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San Francisco, 9:43 PM
Tue Dec 1
29 posts in the last 24 hours
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04/24/09
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04/24/09
I find it funny how closed people's minds are and how easily they jump to conclusions based on previous prejudices or worldviews rather then weighing evidence with a rational mind.
04/24/09
My culture contains the "innocent until proven guilty" meme.
At worst, he seems to have conflated and confused some things; it doesn't ruin his basic theories/analyses.
04/25/09
04/24/09
When the group they're with petitioned the government for land to build their centre, the PNG government decided to use the expats as a buffer between two rival tribes in the Ayura valley. As a result, the organisation has to be extremely careful not to give the appearance of favouring one tribe over the other, or there will be bloodshed.
More than once, my mother has had to patch up (or try to patch up) some young man from one or the other of the tribes that got into a (usually machete) fight with someone from the other tribe. The airstrip outside of town has to check the cargo on the planes to make sure no one from Moresby is shipping up guns inside the supplies. Etc and so forth. While the average New Guinea national is probably just trying to get by, the cultural values by which they live allow them to be far more violent (particularly in seeking to redress perceived wrongs) than the typical westerner.
04/24/09
04/24/09
being from the Pacific, the PNG highlanders are storied indeed for their payback violence. there's a possibility that the tribesman here could be influenced by someone else to take this action to sue, i mean the guy could be lying to the follow up researchers out of embarassment of being conceived as uncivilized when actual events like Diamond describes have actually occurred in the past. A colleague of mine told me of a time he ran a project office in the highlands with a handful of local staff. Due to some of the staff being of different tribal backgrounds, when a killing happened, the staff from the 2 tribes involved could not come to work for weeks on end for fear of being payback victims of the other's tribe. He lost a few good staffers to violence like this, a lady staffer steps off the bus, a man from the revenging tribe walks up and chops her to bits in front of onlookers. next week, the chopper is done in as well. and it goes on and on. so part of what Diamonds background on the violence involved is in fact true. you have to understand that the people there (and other Pacific folk too in general) won't just open up and tell you everything about their culture to just any ol' white man that comes along. it takes time to get the trust that delivers the information that someone like Diamond with all his years of work there in PNG has worked hard to earn. He's probably being hard done by now with his many critics of his books and so-called simplistic approach to anthropology (why does it have to be complicated in the first place?). I'm as upset as any islander when we're portrayed as simple hula shaking, coconut drinking smiley brown people, much as any others that are stereotyped, but in this case, I think the larger mass of western folk that know of Diamond yet little of our culture, will be politically correct and make him guilty without fully appreciating the entire story only few like Diamond have the privilege to know.
04/24/09
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How do you get from "cultures can and should be pointed out as a hindrance to development" to "bitches were asking for it by not being white"?
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04/24/09
This is something I've said for years, meaning it as a compliment, in that journalists can tell a story effectively and anthropologists cannot. Now it seems it applies in the bad way as well...
04/24/09
To that end though, I think that statement is still a compliment, no worries. ;)
04/24/09
This is just the (disturbingly popular) residue of Thomas Hobbes' influence on Western culture. It's just easier to believe that mankind is inherently violent than it is change a violent lifestyle. It's like the alcoholic who blames his genetics or his upbringing for making him that way, then goes on drinking without taking any responsibility for his actions.
04/24/09
However this same professor, also said that it was the general opinion of anthropologists that organized warfare, with kings and soldiers or police, is only possible after the development of agriculture or pastoralism. Hunter gatherers may have lingering feuds or endless family and clan reprisals but they do not have a war making class like post agricultural societies do. War is only possible with the emergence of possessions, specialization and eventually literacy and civilization.
04/24/09
The part where I get in a knot is that we should be able to learn something, as a society, from the more peaceful examples of hunter-gatherers that do exist. But, just as Diamond did here, instead of learning from them, Westerners (or maybe members of any state-level culture) tend to view members of less complex cultures as vicious savages and barbarians living in a Hobbesian "state of nature," always at each other's throats--which is simply wrong.
It's part of this persistent myth that somehow our own way of life is the pinnacle of human achievement--and the related myth of a more violent past allows us to justify whatever social Darwinism exists in our own society.
04/24/09
Hunter gatherer societies don't have formal governments or complex economies or specialization. To really get rid of war, we'd have to remove all that and regress to a society like a hunting and gathering one. I strongly doubt that most people on this planet will want to do that.
Civilization is a mixed blessing and a very strong lure but once in it we seem to prefer it. It is a pill that must be swallowed whole, there is no part of we can somehow leave out.
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This is definitely something that people who really study Anthropology think about all the time. They still fuck it up occasionally, but not usually to this degree.
04/24/09
He's a biologist.
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04/24/09
Well, frankly, I'm not so concerned about him individually as I'm concerned with the ideas of espoused in GG&S. For me, it's sort of like reading that Darwin fudged some data in articles about plant biology just after publishing Origin of Species.
Evolution is still valid even if Piltdown Man is a lie.
04/24/09
04/25/09
In fact, scientists in general love nothing more than finding flaws in another scientist's methods or reasoning. But I have a warning for Io9 commenters: Finding flaw with a scientist's research requires a bit more work than reading a blog post, watching a PBS show, or even reading his whole book, and then proclaiming him an "idiot."
04/25/09
Nattering no-nothings opining on the internet, offering no alternative theories buttressed by objective data, OTOH...
04/24/09
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It's not that tradition would require they try to kill each other, but that human nature would. The theory basically boils down to the idea that, as a living creature, it is entirely natural to try to pass on your genes, and the more other people there are, the less likely you are to "get some". So, the claim was that when two people who have not had the philosophies of what we call civilization imposed on them meet in the wilderness, each would view the other as a competitor in the gene pool. The natural response, as demonstrated quite often in the animal kingdom, would be to fight. The exception to this would be if they could figure out how they were related, in which case they'd probably start swapping stories and such. That was the claim.
The contrasting claim was put forth by some French philosopher where he said that humans are inherently civilized, and it was just a matter of time until we were finally abel to live peacefully with each other or some junk. Pretty much any history textbook will show that for the lie it is.
@shazwozzle:
First of all, the temperate part of NA isn't even as wide as Africa, where Eurasia is wider than North America, South America, and Africa combined.
Second, continental orientation was only part of the mix. Also included was availability of herdbeasts that could be domesticated and food crops that could be cultivated. The only two herdbeasts of note from the entire Americas were guinea pigs (which were eaten) and llamas (which were not), and both were exclusive to South America. All North America really had going for it was corn, which doesn't rank very high against the grains that became available in Eurasia.
04/24/09
04/25/09
He's actually a professor of geography and physiology, but GG&S is cataloged in the biology section for some reason.
04/25/09
And, as you say, Diamond lays out well that it wasn't any one key factor, but a number of them conspiring to limit sharing technologies in ecosystems reliant on oral history.
Anthropology's a fuzzy subject, but what Diamond says has merit and it's novel.
Better than the alternative: Manifest Destiny?
04/26/09
Oh, absolutely it's better than any racial superiority bullshit. If race was the deciding factor, Europeans should have successfully conquered the tropical parts of Africa. But they couldn't, so that theory clearly doesn't hold water.
@Kevin Howell:
His writing clearly borrows from the Department of Redundancy Department, but the theories put forth in GG&S are the only logical, rational explanation I've ever heard for why _Europeans_ conquered most of the world, even though there were periods in history when other cultures were clearly known to have been more advanced.
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