Diamond’s Vengeance

“…it may be that Diamond was overly eager to believe the tall tales that Wemp presented because they resonated so deeply with another, more personal story.

Well, such tales also resonate deeply with long and deeply held stereotypes about how savage are all those savages off in the savage lands. Can you imagine Diamond hearing that story in, say, Minnesota, and accepting it without question? I’m willing to believe that Diamond is not a racist, but it would be much easier to do so if he would stop quacking like a duck.

OW at scatterplot had a good summary recently.

If you’ve read GGS, you know that he does not articulate those “long and deeply held stereotypes” about “savages.” To the contrary, the origin of the book is his conclusion, based on observation, that modern stone age people like those of Papua New Guinea tend to be “more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.” He wrote GGS in order to explain this apparent paradox.

Also agree with rea. Don’t know about such stories in Minnesota but definitely heard them in Mississippi. And yes, believed them. A little bit of introspection also suggests that if placed in similar circumstances I really don’t know whether I’d be like Daniel or like Jozef.

Whatever the truth of the anecdote, Diamond’s obviously saying that the desire for vengeance (somewhere someone called it “the only true justice”) is universal and present among the people of PNG as it is among Minnisotans. The difference is that in the latter, a particular type of a social institution prevents the expression of this desire, although it occasionally will do it for you (well, maybe in Texas).

Once of the few things I remember from my time as an anthro major is how easy it is to screw with an anthropologist. For example, there’s the famous case of Chagnon dutifully recording kinship data for months, only to find that he’d been told names like “hairy cunt” and “eagle shit.” The ability to bullshit suckers and then sue them for millions is a new twist on the subject/object relation.

Or maybe Diamond is just full of shit. Anyway, he didn’t need to go to PNG to find altruistic punishment. It’s right there in the ultimatum game.

Jon, you’re suggesting that Diamond’s New Guinea vengeance story may have been influenced by his Polish vengeance story.

But, um… given that the second story turns out to have been completely untrue, why should we believe what he says about the first one?

Really. Seriously. If he lied (embroidered, was very very sloppy, whatever) with one story, why not the other? Is there any other account of the Polish story, or is it all Diamond? and if the latter, isn’t his account of what an elderly relative told him about something that happened three generations ago on another continent *less* reliable than his account of what his driver told him happened recently and nearby?

Doug M.

I haven’t read GGS and have no dog in that fight. But yes, this story as it currently stands is one big quack.

I’ve read it. It’s almost annoyingly anti-racist. To begin with, the entire theme and justification of the book is to show that cultural differences (especially differences in technological progress) result from environment and not race. The annoyance results from Diamond’s repeated insistence that it is not racist to ask such questions as “why did Spaniards have steel, and Incas did not?”

Perhaps he protests too much. But reading some of these comments, I can see why Diamond felt these apologies were necessary. Some people see racism in everything! What if, instead of being too credulous about this revenge tale (which supposedly shows his willingness to regard other cultures as savage), Diamond had been skeptical, investigated, and found the story to be false. Why, those macho-posturing, mendacious savages!

Amen to herr doktor bimler. If I had known that “closure” was going to become such a standard media meme I’d have taken notes on its spread over the past 5 or so years.

I suspect that many crime victims state their need for closure simply because they have seen so many others on television make the same statement and are living up to media expectations.

If anyone has any actual data on crime victims and closure (particularly in death penalty cases) I’d love to know of it. Prosecutors here in the US routinely make a pitch for death to provide closure to victim’s families.

But, um… given that the second story turns out to have been completely untrue, why should we believe what he says about the first one?

Isn’t it a bit premature to say that the second story turns out to be completely untrue?

On the one side, we have Jared Diamond, a known writer of popular anthropology. He is the target of some grudges from “real” anthropologists, but these appear to be largely political or professional. If forced, most would say that he simplifies stuff too much but is basically honest.

In the middle, we have Daniel Wemb. Diamond says that Wemb drove him around in Papua New Guinea to look at birds, and while doing so passed along tales of vengeance from the Handa region.

On the other side, we have Mako Kuwimb, a Ph.D. student who comes from the Handa region. He needs to publish a paper to finish his Ph.D., but the draft comes back from the referees with a note that says “this Diamond guy said a bunch of stuff that contradicts your thesis. You didn’t mention his work. Is writing about your home region biasing you?”

