From the point of view of evolutionary biology, Diamond’s GG&S is a monumental breakthrough. It’s a shame anthropology is apparently so humanist and moralistic and intellectually sloppy (it’s unbelievable that you comment on books you haven’t even finished).

Are you an evolutionary biologist, sd? I haven’t noticed it being described as a ‘monumental breakthrough’ er… anywhere at all. Now, I have to admit that, I’ve stayed out of this quagmire because I’m largely unfamiliar with Diamond, but I remember reading an ecologically determinist argument for the differential rise of technologically more developed cultures in various parts of the world in a book called “Anthropology Made Simple”, which, I believe was published in 1961. The idea that such thinking is extrinsic to anthropology, or something new, I don’t think holds water.

I haven’t actually noticed much moralising or intellectual sloppiness (Kerim’s odd statement about Nigeria notwithstanding) in the Savage Minds anthropologists about this (and please check through the moral models in anthropology posts to see that I don’t slavishly agree with them), though plenty of odd through to much worse by various other commentators.

I think the points about colonialism and capitalism are ones about the explanatory power they have. If you are an evolutionary biologist, I think a useful way of conceiving of the argument is with reference to Lis Vrba’s turnover pulse as an overarching explanatory framework, versus standard intra-and inter-specific competition models in evolutionary ecology.

I’ll duck out now before the brickbats start flying.

How does describing geographical advantage amount to crypto-racism? Should Diamond have started every chapter with the disclaimer “The behavior of our ancestors was really bad here. They were terribly oppressive and exploitative. Capitalism, globalization – awful.”

A biologist is not obliged to condemn the virus they are studying (“Morally reprehensible parasites, these prokaryotes, terrible…”) so why should an evolutionary biologist refrain from describing the evolution of technology in a cold, factual manner?

From the point of view of evolutionary biology, Diamond’s GG&S is a monumental breakthrough. It’s a shame anthropology is apparently so humanist and moralistic and intellectually sloppy (it’s unbelievable that you comment on books you haven’t even finished).

Cynical Question: Don’t Post Colonial Theory (or am I miscategorizing G&E’s academic millieu?) and Diamond’s historical materialism both have their origins in ideas of Hegel (and Marx)? Is this not more of a religious argument between dissenting sects of the same church?

BTW: Is Yali still alive? Can someone in PNG ferry him over to Port Moresby and plop him down in an Internet cafe so he can comment on this exchange?

cheers,
–Beo

It should also be noted that, while Freud did construct this ginormous formalistic account of the workings of world history…

Of course that should be “Marx”, not Freud.

Marx and Freud both established explicit ideological frameworks, and they were quite prepared to argue (and prepared others to argue) about their ideological premises.

It should also be noted that, while Freud did construct this ginormous formalistic account of the workings of world history, he also wrote particularistic, deeply historical works like _The 18th Brumaire_ and his discussion of enclsure in _Capital_. Interestingly, these small-scale histories often contradict the grand-scale histories — reinserting human agency into the tiny events (like the rise of Napoleon III) from which the Big Picture is abstracted. While the way things are is inevitable in Marx’s Grand History, they are incredibly contingent and agency-driven in the little history.

The complaint here seems to be that Marx and Freud are given a “pass” despite their ideologism, but Diamond isn’t. I suppose that’s a fair enough complaint — except that I can think of very few researchers who have absorbed Marx’ Marxism as a whole. Work like Wolf’s and Mintz’s shows a strong influence of the particularistic history noted above, but I see little in their work to indicate an acceptance of the “inevitable” rise of Communism as the pre-determined end of History. In any case, it seems to me that Marx and Freud have been influential not because their idologies agree with us so well, but because their work has proven useful in developing and researching so many issues. That is, their work has been productive. I’m not sure what research Diamond’s Grand Theory might inspire — in the 8 years since it’s been out, has there been a strong follow-up in cultural geography (outside of Diamond’s own work) or any other field? What research questions are facilitated by Diamond’s work?

