Ashby Dialogue, Part 2

So, this past Monday (February 24), we had our second Ashby meeting. This session's theme was Human Adaptation to Sedentism and Urbanism. Gwen Robbins Schug and I moderated the session, although Gwen did most of the heavy lifting. We had a great student turnout this time as well.

As an organizing theme for the session, we used Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (henceforth GGS), which attempts to explain why Europe and her descendants came to dominate today's world. We watched PBS's video adaptation of the book, and Gwen assigned several articles that critiqued Diamond's arguments there and in his other popular book, Collapse. The latter explores the effects of anthropogenic environmental degradation and how this has led to the fall of past societies. One of Diamond's major goals with GGS was to discredit the idea that Western domination was the result of racial superiority. He argued that societies were forced to deal with the hand that geography dealt them and some areas were more conducive to the development of "complex" societies than others based on factors such as the length of the growing season and the presence of domesticateable plants and animals, most importantly draft animals, wheat, and barley. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Diamond has been heavily criticized for what many perceive to be an environmentally deterministic perspective (you can see one of his rebuttals to that charge here).

So, using this as a backdrop, several prominent points arose in our discussions, thanks mainly to Gwen's guidance:

• The first, and probably one of the most infuriating to anthropologists, is that in both GGS and Collapse, Diamond appears woefully out-of-date on his characterization of human societies. His use of terms like "band," "chiefdom," "state," and even the concept of "complexity" are based on decades-old anthropological paradigms. While useful for organizing variation, in practice they unrealistically pigeonhole the vast amount of diversity out there. I wonder how Diamond's definition of "complexity" would change if he were not a Western researcher?
• Collapse also fails to cite the latest archaeological research, which is, after all, the best record we have for the development of past societies. The best example of this comes from his discussion of Easter Island (known to those that live there as Rapa Nui). In Diamond's scenario, reckless Polynesians chopped down thousands of trees in order to transport those iconic stone statues (known as mo'ai). While this story certainly raises the issue of how fragile ecosystems truly are and how destructive humans can be, the archaeology tells a very different version. Gwen had us read a fascinating article by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo that demonstrates (1) deforestation was largely the result of introduced rats that ate palm nuts and thus prevented forest regeneration and (2) the huge statues were not moved on tree rollers anyway (they were probably dragged, upright, with ropes).
• Diamond's books are attractive because they provide unicausal explanations for very complex phenomena. In GGS, for example, it was all about agriculture: the raising of crops (wheat and barley) created food surpluses, which encouraged the domestication of draft animals, which led to social stratification and, ultimately, to the "complex" state-level societies that came to dominate the world today. However, these sorts of explanations, even when they work for a particular time and place, rarely apply to ALL times and ALL places. The native peoples of North America's Pacific Northwest, for example, developed very complex societies based largely on a fishing, not a farming, economy. 
• This whole issue of societal "collapse" is also problematic. Several people brought up the fact that societies rarely, if ever, fully collapse but, rather, undergo a long decline where people typically move away from the population centers into the hinterlands. 
• We also agreed that, while Diamond's arguments have their flaws, he is doing what many an anthropologist has failed to do: bring these "big picture" issues to a popular audience.  

References:

Diamond, J (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton, New York.

Diamond, J (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin Books, London.

Hunt, TL, Lipo, CP (2010). Ecological catastrophe, collapse, and the myth of "ecocide" on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). In (McAnany, PA, Yoffee, N, Eds) Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, pp. 21-44.