Kuwimb then goes and finds Wemb, presumably asks him what the hell he told Diamond and berates him for making their people look bad, says that he has to tell the New Yorker that Diamond made it all up, and then goes off to save his paper by discrediting Diamond’s article. Lawsuits follow, and hilarity ensues.

It looks like there’s probably a decent case to be made that Diamond, like so many anthropologists before him, got snookered by his subject. The defamation lawsuit is going nowhere (should have filed in Australia), the notoriety will probably let Kuwimb get his Ph.D., and Diamond will probably sell a few more books.

Do not take this as a defense of Diamond who, for all I know, is as shoddy and fraudulent as anyone says he is; but the revenge anecdote is completely believeable, in any culture. Anyone who has experienced the primal desire for vengeance would recognize the characters and motivations in the story. And yes, the rule of law can be profoundly frustrating in those circumstances (I say this as an ardent proponent of the rule of law).

The discussion of “closure” is interesting. It doesn’t surprise me that e.g. relatives of murder victims don’t get much relief (and may experience greater distress) from witnessing the execution of the murderer. I suspect it is because the revengee is not seen to suffer enough, and death puts him beyond the reach of further retribution.

Isn’t the difficult of giving up vengeance for law Sophocles’ central concern, as well?

Since when is it racist to think that other cultures have different mores, including mores that license acts which we (I think rightly) regard as wrong? I think (gasp) that I’m agreeing with John Emerson here (perhaps he’ll set me straight, to mutual relief).

Apparently one of Diamond’s critics is Rhonda R. Shearer, S J Gould’s widow.

Here in Wobegon we do not conduct feuds, though neighbors of mine did manufacture sarin toxin in order to kill the county sheriff and his deputies. The terrorism experts concluded that

Living in an isolated economic backwater probably contributed to their chronic frustration. Given this lifestyle, coupled with the influence of living in a state with a strong history of grassroots political activism that sometimes included violence, it should come as no surprise that they began to seek people and institutions to blame for their problems.

Anywhere in the U.S. where the population density gets low enough, you can have murders over hunting. I would certainly believe the story if it were set in Minnesota because something extremely similar happened in Wisconsin (I think…) – a Hmong hunter went gunning for a group of white hunters who were threatening him, and, sometime later, some racist went and killed a Hmong hunter with a similar name in revenge, or something like that.

America, land of the free, and home of the ethnic conflicts over shootin’ and fishin’.

Jake, Your scenario about how things happened (Mako John Kuwimb contacting Wemp, and creating a cover-up) is, with all due respect, silly. Our team has spoken to dozens of witnesses regarding the only fight between the two tribes that lasted approx. three months in 1993 and resulted in 4 dead (two on each side).

Our informants include police, government officials, members from Handa and Ombals and other tribes. We also have Henep Isum’s medical records that prove he never had a spinal injury (nor was he paralyzed from an arrow in the spine in a wheelchair as Diamond claimed). Missionaries who live in the area now and during 1992-1995, the time Diamond claimed between “four and six thousand” were involved fighting, say Diamond’s story is wrong and these tribes are peaceful. One, a known author and former scientist, wrote: “But may I make a simple statement that Diamond’s article is ‘pure’ unadulterated garbage. I lived there in those days and recall that there was a fight, but 47 lives is preposterous. Could have been 2 or 3.” His memory was good, of course. There were 4 dead as I mentioned above. Go to our and other scholars reports on http://www.StinkyJournalism.org to learn more.

BTW, I too read GGS and found it meticulously anti-racist. But I don’t see (re: 13) why it would be annoying. He is looking for a rational explanation and he offers one.

