The initial entry in this series focused on some commonly taken for granted pieces of clothing—underwear, hats, and scarves. In this entry we move on to discussion of outerwear (trousers/pants and shirts/blouses).

Which fabric?

Or – Should you stick with cotton?

Cotton and cotton blend apparel constitutes the majority of the world’s collective wardrobe. Cotton fabric is hard-wearing, breathable, and possesses a pleasing hand.

Cotton fabric absorbs several times its own weight in moisture and insists on holding onto it as long as possible afterwards. Ever notice how the cotton t-shirt that allows your skin to remain pleasantly dry during the first several minutes of yard work, a pick-up game, or Ashtanga session soon becomes so heavy and clingy that it actually prevents your skin from staying dry? If so, then you have observed the interplay of these two features at work.

If you do your fieldwork in a hot, arid environment it is possible to put these inherent qualities of wet cotton to good use. When the relative humidity is low, a sweaty cotton garment acts as something of a heat pump. Moisture circulates through the fabric pulling heat from the skin and dissipating it into the atmosphere through evaporative cooling.¹

The heat pump effect is largely absent in high humidity environments due to their low rate of evaporation. Even so, cotton clothing is perfectly functional in hot and sticky conditions. It isn’t optimal, though. On a swampy day, the difference between a workable cotton ensemble and a nice polyester or nylon² ensemble is the difference between a ballpoint pen and a fountain pen. The difference in price is not as pronounced, but the difference in performance really is. Polyesters and nylons absorb far less moisture than cotton, and hold onto that moisture less zealously than does cotton. That translates to more general comfort on a day to day basis due to less clammy, clingy clothing, and less weight carried on your back over the course of the day. (If you have access to a kitchen scale, try the following sometime. Weigh a clean and dry cotton t-shirt. Then thoroughly soak it and weigh it again.) Over the course of weeks and months it translates to less chafing and fewer fungal infections. High quality performance wear does indeed cost more, but over time you are going to end up paying one way or the other.

There are certain locales, and if you have spent time in one you know exactly what I am talking about, that see you coming out of a wall of hot, thick air and into air-conditioned commercial space with a sweat-drenched shirt on a daily basis. If that describes your regular research round, you might seriously consider the purchase of a 150 weight merino wool top. A lightweight merino garment is really not that much warmer than a lightweight cotton garment out in the street, and it far less chilly inside the room where the mildewy AC unit is blasting. (This has to do with the fact that cotton looses its ability to insulate when wet while wool does not.) And all other things being equal, the merino top will absorb less moisture than the cotton garment, breath every bit as well, and dry more quickly. Price can be restrictive, though, typically in the range of $80+ per. But if you keep your eyes open you will eventually turn one up at 40%–60% that price.

Where do I look for this type of kit, anyway?

Outdoor equipment manufacturers are obvious starting point on a search for the type of clothing I am describing here. In no particular order, and with no kickbacks coming my way, you might start with Patagonia, Mountain Hardwear, ExOffico, Craghoppers, and RailRiders. I have had good experiences with apparel from all four brands, and their offerings run the gamut from hardcore outdoorsy to athletic to business casual. If you are concerned with looking too much like a fisherman while conducting interviews at your urban field site, look specifically for a company’s “travel” line.

Next installment: Footwear (sandals, shoes, boots, socks, and insoles).

Notes

^{1. Wet cotton is a poor insulator. Keep this in mind if you plan to spend a hot day out in the desert that might stretch past sunset, when temperatures will begin a their sharp overnight drop.}

^{2. I especially recommend garments manufactured of Ripstop Supplex, a nylon trademarked by DuPont. (The “Ripstop” part is important. Plain Supplex isn’t a bad fabric, but it is not as soft of the Ripstop variant and also much clingier when wet.) It has a hand and drape that begins approaching that of cotton. If you happen upon a garment made of Ripstop Supplex that you like the looks of, that fits you right, and that can fit into your budget, I recommend going through with the purchase. It’s a highly durable fabric, so with proper care the garment will be a usable part of your wardrobe for years.}

Suggested reading

The following are nice points of departure for those interested in learning more about the issues of materials science and physiology underlying this discussion.

BackpackingLight.com. “Comfort and moisture transport in lightweight wool and synthetic base layers.” July 25, 2006. www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/comfort_moisture_transport_wool_synthetic_clothing.html.