There is a nice list of some of the leading progressive women bloggers on the left side of this site. Bitch Ph.D., Majikthise, Moorish Girl (who has a new book!), and Body and Soul are some of my favorites.

There are a lot of women bloggers out there, some of them even blog about anthropology, like Karen Nakamura’s photoethnography blog. But there aren’t very many anthropology bloggers at all. I’ve compiles a list here. One of our goals on this site is to get more anthropologists blogging (and we hope that anthropological bloggers will be representative of the community at large, which is largely female), and so we are very happy you agreed to participate, and we hope you enjoyed it!

But here, and I’ll tone down the provocation a little, is what I suspect is going on. As Rabinow argues (it’s really a very useful piece; I imagine most of those participating here have read it, and those who haven’t, should), disciplines are shaped as much by their “corridor talk” – the subjects and assumptions of shared, informal conversations among those in the discipline – as by the formal activities of publishing, research etc. A lot of that corridor talk involves informal, not-very-well examined ideas that re-create the boundaries of the discipline. And I suspect that what we are seeing here is corridor talk about Diamond made overt through the form of blogging, which is neither ‘normal’ academic writing, nor purely off-the-record conversation either, but something between the two. Now for someone like me, parts of what Fred and Deborah have said is valuable and thought-provoking – they’re clearly knowledgeable scholars – but there are some real and serious slippages in their arguments. The useful parts of their argument are, as far as I can see, connected by claims which really don’t hold up very well on closer examination, and depictions of what Diamond says which don’t match up with what he says, so much as what an anthropologist who doesn’t like this stuff on principle might imagine he is saying.

In short, there is the bones of a real, valuable argument here about context vs. structure, but some of the ligaments connecting these bones are composed of corridor-talk type informal ideas that decohere (or at the least, become very much more complex than they look to be in shorthand) when examined properly. I suspect that as academic blogging becomes more common, we are going to see the corridor-talk of various disciplines exposed (and, I hope, sometimes revised in the wake of good argument) as the commonground, unstated assumptions of one discipline come under concerted critique from those who don’t share those assumptions.

me.

Timothy B: calling M & F “pretty good” was intended as humorous understatement. And I am not sure what you mean by the second part of your statement — I sense that you are trying to score a point about “ohmigod but Marx is totally ideological”, though what with the arriving and the aiming and sighting you construct create quite the metaphorical maze out of a few short lines of text.

Anyway: Marx and Freud both *established* explicit ideological frameworks, and they were quite prepared to argue (and prepared others to argue) about their ideological premises. This is very different from appealing to an extant ideological framework whilst feverishly disavowing any relationship to it.

Finally, may I suggest a daily visit to the Daily Kitten? Unfortunately it’s down right now, but it really might do you a world of good.

me.

Timothy B: calling M & F “pretty good” was intended as humorous understatement. And I am not sure what you mean by the second part of your statement — I sense that you are trying to score a point about “ohmigod but Marx is totally ideological”, though what with the arriving and the aiming and sighting you construct create quite the metaphorical maze out of a few short lines of text.

Anyway: Marx and Freud both *established* explicit ideological frameworks, and they were quite prepared to argue (and prepared others to argue) about their ideological premises. This is very different from appealing to an extant ideological framework whilst feverishly disavowing any relationship to it.

Finally, may I suggest a daily visit to the Daily Kitten? Unfortunately it’s down right now, but it really might do you a world of good.

I don’t think taking Diamond’s account apart as a “structural” account has, actually, been the major focus of any of his critics here. I assume what you mean by structure is “not agency”, since your use of the term is rather loose.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s certainly not my problem with Diamond’s account. If I understand what you mean by “structural”, I think Marxism could be described as a “structural” account — it has a big grand theory of why things are the way they are. And while I think there are specific phenomena Marxism is not very useful for explaining, as a ‘grand theory of everything’ I think it’s a pretty good one. That is to say — it has lacunae, as any grand theory of everything will, but it’s powerful and persuasive and (I think) looks in the right places for the motors of the processes and relationships it posits.

