Furthermore, what Hunt’s work actually states is that when the Europeans got there, the Rapa Nui people, rats, and Rapa Nui had reached an equilibrium, in which the islanders were managing the ecosystem for their own purposes. As Hunt points out, the accounts of the early European explorers suggest managed productivity, not ecocide, rodent-caused or otherwise. Between 900-1200 C.E. the introduced rodent population underwent a population rise and then a leveling out. When the humans got there for colonization in 1200, they were working with an (inadvertently) modified landscape but they went ahead and managed it just the same. There was no Rapa Nuian musing over the last tree as he heaved his stone axe, his/her eyes a-gleam with ecocidal mania.

Diamond chooses to ignore research done over the past two decades and uses Heyerdahl as a primary source. Heyerdahl!!! Come on!!!!

But Rapa Nui is only one of the many cases that Diamond gets wrong. The re-assessment of the Maya collapse has been around since the 1990s as has that of the Mesopotamian states. But Diamond doesn’t care. He is a successful macro-historian with the ear of the public. Why should concerns of the pointy-headed academics matter, even if he does end up blaming the have-nots for their condition while absolving the haves for their position: “it was just geography, stupid.” As he famously said in a response to his critics in the NY Times, local and regional details could be BUT are not as important as his deterministic factors (accidents of geography — the availability of raw materials and crops, a hospitable climate, accessible trade routes and even the cartographical shapes of continents). He also said once that any theoretical explanation that can explain 70% of the data is good enough for him. How’s Ptolemaic geometry working out for us now?

As his stubborn response to the very pertinent issues brought up by his New Yorker debacle shows, he is rather arrogant and sees anthropologists as irritants, and details as inconsequential.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?pagewanted=1&sq=jared%20diamond&st=cse&scp=10

Even so, Hunt’s 2007 article suggests that Rapa Nui suffered an ecological catastrophe at the hands of its Polynesian colonizers, albeit by introducing rats to the ecosystem rather than overpopulation and traditional deforestation.

Other uncredentialed people have ventured into anthropology successfully. Barbara Ehrenreich is not an anthropologist nor is Ted Conover. But their ethnography-like works (Nickel-and-Dimed and Coyotes) are excellent and are regarded as good contributions and texts for anthropology.

When the UCLA Geography Department invited him into their ranks several years ago as professor, they surely knew about his problematic standing with scholars. But professors in that unit–which has had over the years a number of shameless self-promoters–were themselves seduced by the fact that he was such a well-known author. After all, in Los Angeles celebrity is what counts! Now the chickens have come home to roost. They have an author on their hands, not a scholar and, though mortified, they are feckless in dealing with Diamond’s
prevarications on the New Yorker piece.

But Diamond is not content with the academy, which is what makes his message and his “branding” problematic and his message impossible to peer-review. When contrary to recent findings (Hunt 2007), his work allows lay people to blame the Easter Islanders for the ecological destruction of Rapa Nui, ignoring later climate change, European induced diseases and slavery, that is a problem. Even more so, when I am confidently assured by my lawyer or investment banker friends that this was the latest anthropological truth from the greatest Anthropologist out there.

Hunt, Terry
2007 Rethinking Easter Island’s ecological catastrophe. Journal of Archaeological Science 34: 485-502

At the 2006 American Anthropological Association Meetings in San Jose, Patricia McAnany and Norm Yoffee brought together scholars, cultural anthropology, archaeologists, and historians who carefully took apart each and every case of ecocide mentioned by Diamond in collapse. They pointed out using data, that not only did Diamond get the details wrong [on Easter Island (Terry Hunt), the Maya (Pat. McAnany), the Greenland Vikings (John Steinberg), Mesopotamia (Yoffee), the Southwest (Wilcox)] but also the process. They cut off the five legs of the beast that Diamond put forward in “Collapse” when he egregiously misused data, favored some very questionable types (Heyerdahl), and ignored other data sets. However, the beast still lives and is loose.

I study collapse and know that systems undergoing “collapse” go through processes far most complex than the simplistic notions that Diamond has presented. And again, to be simple is not wrong. To be “simple and wrong” is wrong. Contact McAnany or Yoffee or any of the people I mentioned and they would be glad to tell you why Diamond got it consistently wrong as he strove to fit and massage the data into his pre-determined ideas of native peoples committing ecocide. He looks at our consumption patterns and assumes that all humanity would have such behaviors hard-wired into them. But economic behaviors, availability of resources, and consumption patterns have been altered over the past 200 years. NOW we are “become death,” except as the “devourers of the world.” But the evidence from the past does not suggest this.

