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Whatever. Jared Diamond has nothing on Napoleon Chagnon in the canon of bad Anthropology. Hell, even Margret Mead was taken for a fool way back when. Still, fudging your fieldwork to fit into a nice story is not cool. I love Diamond's stuff, but there's always been a bit of an armchair anthropological air to it, even if a lot of it is true/logical.
I am surprised that after the factual opening sentence that states that Diamond is being sued and there are claims that he lied, that Annalee and 99% of the commenters then go on and assume he is guilty based on anecdote, assumption and a semmingly 1st world guilt syndrome. The comments become harsh, vindictive and judgemental against Diamond even by those who haven't read his work or know who he is, when nothing has been proven in court or in the original article. 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.
@Derek Sabine: Thinking that your own culture is always wrong and guilty is just as bad -- and much less understandable and defensible -- than thinking it's always right.
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.
@Derek Sabine: No-Nothings often attack people striving to bring knowledge, especially by attacking peripheral points which don't disprove the central hypothesis. The Green-Eyed Monster is fearsome to behold.
I lived in Papua New Guinea briefly in 1999, visiting my parents for three months. My folks have been there since 1997. My mother works in a medical clinic that treats New Guinea nationals, and she would probably agree with Mr. Diamond.
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.
Imagine, a new yorker approach to a new yorker problem! Sue!
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.
his book is interesting, but its mostly praised because it fits a pc notion that you can't blame cultures for their lack of development which is a bit bullsh*tty to be frank.
@SpecialK: Nah. I majored in anthropology. The only people who confuse anthropology with real science are anthropologists. And everyone else just laughs at them.
@Elizabeth Weinbloom: Hey now... true, anthropology isn't an experimental science the way physics is or psychology tries to be; but it's still a science at least in a descriptive sense. Unfortunately, it can't really be a science in the sense you mean until we can start seeding societies on other planets and watching how they develop.
@Anekanta: @XantheCacharpa: @SubarnaPelican: Whoops, seems I pushed buttons. Um, mostly I'm just bitter about the ineffectiveness of my university's anthro department and its lack of emphasis on field work, and have a tendency to take it out on the discipline as a whole. After my zillionth term paper nitpicking the conclusions of some ivy league white guy's field work in China when I don't know a damn thing about China and had no real context for responding to the white guy's field work any more substantially than "hmm, interesting," I soured on the whole thing.
Jared Diamond's anthropology is much more readable and interesting than the vast majority of anthropological writing. This is because he isn't really doing anthropology - he's doing journalism.
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...
@Elizabeth Weinbloom: Well said. I actually didn't read Guns Germs and Steel until AFTER I had the opportunity to read The Third Chimpanzee, which I thought was a really eye-opening book.
To that end though, I think that statement is still a compliment, no worries. ;)
This is interesting, but not very surprising. In school, all of my anthropology teachers repeatedly insisted that so-called "primitive" hunter-gatherer tribes tend to be rather peaceful, especially when compared to the frequent and bloody warfare of more complex agricultural and industrial societies. Simpler cultures do have occasional violence, murder and such, but tend not to wage organized war on their neighbours.
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.
@Anekanta: My anthropology professors told me back in the 1980s that we shouldn't assume that hunter gathering cultures are more or less prone to violence as a blanket rule because each culture is very complex and there are always exceptions.
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.
@corpore-metal: Yes indeed--that's more or less what I was taught as well.
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.
@Anekanta: We can definitely learn about ourselves and where we came from by looking at other pre-agricultural cultures around the world but, I don't think this knowledge will help us to be more peaceful simply because our societies are so fundamentally different. A solution in one won't map well to another.
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.
@corpore-metal: Hunter gatherer societies would work well if you had about five billion fewer people on the planet. I don't see a lot of volunteers to make that happen.
You would think that, considering the rather troubling history of anthropology as a discipline, contemporary anthropologists would see this sort of thing as the most egregious abuse of their science. But, Diamond shows us that colonialist impulses are apparently alive and well. How depressing.