Conover, Keith. “Clothing materials: a totally (or near-totally) subjective analysis of newer clothing materials for outdoor clothing [version 4.9],” December 2, 2013. http://conovers.org/ftp/Clothing-Materials.pdf.

Wilkerson, James A. “Ch. 3 – Don’t lose your cool: mechanisms of heat loss.” Ch. 3 [pp. 31–37] in Hypothermia, frostbite and other cold injuries: prevention, survival, rescue and treatment. 2nd ed. Seattle: The Mountaineers Books, 2006. OCLC: 65064497.

Matthew Timothy Bradley

This is intended as the first in a short series of how-to posts for optimizing your clothing choices for the heat and humidity. The individual posts will be organized around a particular type of garment or gear, such as outwear and footwear. This post will discuss undergarments and headwear and neckwear. Prior to that, a few caveats about the series of posts as a whole:

• The information is intended as introductory, not as comprehensive.
• Brand names will be mentioned. I don’t know how I would provide any useful advice without doing so.
• Trademarked technologies will be mentioned early and often, so much so that I have not bothered with the ™ or ® or related symbols. Trademarks are trademarks of the respective companies.
• I will be focusing on how to optimize your clothing in terms of technology. This may or may not square with optimizing your clothing in terms of impression management.
• Performance wear doesn’t have to cost a mint, but it doesn’t come at a bargain price. “Buy once, cry once,” as they say.
• This is an anthropology blog, so archaeologists and primatologists are obviously within the scope of the intended audience here. Environment rather than discipline is the determiner. The information is equally applicable to linguists, geographers, geologists, ecologists, and anyone else planning fieldwork in swampy or arid conditions.

And now, on to the service part of the service writing.

SMALLCLOTHES

Underwear is a good place to start for a couple of reasons. First off, some components of an ensemble are more important are more important than others, and underwear are one of those. Antifungal creams are law enforcement; the right pair of briefs are crime prevention. Secondly, underwear are a good gateway garment to start you down the path of a high performance clothing habit. A poor grad student may scoff at the wisdom of parting with $20–$30 for a pair of underwear, but s/he can afford to do so. (If a twenty dollar bill doesn’t appear under a rock somewhere, another option is to calculate how many trips to the bar, coffeehouse, or sandwich shop would net you that amount and foregoing them in exchange for your new pair of skivvies.)

For reasons I will discuss in a latter post, cotton can be a good choice for outwear to be worn in arid climates. There is no reason to wear cotton underwear anywhere, though. Synthetic is one way to go in terms of materials. ExOffico makes a well-regarded line of nylon briefs. Patagonia also has some good options on the market. I recommend the rib-knit over silkweight models. Merino wool is the other big choice in terms of materials.¹ There are a few companies out there who turn out excellent merino kit—Ibex, Icebreaker, and SmartWool all come immediately to mind. For hot weather use, 150 is the appropriate weight. Merino is typically more spendy than synthetics. Expect to pay $40–$50 per pair rather than $20–$30. But keep in mind when planning your budgeting and packing priorities that the natural anti-microbial properties of wool mean you are obliged to wash merino underwear less often. (And by all means, do wash your own underwear. Even if you hire out your laundry duties, it’s just good manners, and don’t be surprised if it is an expectation at your field site.)

I will not pretend to know enough about what to look for in bras to try and give advice about picking one out. Serious, non-titillating contributions to the Comments section are welcome from those who might be able to help out on the topic.

BEST PROTECT YA NECK

Headwear and neckwear help keep the sun at bay. They can also help you connect a bit with the people and place you are visiting. My undergraduate advisor wore an Orioles cap during his dissertation fieldwork in the Sierra del Nayar as a means of eliciting comments about the logo. And I unintentionally did the same after acquiring a keffiyeh during my visit to Burkina Faso in the summer of 2010. My favorite was hearing three Burkinabé boys whisper to one another, “Is he an Arab?” “Ask him, ask him!” while standing on a sidewalk in Ouagadougou one night.

I recommend looking for a hat that can be rolled up (“crushable,” in outdoor industry parlance) or folded at the brim. A 360° brim will be especially appreciated by archaeologists. Cotton works well as a heat pump in arid climates. A synthetic material such as Supplex (a trademarked variety of nylon) will dry more quickly in humid environments and so feel less clammy on your head. Outdoor Research and Tilley turn out consistently high quality products, but in the end hats are like shoes: think fit first.