Jake, you are wrong. I do deny that Diamond accurately reported what Wemp told him.
See http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-149.php
Our report states:
“Wemp says, in one of dozens of phone interviews with StinkyJournalism since July 2008, “The facts are totally wrong in The New Yorker story. I have given all those stories to Diamond and those stories are very true and those names are not fake.” In other words, Wemp says he told the true stories to Diamond with real names but Diamond retold them wrongly by jumbling up information… Let’s examine just one example of the seriousness of Diamond’s errors and how he jumbled facts: Wemp told Diamond he lives in Nipa/Kutubu district (his mother was Nipa, his father a sub-clan of Handa). Diamond’s untested assumption was that Ombals and the Handa tribes live in Nipa, since Wemp does. In fact, they live in a completely different district, Komo-Margarima. The more serious error occurs when Diamond extrapolates his false premise that ‘Ombals and Handas are Nipa and live in Nipa’ to devastating effect when also assuming that the Ombals and Handa tribes also raped and killed Huli along with their fellow Nipa [sic] tribesmen on a highway in 1997.”

“Well, such tales also resonate deeply with long and deeply held stereotypes about how savage are all those savages off in the savage lands. Can you imagine Diamond hearing that story in, say, Minnesota, and accepting it without question? ”

It’s not like Diamond is some random tourist marvelling at these strange people. He worked for decades in PNG as an ornithologist and then an anthropologist. And I’ve really no patience for the people who claim that GG&S is somehow racist. That’s about as spectacular a misreading as you can make.

From what I remember of GGS, much of the argumentation follows the general form:
“One reason why cultures in continent X lagged behind Eurasia in material culture is that no animals were available for them to domesticate. The absence of any such animals is shown by their failure to domesticate any.”

That’s not even remotely true. There are plenty of arguments in the book which have too little (properly footnoted) support, but this isn’t one of them. He does an extensive survey of the wild animals and potential crops on various continents, and explains in detail why some were suitable for domestication and others not. There’s a fascinating chart, for instance, of seed sizes in the wild antecedents of modern crops.

Diamond frequently starts with an argument that’s some kind of sociobiology or Marvin-Harris-style material determinism and then goes delving for some kind of anecdote that he thinks illustrates it. Sometimes he gets it from his own travel–and as a lot of folks observed in that previous discussion, he is often at the very least inclined to re-cut whatever he’s told to fit whatever he wants to have been told–or he grabs something from published work that fits the bill, usually ignoring what the bulk of publication says. If this was just to spice up something, it would be annoying enough, but he often seems to think he’s actually proven something with this kind of embroidery. In a way, that’s less Diamond’s unique flaw: it’s how a substantial amount of sociobiological/evo-psych argument proceeds when it wants to compile a claim that a particular practice or behavior is universal, by a careless grabbing at whatever confirms a hypothesis out of work which has a great deal else to say, as if all the contest and complexity of cultural or social anthropological research is irrelevant as long as there are two or three round-peg sentences that can be pounded into the square hole of a hypothesis.

Except that Burke is correct.

GGS’ preface, where he marvels at the natives’ intelligence, is deeply creepy. The determinism is silly, but that first part, yikes. Sounds like the TV series amped up the creep, but I didn’t see it.

From what I’d previously heard about this case (I thought it was on NPR’s On the Media, but I can’t find the report on their site, so I could be mistaken), a lot of the finger pointing has been aimed at The New Yorker itself, whose famous fact-checking department apparently didn’t think to check the facts of this story. My guess is that a similar story that took place in Mississippi or Minnesota would have been fact-checked, regardless of the cultural/class identity of the protagonist.

My guess is that a similar story that took place in Mississippi or Minnesota would have been fact-checked

*My* guess is that it would’ve been a helluva lot easier for a fact-checker in Manhattan to follow up on MS or MN than to find some guy in New Guinea.

Really, whatever the merits of Diamond’s work — comments like those above have kept me from reading GGS — this controversy seems ridiculously overblown. And Ms. Shearer seems like somebody with a good bit of free time on her hands that could be put to better use.

My guess is that it would’ve been a helluva lot easier for a fact-checker in Manhattan to follow up on MS or MN than to find some guy in New Guinea.

Unquestionably. But doesn’t The New Yorker claim to fact check every nonfiction piece it publishes? They don’t have a policy of waiving the fact-checking process due to difficulty.

@ 21: Aeschylus’ Oresteia

Ajay:

Try the two links above to much longer posts of mine commenting on Diamond (and the earlier Savage Minds discussions of Diamond). And chill out a little.

Marc:

Diamond’s sociobiological interests are more marked in The Third Chimpanzee. GGS and Collapse are more a kind of non-Marxist material determinism.

Shorter Shearer: “You can’t take these silly wogs’ stories seriously. Every white man should know that”?