@TomSkylark: Diamond isn't really an Anthropologist. If I remember correctly he is a zoologist or biologist that got interested in anthropological questions when he was doing other fieldwork in New Guinea.
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.
@Andrew Liptak: Does that include GG&S? I kinda thought the point of that book was to undermine any perceived specialness of Europe by putting it all down to geographical and biological factors that supported certain cultural innovations, not the other way around. Europe only rose to global dominance first because of where it was, not because of any kind of cultural superiority.
@Andrew Liptak: I don't necessarily think so. Guns Germs and Steel may have been considered as such, but I don't think The Third Chimpanzee was particularly Eurocentric at all, and I thought it was an excellent read.
@phoenix: I think that GGAS was largely the focus of those theories, and I think they're largely a load of rubbish - he does make some good points as to why the Europeans went out and conquerored the world, and through my studies for my Master's, I know that military-wise, it can be backed up.
@corpore-metal: Yes - I think you're right, that it was mainly sheer luck, but there's always people that will always complain because something isn't represented to the umpteenth level.
The very fact that these men are suing Diamond rather than hunting him down and killing him for being such an idiot proves their far more "civilized" than the author.
@Mark 2000: More like pragmatic. Hunting him down and killing him would take resources and effort they may not have. Also, they could very easily be found and punished for the crime (modern forensics and police, you know). So, it's more like their just smart ;)
@The_Sporean_Bob: Thank you for saying this. They're just learning to adapt to a different kind of tribal culture - more likely proving Diamond was correct. ;)
I too wonder how this will affect discussion of ideas in GG&S if doubt is cast on the truth of all of Diamond's anthropological accounts. Personally I still think they hold up even if fabrication is discovered in the details but, still, a scientist's reputation is a very fragile thing. You document and document and you bend over backwards to avoid lying. You get caught in a lie once and everything you ever said, academically, is cast into doubt.
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.
@corpore-metal: if this lawsuit turns out to be ligitimate you're going to have to find someone else with real data that's willing to stipulate the same claims made in GG&S for them to hold water. reading darwin fudged the numbers on plant biology just after publishing origin of a species in 2009 isn't a big deal because there is a large body of good scientific evidence to support the theory. reading about said fudging in 1869? well that's a different matter entirely.
@corpore-metal: I promise that there are thousands of people who hate Diamond's thesis in Guns, Germs & Steel, particularly social scientists who deny that there is a biological basis for human behavior. I think that if there were any problems with GG&S of the nature alleged against the New Yorker article they would have been exposed long before now.
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."
I wish I could say this surprises me. I've read Guns, Germs, and Steel, and it has some great ideas, but I always found Diamond's anthropology somewhat suspect. In that book, too, he portrayed New Guineans as being violent (he claimed that if two New Guinean strangers met in the wilderness they would be constrained by tradition to try to kill each other, which I kind of doubt is true). I don't know what his deal with that is.
@Triplanetary: 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.
@Triplanetary: Jared Diamond is not an anthropologist. He's a journalist. Don't be shocked that his "anthropology" is crappy. And don't blame anthropologists for it.
@Purple Dave: Plus a critical chokepoint between the two leading civilizations, where none was in Europe.
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.
@Trai_Dep: 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.
I wonder how this will affect the cottage industry of bloggers who take every single thing that ever happens as proof that the United States and Western Europe are headed down the way of Vinland and Easter Island, as described by Jared Diamond in his books, unless we institute universal healthcare.
@Triplanetary: Exactly. For "universal healthcare," insert "the blogger's particular obscure object of affection [unicameral legislature, the national popular vote, Twitter for all, confiscatory estate taxes, mandatory preschool, etc., etc., et tedious cetera]."
04/24/09
04/24/09
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
04/24/09
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04/24/09
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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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.
04/24/09
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04/24/09
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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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.
04/24/09
04/24/09
04/24/09