A shemagh is a great help in an arid climate. It helps keep the sun off your neck and head and the dust and sand out of your lungs. Airsofters love them, so they are easy to shop for online (As with bras, I do not feel qualified to speak to hijabs or other female headscarves. Again, anyone who does is encouraged to participate in the Comments section.)

If your field site is humid rather than arid, and/or you expect to spend a lot of time traveling on foot, a keffiyeh comes with a heat penalty. Consider going with a stretchy tubular neck scarf instead. Buff is the big name there.

It’s not impossible that you might end up separated from your hat or scarf mid-trip. Your hat might be stolen right off your head as you walk down the street. Someone might ask for one or the other as a gift, and you would have to judge for yourself the repercussions of saying “yes” or “no.” That possibility holds for a lot of items in addition to hats, too, of course.

Next installment: Outerwear (trousers, blouse, &tc.).

Matthew Timothy Bradley

NOTE

^{1. If the thought of wearing wool underwear in the summer sounds crazy to you, go visit a good outdoor goods retailer and have a look at what they have to offer. It won’t be what you were expecting!}

The most obvious of these is that the book is pure Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor. Veblen borrows Morgan’s speculative system of stages from Ancient Society more or less wholesale to make his argument about how the Leisure Class develops and why people engage in comparisons of worth. So you can immediatetly spend a week talking about matrilineality in the Iriquois or the critique of technological periodization. Two of the chapters focus on “survivals” –ranging from hunting exploits and their survival in football games to survivals of religious life– so you can get your Tylor on and talk about the mechanisms of cultural change and the descent with modification of cultural traits. But it doesn’t end there– Veblen also draws on folks like John Lubbock and John McLennan to talk about the both the distant past and modern savages–he is especially fond of “marriage by capture” and the origins of property and civilization. Of course, it is now our duty to if not ignore Victorian anthropology of this sort, to at least denounce it, so to cleanse your undergraduates, you spend a diverting week talking about Franz Boas’ critiques of this stuff, and try to get the students to argue for the existence and reappearance of Conspicuous Consuymption without the ethnocentrist, unilinear version of progress.

I haven’t even gotten started, and we’ve managed to work in archaeology and biological anthropology–at least in their barbaric stages–into the class. When we want to come back to the present, we can teach anthropology of fashion (Ch. 7), anthropology of sport (ch. 10), anthropology of religion (11, 12, 13) and so on. Then of course, your upcoming can pre-empt you classes on Bourdieu with the chapters on invidious distinction and the last one, “The Higher Learning” (Homo Academicus avant la lettre, which was expanded by Veblen into a book of its own), on the foibles of the academic class. And Voila, fiat Anthropology. No more textbooks!

But what of Linguistic Anthropology you say– for that you have to read H.L. Mencken’s totally hilarious critique in Prejudices (ch. 5). This also allows you to teach about conservatism and its avatars, something we college professors are accused of never doing.

How you will fit Jared Diamond in is an exercise left for the reader, but I hear he has a very nice home in the hills of Los Angeles…

I’ve always been struck by the duality I see in how archaeologists approach knapping. On the one hand, they produce articles like the one in the Journal of Archaeological Science, full of exhaustive and incredibly sophisticated methods to study the acquisition of knapping skills from the outside in. On the other hand, they round up a bunch of 20 year olds, give them some gloves (hopefully!) and make them knapp till they bleed — which often doesn’t take very long. This is knapping form the inside out, the skill passed down from one archaeologist to the other via bruised, calloused fingers.

Although there is a lot of variation within anthropology, I would have to say that one of the most distinctive things about our discipline is our commitment to learning about humanity from the inside out. It is surely one of the most unique things about our discipline that we are committed to the idea that being human with other humans is a far more sophisticated way of learning about them than any other sort of method that works from the outside in. Some methods distrust our intuitions and sympathies as biases distortions, but we feel that we are by ourselves infinitely more complex instruments for gathering data than the artifacts we make.

Of course, this commitment to learning from the inside out has its drawbacks. There is such a thing as bias, and there is a lot of value to be gained by using formal methods or advanced instrumentation — remember, I began this blog entry saying that I found the Journal of Archaeological Science worth reading! But on the whole we feel like if we can learn to make the arrowheads and hafted axes of social life, then we have something that counts as knowledge that we can pass on to others, and we can skip the meticulously recorded and coded video records of people knocking bits off the edge of a stone blank.

