Publisher: New York : W.W. Norton, ©2003.
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Thanks for the suggestion. this web-of-interaction model looks like a good contender to round off or complement the geography/resource model — which i’m not going to abandon at this time. For while i recognize the validity of a lot of your criticisms, and see the outright falsehood of parts of Diamond’s claims, as well as short comings in some of his thinking, i do think the work remains useful, as well as having predominantly positive, i.e. against ignorance and racism, effects on the world…
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Sometimes a micro perspective can help to clear the air. Thus, for example, on Boxing Day (12/26) my wife and I made a day trip to the Tomioka Silk Mill, where, the local story goes, the industrialization of Japan began. The tour guide did an excellent job of combining the global and local dimensions of the Silk Mill’s founding.
The year was Meiji 3 (1871). The Meiji oligarchs, pursuing the goal of catching up with the West, were eager to import Western technology and Western experts to teach Japanese how to build and use it. But they needed something to sell to pay for the imports. Japan produced silk, and foreign traders based in Yokohama were ready to buy it. In Japan, however, silk was still a cottage industry. The irregularities in the thread caused stoppages and wastage in European industrial looms, reducing the price and thus the income generated. The new silk mill would solve that problem.
But that was just part of the story. Historically, the silk thread used by European silk textile manufacturers had been produced in France, Italy or China. Then, however, a silkworm plague decimated silk production in France and Italy, and China fell into the chaos following the Taiping Rebillion (1850-1864) and subsequent events leading to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. That is why those foreign traders were in Yokohama, looking for silk from Japan. One of them was Paul Brunat, the French silk expert whom the Meiji government commissioned to find a suitable site and arrange for the construction of their new silk mill.
How, then, did the mill wind up in Tomioka, in Gunma Prefecture, instead of in Nagano or Yamanashi, neighboring prefectures were silk was also produced? Our guide listed five factors.
1. A large chunk of available land on which to build a factory. In Japan, where property rights are fiercely protected, this was a serious consideration. In Tomioka, the government already owned land, a site acquired by the Tokugawa Shogunate for a never completed military training ground.
2. Locally accessible clay suitable for bricks. Five kilometers in one direction.
3. Locally accessible coal to power steam-driven machinery. Five kilometers in another direction.
4. Water for simmering the silkworm cocoons to loosen the thread. A deep river running beside the site.
5. A welcoming local community. Here it is important to remember that foreigners were still unwelcome in Japan and the Meiji government was still on shaky ground. The Satsuma Rebellion, the last uprising of the samurai against the new government occurred in 1877, two years after the Tomioka Silk Mill went into operation in 1875, Tomioka, however, was home to several prominent silk traders already doing business with Yokohama, who saw the new mill as a chance to expand their business.
Together, these conditions made Tomioka the site of choice. Brunat, who was French, engaged a French architect working on the new imperial shipyards in Yokosuka (down the coast from Yokohama) to design the factory, which thus bears a striking resemblance to the shipyard buildings and is now one of three major historic brick structures surviving in Japan in which the bricks are laid in the French instead of the British style.
Brunat also engaged several young French engineers to install the plant’s machinery and four French women, all experienced industrial spinners, to train their Japanese counterparts. One of the women they trained became a trainer herself, traveling around Japan and training spinners for other factories that soon sprang up in other parts of the country. Her diary is now the primary source for information about the working conditions of the Japanese women who provided most of the new silk industry’s factory floor labor force.
What impresses me most about this case is the clear articulation of an historic opportunity (demand for Japanese silk due to the collapse of silk production in France, Italy and China), the availability of resources, both natural resources in and around Tomioka, and human resources, the French engineers and spinners, who, I suspect, were willing to travel half way around the world to a very strange new place because their industry at home was in the pits, the related technology, and a new government bent on catching up with the West and preventing Japan from sharing China’s fate during its encounters with Western Imperialism.
How to model these processes? Need something at least as sophisticated as Sim City. The usual sorts of simplifications to which the social sciences are prone are, alas, too simplistic.
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