Evolution is another “structural” grand theory of everything that seems not too shabby. Peircian semiotics — very nice. Freud’s theory of the unconscious and its role in individual and social life, also rather impressive. and so on. The point is, there are lots of “structural” theories and I don’t think anyone was objecting to the “structural” mode of explanation in and of itself.

In my case at least, my problem with Diamond is not the form of his theory (and I use the word “theory” here very loosely) but the theory itself. First I think it is not well developed — he takes a starting point (a certain geographical array) and an end point (the world as we know it) and then he “deduces” the latter from the former while eliminating any potential for dynamism from the middle part. I think he mistakes relationships of correlation for relationships of cause and effect. I think he makes selective use of evidence, I think he consistently makes use of negative hypotheses, and I think that because he only has one grand test case (the history of the world as it happened) there is no way to “replicate” his results, even theoretically.

Finally, yes, I think the reason he proposes such a shoddy theoretical edifice and the reason so many people have found it persuasive despite its evident flaws is because his model is ideologically rather than empirically satisfying. But the fact that his model is grandiose? Okay by me.

To turn to your other point — that my criticisms or anyone else’s criticisms of Diamond are a product of “disciplinary habitus” — I’m just not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that the methodological and theoretical framework of our discipline has equipped us to think critically about work like Diamond’s — why, sir, you are too kind and will end by making me blush.

But what seems more probable is that you are making a scurrillious allegation — that we have used the critique of Diamond as a sort of ice-ax, in order to clamber atop his reknown and from that ill-gotten elevation grab lots of prizes dangling from even more exalted heights.

If that is what you meant (and perhaps I have done you wrong in supposing so), I’d like to hear more about what those prizes might be — has anyone ever become a tenured faculty member on the basis of blog posts?

I don’t think taking Diamond’s account apart as a “structural” account has, actually, been the major focus of any of his critics here. I assume what you mean by structure is “not agency”, since your use of the term is rather loose.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s certainly not my problem with Diamond’s account. If I understand what you mean by “structural”, I think Marxism could be described as a “structural” account — it has a big grand theory of why things are the way they are. And while I think there are specific phenomena Marxism is not very useful for explaining, as a ‘grand theory of everything’ I think it’s a pretty good one. That is to say — it has lacunae, as any grand theory of everything will, but it’s powerful and persuasive and (I think) looks in the right places for the motors of the processes and relationships it posits.

Evolution is another “structural” grand theory of everything that seems not too shabby. Peircian semiotics — very nice. Freud’s theory of the unconscious and its role in individual and social life, also rather impressive. and so on. The point is, there are lots of “structural” theories and I don’t think anyone was objecting to the “structural” mode of explanation in and of itself.

In my case at least, my problem with Diamond is not the form of his theory (and I use the word “theory” here very loosely) but the theory itself. First I think it is not well developed — he takes a starting point (a certain geographical array) and an end point (the world as we know it) and then he “deduces” the latter from the former while eliminating any potential for dynamism from the middle part. I think he mistakes relationships of correlation for relationships of cause and effect. I think he makes selective use of evidence, I think he consistently makes use of negative hypotheses, and I think that because he only has one grand test case (the history of the world as it happened) there is no way to “replicate” his results, even theoretically.

Finally, yes, I think the reason he proposes such a shoddy theoretical edifice and the reason so many people have found it persuasive despite its evident flaws is because his model is ideologically rather than empirically satisfying. But the fact that his model is grandiose? Okay by me.

To turn to your other point — that my criticisms or anyone else’s criticisms of Diamond are a product of “disciplinary habitus” — I’m just not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that the methodological and theoretical framework of our discipline has equipped us to think critically about work like Diamond’s — why, sir, you are too kind and will end by making me blush.