Admittedly, this means we often get little respect from people with much more myopic definitions of knowledge, but I think this demonstrates the limits of their vision, not ours. Like stone tools, there is nothing primitive about our discipline. Or, perhaps, there’s something primitive about it that’s worth holding on to.

I have a weak sense of the details, but I do know that accusations of fraud, regardless of whether fraud was committed, tend to have a range of effects on people involved, especially the administration of a university, the graduate students in a lab, and the fellow researchers in an accused’s field. One might think of this as Hauser’s trolley problem, a tool he’s fond of using himself in order to supposedly get at the basic biological modules or organs of morality. In this case, the person on the track, about to be flattened by a runaway trolley, is Hauser himself. One can imagine a number of scenarios: should one pull a lever to save Hauser? Should one push an unnamed (fat) graduate student or post-doc onto the track to save Hauser? Should one divert the trolley onto a track containing five other researchers who work on moral cognition, or leave it on the track towards Hauser to save those five? Should one derail the trolley and risk destroying a building (cognitive science at Harvard) that might contain sleeping researchers, etc. etc. etc.

As many journalists have noted, there is irony in the fact that Hauser’s forthcoming book is called Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. But it’s more than irony, it’s a question of scale and temporality. Whatever evil is at stake here, it might have both a distant cause (evolution) and a proximate one (the institutional pressure to publish and the problem of being a star scientist), and neither Hauser nor anyone else seems able to mount a theory that would accommodate both. If there is a problem with Hauser’s style of research, it’s probably not that it is fraudulent. More likely, the problem is that his theories cannot explain the possibility of fraud arising as a result of the intense desire to prove that fraud has an evolutionary origin.

Journal of Archaeological Science: Use of Strontium Isotopes Reveals Extreme Salmon Specialization At Prince Rupert Island, British Columbia

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology: Do You Never Get Tired of Samon? Evidence For Extreme Salmon Specialization At Prince Rupert Island, British Columbia

Archaeological Dialogues: Salmon and Agency

Just saying.

A disagreement with similar contours is afoot today. The latest skirmish in the Jared Diamond wars deals not only with issues of scholarly accuracy, but also the cultural/personal motivation of the protagonists as well as the social effects of their arguments. The main protagonists are the authors of Questioning Collapse, an edited volume in which expert scholars take issue with Jared Diamond’s reading of their specialty topics: the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) specialist discusses Diamond’s use of the Rapa Nui data, the Incan specialist discusses Diamond on Pizzaro and Atahualpa, and so forth. The book is critical of Diamond, who has responded with a review in Nature that is none too friendly itself.

The Usual Denunciations are already issuing from Stinky Journalism.org, which mostly focus on how unethical it was for Diamond to write a review of a book that criticized his book without explicitly telling readers the book he was criticizing criticized him. You can check it out if you want, but I think its much more interesting to see how the back and forth between Questioning Collapse and Diamond exemplified some of the issues that played out twenty years earlier in the Sahlins/Harris debate. How do we tack between the social effects of our work and its accuracy? How can we address the cultural underpinnings that motivate an author’s writing without falling back into ad hominem attacks? How well does Collapse stand up to scholarly scrutiny? And how good a job does Questioning Collapse do of reaching out to Diamond’s popular audience? These questions are worth asking — even if you are a little burned out on the Jared Diamond wars.

In this piece I want to review Questioning Collapse through the lens of these issues. I’ll start by working backwards from Diamond’s review in Nature to the book itself. In the end, I find Questioning Collapse’s critique of Diamond extremely compelling, particularly for the way it highlights the theoretical difficulties of Diamond’s position. That said, however, Questioning Collapse’s (henceforth ‘QC’) authors often don’t do the readers any favors — as a piece of public anthropology I feel it has a long way to go.

Diamond’s piece is actually a review of two books, Questioning Collapse and The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. In the event, however, only about 400 of its 1300 words focus on the later volume. In the review, Diamond pulls a classic Sahlins maneuver, arguing that the authors are driven by a tendentious preference for a “positive message about human behavior” is “laudable” but, unfortunately, does not mesh well with the facts. The result is a “naively optimistic redefinition” of the data which “inevitably forces one to distort history and to avoid trying to explain what really happened.” Indeed, Diamond even claims that although they take issue with his work the authors of QC “do not offer a substitute thesis” for facts which “cry out for explanation, even if one relabels them as something other than collapse”. Political correctness, it seems, blinds Questioning Collapse to The Facts. Or, as the subtitle of the review puts it, ‘realism’ (i.e. Diamond) must trump ‘positivity’ (i.e. QC).