That Diamond was sloppy with his facts doesn’t surprise me. I had to fact-check a couple of his articles back in the 1990s and would uncover the odd unsubstantiated claim. More disturbing was his attitude toward what I found, which was, well he knew that to be true, so let’s let it stand.

But that said, I think it’s clear that whether or not Papua New Guinea is a hotbed of vengence, it is indisputable that academia is. That’s what’s really driving the controversy.

Racism seems like a total red-herring in all of this; GGS is explicitly anti racist — even if the terms of it are sort of sketchy (“isn’t it weird that tribal people are actually human beings?”). What’s pernicious is the narrative it tells about environmental determinism, where the fact of where we come from is the only determinant of where different groups of people end up, and things like the imperial subjugation of half the world are taken to have no relevance for understanding why Africa, say, is so darned poor. This was the substance of Tim Burke’s critique way back when, if I recall correctly, but the point is that “racism” is simply not the terms in which his sloppiness has to be addressed: he is, in fact, using the issue of racism himself as a way of making it seem like he’s doing something more interesting than he is, as if he isn’t simply peddling a new version of a very old story, to people who want to believe it for reasons having nothing to do with an actual desire to understand historical processes. In that sense, it’s interesting to note how often Diamond’s defenders defend him against a charge of racism that the savage minds folks, for example, have been pretty sparing with; Diamond has been quacking like a duck for a long time, but most of his critics have — I thought — been really fair in simply noting that his actions are questionable (like taking at face value claims that he would no doubt investigate if they didn’t confirm pejorative preconceptions about what “tribal people” do). Hiding behind the screen of “Diamond’s no racist” sure seems to me like a way of avoiding thinking about the ways his sloppiness makes him complicit in self-aggrandizing narratives of the West’s blamelessness, and of avoiding actually thinking about the real substance of the critique. But then, this is America, where being racist is a misdemeanor, but *calling* someone racist is a felony.

what does the first paragraph have to do with the rest of this post?

There is something seriously wrong with Diamond’s article. While anthropologists may take offense with the vulgar materialism, Rousseauian generalizations and geographical deterministic excuses for the brutalities of colonialism of Diamond’s work, these problems are not legal problems. However, this time Diamond has crossed the line. If he claims to be an anthropologist, then he should at the very least be familiar with the accepted ethics of the discipline. I don’t care if he’s a PhD in evolutionary biology, he can still do anthropology as far as I’m concerned, but he has a duty to follow basic ethical requirements of the field. Principally, Diamond failed to inform Wemp that he would be the subject of an article. He published Wemp’s name and accused him of having confessed to a murder conspiracy in an internationally read magazine. THEN, his agent attempted to sell lectures about the article for 20,000 dollars a pop. I realize I might be confusing anthropological ethical standard with legal definitions of libel and defamation, but I think Wemp and Isum’s case against Diamond has a real foundation.

Besides, I haven’t read many posts on here that attempt to sympathize with Wemp and Isum. Basic empathy is missing from this discussion.

Shearer does not deny that Diamond accurately reported what Wemb told him, just that Wemb may not have expected it to end up in the national press. That can’t be good for the defamation lawsuit.

There are two questions here. One is the outcome of the lawsuit, the other is about Diamond’s trustworthiness.

The first question is of no interest to anyone except Wemp, Diamond, and their immediate circles, which as far as I know doesn’t include anyone here, except maybe Rhonda Shearer. The second is of interest to anyone who reads Diamond’s stuff, or who has conversations with others who do. That includes almost all of us.

If it’s true that Diamond wrote a New Yorker piece describing rape, murder, and a violent conflict involving thousands of people purely on the basis of a story he was told by a cabdriver, then he’s a crappy journalist, and we have to substantially raise our estimate that he’s a crappy scholar too. Whether he’s legally liable has nothing to do with it.

To give a single example, in Third Chimpanzee he makes a dramatic claim about false paternity rates… that turns out to be completely unsupportable and almost certainly bogus. To be specific, Diamond cites a false paternity rate that’s likely in double digits (“5 to 30 percent”) based on two cases—an unpublished 1940s study of blood groups in babies

Weren’t the studies supposed to have been done in or near Edinburgh?