But what seems more probable is that you are making a scurrillious allegation — that we have used the critique of Diamond as a sort of ice-ax, in order to clamber atop his reknown and from that ill-gotten elevation grab lots of prizes dangling from even more exalted heights.

If that is what you meant (and perhaps I have done you wrong in supposing so), I’d like to hear more about what those prizes might be — has anyone ever become a tenured faculty member on the basis of blog posts?

Foucault has been mentioned here on several occasions. He would not be surprised, we think, to discover that the powerful(ish) in the early 21st century claim epistemological superiority.

Indeed, but as noted Foucauldian scholar Paul Rabinow has observed (see my comment above), the ‘discipline’ of anthropology itself isn’t innocent of power games, and the invocation of anti-colonialism should be understood, at least in part, as tied up with the internal politics of the academy. Fred and Deborah arguably not only describe, but themselves exemplify the powerfulish (within a particular academic discourse) in the early 21st century claiming epistemological superiority. Which is why I for one have been quite unconvinced by the thrust of the criticism here. I can buy that there are problems with big structuralist accounts of history – by definition they are going to leave out a lot of important things, and they may also simply be wrong. I can also buy that apparently ‘neutral’ forms of history may be ideologically loaded. But there’s something weird and fishy about the dismissal of Diamond on principle, in many cases on this blog by people who haven’t gone to the trouble of reading him, or on the basis of stretched and tortured readings by those who have. I don’t agree with Brad that there is material dishonesty here – but when Fred and Deborah accuse Diamond of presenting a history of “morally neutral conquest” they’re presenting, perhaps unconsciously, a parodic distortion of the book which says rather more about them than about Diamond. There’s a slippage from the argument that Diamond makes big structuralist arguments in which human agency doesn’t play a direct role (mostly true), to the argument that Diamond is ipso facto exculpating the conquistadors (as far as I can see, more or less false). This slippage doesn’t make sense, unless one wants to make the quite implausible argument that other big-picture structuralists like Charles Tilly are similarly seeking to give a free pass to the oppressors of history. To privilege structural causes in your explanation is not to remove all space for moral culpability and blame. This is not rocket-science. Second, there’s a claim for authority – a claim that Diamond isn’t able to interpret what Yali said to him – but that Fred and Deborah are. As Brad has pointed out, this claim lies in a quite extraordinarily perverse reading of how Diamond actually depicts their conversation – Diamond makes it quite clear that he is aware that this conversation is taking place in a context of power relations. And as Tim says, it’s not clear that this reading does any more (or less) justice to Yali’s agency than does Diamond’s.

When you get these odd slippages and power-claims, it really is hard to avoid the suspicion that this set of criticisms is mostly about disciplinary habitus in the Bourdieuvian sense, and the protection of boundaries from an outsider who is perceived as threatening. In short: an effort to increase the value of a particular variety of cultural/academic capital as against others. I’d like to be convinced that this isn’t what is happening, and I’m deliberately putting this forward as a bit of a provocation, but so far, I’m not seeing even the beginnings of an argument that’s likely to persuade those who haven’t already been persuaded.

There’s grounds for a real conversation here. Bits and pieces of it seemed to be happening in the comments to Rex’s thread. But either you (a) have to come up with some sort of convincing argument that Diamond’s book does let the conquistadors off the hook (an argument which would have to explain why Diamond’s structural account was an exercise in apologetics, while the similar accounts of Tilly or indeed Marx were not), or (b) let go of the notion that Diamond’s account is in some senses an exercise in justification for the unjustifiable, and concentrate on the real substantive arguments about epistemology, different ways of knowing etc etc. You certainly haven’t done (a) so far. (b) as Tim seems to be suggesting would be much more interesting – and would allow for a real and interesting debate over the kinds of factors that structural accounts miss, and why they are important (which would also allow structuralists to respond and set out their case).