In fact there are four themes in Questioning Collapse: that of resilience (as opposed to collage), of colonialism (‘empire expansion’), of the similarity of current environmental issues to the past, and that of what constitutes an adequate popular anthropology. Diamond deals mostly with the first two topics in his review, and I will skip the third here but I’ll address the rest as well as make a few points about the factual errors each side accuses the other of having.

Resilience versus collapse, or, seven million Mayans can’t be wrong

Is Diamond correct when he says QC’s feel-good agenda prevents it from seeing the truth about collapse? On this first major claim, I think Diamond and QC are talking past one another. At the broadest level, QC takes issue with the three key words in Collapse’s title: ‘collapse’, ’success’, and ‘choose’. What, specifically, counts as collapse? The authors of QC argue that there is more to societal continuity than Diamond’s focus on population size and social complexity. There are, they point out, millions of Mayan people alive today — how then can we say that Mayan culture has disappeared? They also point out that it is hard to tell where one society starts and another begins. Is agriculture in the Netherlands an example of ecological success once we think about the effects their importation of fodder has on countries like Brazil from which they import it? And ‘success’: how long does a society have to be around before it is officially considered to be one? In his excellent article in the QC McNeill points out that Diamond plays fast and loose with dates — the Greenland Norse, for instance, survived longer than all of the modern societies that Diamond lists as successes. And ‘choice’: many of the authors of the volume point out that societies are not people — different parts of them make different decisions for different reasons. Often times ‘choices’ are the emergent property of many individual decisions. And in a world where actions have unintended consequences, even selfish choices might end up being sustainable ones, and vice versa. It is for this reason that the authors tend to focus on ‘resilience’ rather than ‘collapse’ — on the way that populations change over time, but tend overall to endure.

In sum, QC argues that Diamond’s notion of collapse is too simple. Societies are not externally bounded and internally homogeneous. They do not make decisions like humans do. They change through time, making it difficult to identify when they change beyond recognition. Long-term trends are, they argue, mostly for continuity, which is why they use the term ‘resilience’ rather than collapse. Mayans are still around. Easter Islanders are still around — in fact, QC has little boxed-in sections highlighting contemporary descendants of supposedly-collapsed societies.

Diamond is not having any of it. He responds that “It makes no sense to me to redefine as heart-warmingly resilient a society in which everyone ends up dead, or in which most of the population vanishes, or that loses writing, state government and great art for centuries… Even when many people do survive and eventually reestablish a populous complex society, the initial decline is sufficiently important to warrant being honestly called a collapse and studied further.” Diamond’s model of collapse is that familiar to us from the video game Civilization by Sid Meier: civilizations all grow in one direction towards more and more complexity with bigger and bigger cities, and if they go down in size, you lose. The authors of QC have a more anthropological understanding of societies, insisting that they not internally homogeneous or externally bounded, that they persist in time, and that we must understand their ups and downs.

At heart, then, the resilience/collapse debate is a discussion of interpretation, not facts. Many readers will probably find Diamond’s civilization-or-bust definition of collapse compelling, and agree with him that ‘positivity’ leads QC’s authors to a tendentious interpretation of the facts. This is a pity since I think QC takes a principled and satisfying theoretical position on collapse. Still, one can see why popular readers might not be swayed.

It’s the Colonialism, Stupid

Diamond does remarkably less well when it comes to ‘empire expansion’. One of the most egregious howlers from Diamond’s review is his claim that “although the authors of Questioning Collapse may wish it were otherwise, students and laypersons alike know that Europeans did conquer the world” and that “the authors seem uncomfortable with the glaring fact that it is Europeans, not Native Australians or Americans or Africans, who have expanded over the globe in the past 500 years.” The kindest thing one can say about Diamond’s position here is that it is unintelligible, because the alternative options are that a) Diamond’s personal animus against the authors was so intense he could not understand the content of the book or b) he simply did not read the book he is reviewing.