Look, the main thrust of Diamond’s argument in that article is sufficiently flawed (that premodern societies were wracked by vengeance-seeking violence, or that stateless societies are) that beating on his credulous passing-on of a story told to him is missing the point. And this is what I was getting at regarding Diamond in my earlier comment: he is a provisioner of careless overgeneralizations that he sells with tremendous gusto. The materialist argument of GGS is arguably a usefully provocative popularization of much more carefully developed work in environmental history, agricultural history and so on. The argument of this piece on vengeance, violence and political organization is much more demonstrably counter to huge body of scholarly literature on law, violence and political organization in human history, where there are all sorts of variations that complicate or actively refute the generalization of Diamond’s article–stateless societies with apparently low levels of endogamous violence, centralized states with strong legal systems where sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of vengeance-seeking were common, you name it.

@ Lemuel Pitkin: “…If it’s true that Diamond wrote a New Yorker piece describing rape, murder, and a violent conflict involving thousands of people purely on the basis of a story he was told by a cabdriver, then he’s a crappy journalist,…” Gosh, that describes Thomas Friedman’s entire career as a serious pundit and enabler of wars of vengeance.

Re:41
Actually I thought the posts (and lots of the comments) over at savage minds were way creepier than anything Diamond wrote. It was treating the PGNers as some kind of (sympathetic) exotic objects of study, which of course act like some caricatures out of a caricatured politically correct textbook. At least Diamond ascribed motives, passions, feelings and thoughts when he wrote about them.

I find the shearer’s post to be devastating. The conversation is told as though it was occured in@ 2000- 2002, but it actually is a redaction of some phone interview in 2006; it makes small, collateral mistakes – who Wemp works for, the composition of the area where he lives – that, no matter how Paul Bunyanesque Wemp may have been, simply would not have been spoken by the informant. It names an attack on an individual that did not happen, and includes Wemp’s meditation on that attack, which is a two-fer piece of fiction. And finally, the one individual whose name was changed in the editorial process for the article happens to be white.

Now, those who defend Diamond might want to explain – if it is no big deal to falsely accuse a man of paralyzing another man and gloating over it – why, then, Dan Rather got into trouble for the compariatively trivial offense of thinking he could prove a Texas frat boy went awol instead of reporting to his national guard unit in the seventies? Somehow, so great was that offense – which happend in the context of the continuing silence of said Texas fratboy re his national guard activities – that it shook up a whole network.

Of course, racism – institutional racism – was at work here, if the term has any meaning at all. Personally, I think Diamond is more often aiming, in his work, to make anti-racist points. That is good! But even people who consider themselves anti-racist can adapt attitudes, or practices, that are consistent with racism. Unconsciously or not. I do it, and I would guess almost anybody who isn’t a hermit in the Western world does it. This strikes me, however, as an egregious case that plays not only with stereotypes of the savage, but has that exoticism that undermines the point the point Diamond is trying to make. Plus, of course, slandering two people in ways that nobody on this thread would tolerate, if it happened to him or her.

I’m not quite sure why so many people are surprised at–or contemptuous of–the “boundary maintenance” that anthropologists and other academics whose work Diamond has stepped on (including archaeologists) are engaging in. The man wrote a really rather short book that purported to explain pretty much all of today’s global social, political and economic configuration in terms of a fairly narrow set of geographic and environmental factors. Of course he gets it wrong! Of course the specialists are going to complain!

His work is provocative and it’s rather fun to read, but we shouldn’t expect the people who spend their whole careers studying the periods, places, and concepts that he breezes by in a few scant chapters not to want to put their objections on record. As Timothy Burke says, Diamond ignores large bodies of literature on the subjects he purports to explain. It shouldn’t be surprising that anthropologists and others who work in those literatures get upset about this.

(Whether the folks at SM were right to do this in terms of “racism” is debatable. I think Burke probably has the right of it, here. I do think there is something to claims that Diamond’s environmental determinism tends to obscure the culpability of colonial powers. Calling this “racism” is probably a bit much–aaron may well be right about this.)

As for his behavior in the Wemp case, I think Dan Kamen has it right. Diamond’s actions were at the very least sloppy, and look like highly unethical, too. With luck he’ll go back to writing about birds, where he can safely ignore little things like informed consent.