My answer is, obviously: nothing. If people want to do collaborative fieldwork with their informants, then that is fine — in fact it is a growing trend in anthropology. I can even imagine a situation where people would _not_ want to participate in writing up ethnographic accounts of themselves, but _would_ give permission to allow others to do so collectively and publicly.

But for the vast majority of fieldwork, I reckon, people are happy to help, but don’t want their names on the Internet. They want to be anonymous, and we have to respect that. This is why we protect their personal information. It is a choice ‘they’ make when ‘we’ present them with options and explain what our research is about and what their entitlemetns are. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure this out.

“On the whole, we do not take our field data and work them over in the course of commons-based peer production.”

What justifies denying field informants peer status in “our” endeavor?

Erasing the line of misrecognition that separates subjects from objects in the intellectual commonwealth we know and love as anthropology opens the door to an inclusive conversation capable of resisting capitalist enclosure within the fences of canons and credentials.

It doesn’t belong to me, I belong to it. The same goes for you,

I admit that I have read three of Jared Diamond’s books–The Third Chimpanzee, Guns and Collapse. Originally, I started reading them due to a suggestion from a friend mainly because of some of the linguistics content. Also I have a degree in Anthropology — just a bachelors and wanted see how some of his ideas matched up with my background. Currently I am a software developer so I have never claimed to have anything more than an interest in Anthropology.

While I liked his books I did not blindly agree with everything that he wrote. (btw: I don’t consider him a great writer. Guns was very redundant so much so that I think it wasn’t much more than an extension of The Third Chimpanzee.) And I did do some due diligence to try to find criticism of him but did not find anything substantial. I admit that I was lazy and most of my searches were on the web. Also I looked at reviews Amazon.

I would argue that people that read his books are far from average. I don’t think average people really read at all. I only know one other person who actually has read any of his books.

The lawsuit is definitely very disturbing. From my point of view it has put everything that I have read from him as suspicious. I already consider myself something of a skeptic anyway and it just makes me think that there is very little media out there that is trustworthy. Even as I read Shearer’s article I have some suspicion whether it is actually credible due to my diminishing level of trust. For me this time has become not the age of information but the age of misinformation.

Having said all that, I am wondering outside of a university setting how I could have become more versed in the discipline of Anthropology such that I could have discerned the difference between your brand and Diamond’s.

Prudence I’m not sure that you and I agree on what the definition of ‘opensource’ is. For me (and briefly) open source is a cultural formation that began in computer programming which believed in the free flow of information, particularly source code.

Anthropology is not a discipline that is committed to open source principles. We do not publish our fieldnotes raw or our post recordings of our interviews to our websites. We do not do this because our informants have a right to privacy. On the whole, we do not take our field data and work them over in the course of commons-based peer production.

Anthropology should, I believe, be committed to open access principles — that is to say, the right of public to know and the author to be known. This includes proper attribution of articles to their authors, opposing plagiarism, and so forth. So identity concerns and ‘branding’ are relevant here at some level.

The irony of invoking open source communities as an example of a community opposed to branding is that these communities have been part of a decades-long struggle to take control of the brand of ‘hacker’, seeking to overturn myths of the illegality of open source programming, and to undo stereotypes of obsessive, asocial men staring at computer (TOTALLY different, btw, than academics :) This has included exercises like attempted to rebrand illegal hacking as ‘cracking’ in order to morally valorize the image of the ‘hacker’

I think the Closed Source, Micro$oft, RIAA solution to Diamond’s problem would be to throw lawyers at him or start running adds in movie theaters with scary music and captions that say “You wouldn’t steal a CD…. don’t read Jared Diamond”. But that’s not what I’m doing. Neither am I dissing and dismissing Diamond because he is not institutionally licensed by an anthropology department. So I’m not insisting that he be AnthroVista Compatible either. I’m not suggesting that we raise any we/they barriers at all.

I don’t care _who_ does anthropology. I would like _lots_ of people to do it and grow the community — the more pirating of my intellectual inheritance the better! The point is that Diamond _isn’t_ taking up that inheritance, _isn’t_ using core anthropological concepts and practices, and I want him to.