As far as I can tell, Diamond believes the book argues the exact opposite of what it actually says. He appears to think that the authors of QC are arguing that the hand of European rule lay lightly on the colonized world, which never suffered population loss. QC doesn’t admit that there is such a thing as ‘empire expansion’? How about the ending of Michael Wilcox’s essay in the volume (one of my favorites):

Diamond’s tidy explanation of conquest and global poverty is not only factually incorrect; it gives us the sense that its origins lie somewhere out there, beyond the agency of the reader. The implication is that if conquests were situated long ago, somewhere else, then we are powerless over their contemporary manifestations. Conquests are never instantaneous, transformative, or all encompassing. They are enacted, reenacted, and rewritten for each succeeding generation. In this sense Diamond’s narrative of disappearance and marginalization is one of conquest’s most potent instruments. (p 138)

Does this sound like someone who didn’t get the memo that “Europeans did conquer the world”?

Diamond accuses QC of down-playing the role of colonialism in human history, and not offering an alternate explanation for the collapse of indigenous society, when in fact colonialism is their alternate explanation for the collapse of nonwestern societies. Wilcox writes “a more appropriate troika of destruction [than guns, germs, and steel] would be ‘lawyers, god, and money’”. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo write that “ancient deforestation was not the cause of population collapse. If we are to apply a modern term to the tragedy of Rapa Nui, it is not ecocide but genocide.”

In sum, QC attempts to take the moral high-ground out from underneath Diamond when it comes to colonialism, arguing that he underplays the horrors of colonialism because his cultural blinkers prevent him from seeing the truth. Indeed, one of the major arguments of the book is that Diamond (and other social scientists) aid and abet on-going oppression of indigenous people. The proper response from Diamond — had he noticed — would have been to cast the authors of QC as a bunch of lefty radicals who have given up on Scientific Accuracy in the name of advocacy. Except of course he didn’t notice.

Some readers may find Wilcox’s invective overheated, and find the anti-colonial agenda of QC too ‘pc’ in their denunciation of the book’s social effects. That is why it is so gratifying that the volume also takes up the issue of accuracy and never lets go: Diamond is not just tendentious, he is also wrong. The fact that Diamond simply missed this major part of their argument really detracts from his credibility.

Fact Checking

Beyond these overarching themes there are a number of particular factual disputes between Diamond and the authors of QC. In his review, Diamond argues that the Yali he met and the Yali that Gewertz and Errington’s volume is about are different people; he argues against Wilcox that Chaco canyon was deforested; he argued against Berglund that the Greenland Norse died out, rather than emigrating; he argues against Taylor that ecology was a factor in the Rwandan genocide; and he argues against what he calls David Cahill’s “absurd rewriting” of the Spanish conquest of the Inca.

None of Diamond’s factual claims are very convincing. Which Yali was which does not matter, because Gewertz and Errington’s merely use the conversation with Yali as a set piece to raise a series of other claims about colonialism in Papua New Guinea, none of which Diamond addresses. Diamond offers as evidence that overpopulation was a factors for genocide in Rwanda a school teacher’s assertion that “The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.” Which seems to me to be an argument about inequality rather than population pressure — if it is not just a statement about shoes. Wilcox provides two citations to back up his claim that Chaco canyon was forested, while Diamond never cites his sources in the review or in Collapse, and so it is impossible to verify his claims. This also makes his claim that there is archaeological evidence of the death of the Greenland Norse impossible to verify. His claim that David Cahill’s paper is an “absurd rewriting” of Incan-Spanish relations seems to miss Cahill’s careful and, as far as I can tell, uncontroversial point that conquerors often keep local systems of social stratification intact and install themselves on top of them.

Now, it is surely unfair to ask a 1300 word review to exhaustively respond to all of the criticisms made in a 375 page book. Still, one can’t help but notice that the authors of QC make serious claims that throw Diamond’s entire reading of societal collapse into question, and Diamond’s response is to ignore the forest and call out a few trees. When people like Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo argue that Diamond’s claims about Rapa Nui are fundamentally mistaken, you expect such big-issue claims to merit a response.

Of course, Questioning Collapse was not perfect either

That said, the authors of QC do not always make it easy for readers to be swayed to their point of view. The editors claim that “participants committed themselves to setting aside abstruse academic prose and cumbersome in-text references in favor of a more user-friendly text.” Really? Can we blame Diamond for not lingering carefully over, for instance, Cahill’s prose when it contains sentences like this:

It encoded all the familiar generic facts of colonial conquests as seen by Europeans: the mutual incomprehension and marveling at the mirror-image alterities; the chasm between New World and Old World epistemologies, “true” rational knowledge against heathen superstition; clever Castilian against dullard Inca; true believers versus the unevangelized barbarians, at best seen as promising neophytes; asymmetrical technologies manifest in the flash of steel and the thrust of lance against bronze close-combat weapons, slingshot, cotton armor and buckler; European initiative against the kind of unquestioning obeisance associated with “oriental despotism.”

