Comments on: Big Conservation In Papua New Guinea: Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article reflects a larger problem

By: STJ Debate » Fwd: [Marxism] Excellent article on Jared Diamond and the New Yorker

Sat, 23 May 2009 04:10:50 +0000

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By: Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:15:11 +0000

Final post:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/jared-diamond-the-new-yorker-magazine-and-blood-feuds-in-png-conclusion/

By: Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:47:12 +0000

Resource scarcity was one of the main causes of violence between various hunting and gathering societies. Comanches expelled Apaches from Texas because there was not enough Bison to support both groups (this was exacerbated by the gradual emergence of bison as a commodity in the capitalist world system.) But World War One and Two were caused by an *overaccumulation of capital*. In other words, there was an insufficient market for steel, etc. The worst thing about Diamond’s occasional forays into explaining violence is his utter ahistoricality.

By: Pierce Nichols

Pierce Nichols — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:32:32 +0000

Give the fighting tribes grenade launchers, uniforms and tanks, and they will barely differ from our fighting men, with one major exception: PNG warring is done out of a sense of honor, familial/tribal pride, and land disputes.

The developed world wars for precisely the same reasons as the PNG tribes, although national pride is partially substituted for familial and tribal pride. The only difference I detect in this account is in the levels of technology and organization.

By: Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:01:25 +0000

I don’t know how many people have been reading my posts on the Jared Diamond scandal, but the question of “a living museum” was very much at the core of my last article. Here’s a couple of snippets:

Another seminal figure was Frederick Ward Putnam who was the driving force behind Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology until his death in 1915. In 1891 he was asked to collaborate with experts from Powell’s Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution on displays for the Chicago World’s Fair. Indians would be recruited to live in a diorama-like village in the style of the Museum of Natural History in New York, where they would go about their daily lives while the paying customers would watch them like zoo animals.

Given Boas’s commitment to progressive values, it must be reported that he was capable of the same type of abuse of native peoples that his social Darwinist colleagues routinely engaged in. While at the Museum of Natural History, Boas decided that Eskimos were suitable objects for study, because they represented a kind of “living fossil” that demonstrated a connection to Ice Age hunters in Europe. So eager was he to have some useful specimens that he commissioned Robert Peary to bring back some back from an Arctic expedition on his ship “The Hope.” Some 30,000 New Yorkers paid 25 cents each in 1896 to view the six Eskimos that Peary retrieved from their home. Later on they were transported to the basement of the Museum in order to be studied. When a reporter asked Boas how they were kept busy, he replied:

“Oh, we try to give them little things to keep them busy. Their work doesn’t amount to much, but they have made some carvings, and occupied themselves either indoors or around the place with any employment that suggested itself to them. They do not seem discontented.”

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/jared-diamond-the-new-yorker-magazine-and-blood-feuds-in-png-part-3/