I am guessing the average reader will quit long before they get to the part of the sentence where they miss the Wittfogel reference. While several of the authors write clearly and passionately, on the whole Diamond still wins the contest for clear prose. In fact, many of the essays employ all the apparatus of scholarly prevarication: introductory sections reflecting on what it means to write for a popular audience, wider theoretical issues of contextualization, and so forth. You must wade through all this to get to the point where they actually talk about why they think Diamond is wrong.

Or you may not. One of the strangest things about this otherwise very ballsy collection is that many — maybe even most — of the articles do not actually quote Jared Diamond. Sometimes I think the authors are so immersed in the topic that they forget to leave signposts to the reader about what they are doing. Joel Berglund’s piece, for instance, appears to be a valuable detailed commentary on Diamond’s chapters on Norse Greenland, but only if you put the two books next to one another. For many readers it will seem like a tour of various facts about Norse Greenland which mentions Diamond at the start. Cahill’s paper often takes aim at “standard colonial tropes” of “indegnous dullards who ‘didn’t know what hit them’” or views in which “Andean civilization… becomes a kind of ‘unenlightened’ primitive polity”. The positions he put in scare quotes are certainly worth criticizing — but are they Diamonds? A close reading — and actual citation — of Diamond’s argument would have made the essay stronger, especially since Cahill’s data so obviously gainsays the claims Diamond actually does make. The best pieces — Hunt and Lipo’s and Wilcox’s, McNeil’s, and so forth — are very strong (disclosure: I share a department with Hunt) and other pieces could have profited by being as tightly written.

Above all, a central argument of QC is that the world is ‘complex’ and it would be better if popular audiences did not need to have it ’simplified’. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen reminds us, however, this simply will not fly. Public anthropology is, I’ve argued, the bar at the conference — when people tell you straight up and without hedging what they think is really going on in their papers. It is in the nature of the game to “dare to be reductive”. I think QC would have done better to explore how to reduce effectively, rather than lament the fact that such a move was necessary — or attempt to avoid making it at all.

Taking the fight to the streets?

Regardless of what you think about the particulars of Questioning Collapse, it establishes once and for all that mainstream academic authors consider Diamond’s work to be problematic. Coming from a major major press (Cambridge) with a roster of quality specialists, Questioning Collapse is undoubtedly Ivory Tower. If anything, it could have let down its hair a bit more. If only there were some way to reach a popular audience… to take the fight to the streets… in like… say… a blog…? Luckily, they have one, although it has not been updated regularly.

It seems to me QC’s blog could serve two purposes. First, it would also be an excellent place to begin a long and exceedingly detailed analysis of some of the particular factual claims Diamond makes — particularly those in the Nature review. This is the sort of intellectual spadework that publishers are not keen on, which should be made available to the public, and works well in small sub-essay size units which can be clearly written and do not take forever to read. Blog posts, in other words.

Second, Questioning Collapse is relatively expensive (US$30) and formally written — not ideal for spreading the word. The website could become a great location for remixed versions of the articles: piece available for download as teaching resources, or for the casual reader, where the authors cut right to the chase, free and open access, for anyone who is interested in reading them.

Conclusion

In sum, QC excels in empirical accuracy, not public outreach. While I find their arguments persuasive — in most cases, completely persuasive — I think they could have done a better job reaching a broader audience. There is a danger that their accounts of the social effects of Diamond’s work, and his personal/cultural motivations for writing could turn into ad hominem, which would be a shame. Because Diamond is a public figure, the proper course would be to be even more scrupulous in adhering to standards of professionalism and impartiality than a scholar normally would, even though the impulse is (I imagine) to go in rather the other dimension. From my point of view, the central issue has got to be the empirical adequacy of his claims.

As for Diamond, the impression I get of him is of a scholar who increasingly refuses to adhere to the best practices of the university, and who can get away with it because of the power and influence that comes from being in the public eye. Of course, there is nothing wrong with going AWOL from the academy if one wants to become a free-floating intellectual. But Diamond is not Carlos Castaneda, and his audience gives him credence because of his situation within the academy and his role as a translator of technical discourse. It is easy to become complacent when you’re, you know, an ultra-rich Pulitzer Prize-winning author (or so I imagine!). But one must resist the temptation to relax one’s standards. Both lay readers and his colleagues deserve better work than we see in Nature review.

In the seventies, Sahlins and Harris didn’t have the Internet to fall back on. Today, we are blessed with a means of communication that allow incensed scholars to argue endlessly in front of the entire planet! Now that the book is published, I look forward to seeing the authors of Questioning Collapse – and perhaps even Diamond himself? — move these issues forward.

I have next to no opinion on the scientific claims, though I do have a senstivity to just how hard it is to make convincing hypostheses from the fossil record. This is an event worth watching for how massively hyped science affects the outcome of research and discussion in a field. My suspicion is that no one will touch this for a while, it will turn out to be an exceptionally well preserved fossil, but not one that “changes everything” as the History channel would have it. Or at least if it “changes everything” it will be that students and amateurs all over the world will talk about Ida instead of Lucy, and my daughter will have to deal with it for years to come. This is the way we world our knowledge today.

The Secret in the Cellar is a forensic anthropology webcomic.

North Americans in the early centuries AD were gathering into population centers, dabbling in metallurgy and domesticating animals such as dogs and turkeys. Public works were going full swing. Beneath the modern city of Phoenix you will find remains of several hundred miles of mathematically engineered irrigation canals that once fed a hydraulic society on a par with early Mesopotamia.

Structures now known as “great houses” once stood in the Four Corners region — where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona meet. They were masonry compounds rising as tall as five stories, their ground plans going on for acres, interiors honeycombed into hundreds of rooms including massive, vaulted ceremonial chambers.

Such an architectural landscape defies cliches about this continent’s history. Add into this picture trade routes extending more than 1,000 miles along which goods were being moved from Central America into what is now the United States. These goods included copper implements, live tropical birds and, now we know, chocolate.

Chocolate is the cherry on top of Southwest archaeology, and it tips the balance of perspective.

the University Museum has uniquely characterized itself, as stated on the museum’s own website, as a research institution to “advance understanding of the world’s cultural heritage” (see the Museum’s mission statement). We understand the dismantling of the research infrastructure of the Museum as a drastic surgical gesture, a decisive act that will discontinue the possibility of future archaeological research in the above-mentioned fields.

At the moment the petition has over 3435 signatures.

Steven Pinker’s latest apology for behavioral genetics is in this weekend’s NYT Magazine. There are two things to pay attention to. 1) he’s right about personal genome sequencing: regardless of whether it’s correct, or the results can be properly interpreted for people, people are going to do it, and for all kinds of reasons, good and bad, and this is in itself something that will change behavior–call it proximate causality for individual behaviors. And the comparison with astrology, sorcery and other forms of readouts about your fate should probably be taken more seriously, especially by anthropologists, rather than used as a dismissal of genetic essentialism or determinism. 2) genetics seems to have become so confused with heritability that the claims about “what genes cause” have become incoherent; scales are routinely mixed up, which is what results in the manic fantasizing about why we conserve one gene or another (“gene so-and-so is correlated with baldness, therefore baldness must have conferred an advantage on our distant ancestors by serving as an effective way to deflect light before mirrors were invented” etc). As a result, our ability to argue about the roles that distant causality play versus those that proximate causality play have been compromised. Oh, and one other thing, There is no mention at all of epigenetics… is that deliberate, I wonder, or does it represent troubling ignorance on Pinker’s part?

and btw, I will note that our category for genetics at SM is “Race, genetics” which (and I’m not blaming anyone here) is interesting.

The second show, “Pacific Clues”:http://wetserver.net/teleschool/pages/programs/program_home.jsp?programid=16&programpageid=30&programpagetype=programpages discusses the archaeology of the Pacific, with a special focus on Polynesia. The “first episode”:http://www.teleschool.k12.hi.us/tlc/IR_CR_PC_1.html features Terry Hunt discussing the destruction of Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) environment, and his own interpretation of what led to its downfall. Terry’s objections to authors such as Jared Diamond’s interpretation of Rapa Nui’s history is well known, and now you can watch the man explain it in person.

All of these shows are available for free, as a series of 20 minute web episodes — so far only a few episodes are up, but as the season progresses more will be available. They’re meant for kids, so they are a great opportunity for you and your little ones to curl up together in front of a glowing LCD screen. But of course they’re great for people of all ages — especially people who want to know more about what the experts really think about the Pacific, but don’t want to read a bunch of scholarly articles.