Now, those who defend Diamond might want to explain – if it is no big deal to falsely accuse a man of paralyzing another man and gloating over it – why, then, Dan Rather got into trouble for the compariatively trivial offense of thinking he could prove a Texas frat boy went awol instead of reporting to his national guard unit in the seventies?

Diamond “accused” Wemp of attacking and paralyzing another man based on Wemp telling him he did it. No one is denying this, just trying to muddle the issue with claims about Diamond confusing tribes, getting dates wrong, massaging quotes, etc.

If Dan Rather had found letters from a texas frat boy bragging about how he blew off his air force training to go drink beer, and then the frat boy tried to explain that he made it all up so his frat brothers would think he was a rebellious badass instead of a brown-nosing suckup, things would have gone differently.

This is an interesting conversation. I’d agree that the posts at savage minds and, particularly, Shearer’s posts at her “journalism” site are, if not creepy, at the least, problematic, that is if one were reading them to find out the truth about the issue. I see no denial there that Diamond may have been told the tall tales he in turn passed on, only that it became awkward when those tales became public. Ironically, the long letter from Weng’s cousin concerning clan affiliations and inter-clan tensions seems to verify the general point about non-judicial retaliation that Diamond emphasized in his article.
Certainly he was indiscreet at best in having named his correspondent and, astoundingly, the number of persons whom he had not even met, without any attempt to verify what he purportedly had been told. That is simply amazing.

Maybe Wemp’s denial is not credible to you, but don’t overlook that it has been made. To me, it does seem credible. Just as it seems credible that Wemp’s stories, which involved other people in a relation too confusing to simplify for a popular audience, was simplified by attributing the violence to him.

Find the place where Shearer (or anyone else involved) says “Wemp did not tell Diamond that he (Wemp) was responsible for the attack on Isum.” You can’t – she always hedges and misdirects and brings up other details that Diamond got wrong.

Zora, please. I’m reliving the earlier Diamond discussion, maybe, but one of the things I said then and say in general is that I’m all for academics popularizing and I accept that this takes all sorts of generalizations and rhetorical turns that wouldn’t sell in highly specialized scholarship. But I don’t think that writing for a big audience requires cherrypicking big bodies of scholarship (or outright ignoring them): that’s what a popularizing scholar does best: translate those bodies of scholarship and the debates that swirl around them, make sense of specialized knowledge. David Christian’s book is an excellent model of that, a very fine and readable example of “big history”. Diamond really strikes me as a flawed example of the same ambition. You don’t get a pass just because you’re writing for a big audience, any more than you’re required to write small, highly specialized work as a test of legitimacy. There are marvelous examples of popularizing work which is also sensitive to complexity and nuance and debate.

Re:74
I wrote my undergrad comps paper on the early history (pre-World War) of the Soviet security services. That was some time ago so I don’t remember the source exactly but several authors noted it and it just jumped out at me in the “now that I think about it seems obvious” kind of way. If time didn’t move so fast on the internets I could maybe dig it out. Also I probably shouldn’t’ve said “Most” – but a lot of them were.

I’m also a bit wondering about that lawyer that Shearer has hired. Don’t lawyers usually tell you to STFU and don’t talk about the case in situations like these? Or you’re gonna risk the million bucks by saying something stupid? Bad lawyer or bad impression of law from TV on my part?

With respect to the “primal instinct for revenge”: One of Tony Hillerman’s detective novels (The Dark Wind) hammers hard on the thesis that the Navajo lack it. Hillerman of course was a journalism professor, but it is my impression that the Navajo, by and large, regarded him as an accurate and sympathetic observer of their culture.

(I myself would like to believe that the revenge instinct is not universal. It is clear however that not having it can get you in trouble, as witness Michael Dukakis.)

Jake, your theory is that Wemp has to go through the litany of denying every piece of the story?

No, but it’s reasonable to deny the part that everyone cares about. Without the wrongful accusation of rape and murder claim and subsequent ten million dollar lawsuit, no one outside of a few other anthropologists would care.

Shearer is saying “Diamond says Wemb told him that he organized an attack that paralyzed Isum. But Isum isn’t paralyzed. Diamond is wrong.” Doesn’t it strike you as a little weird that she didn’t add in “Wemb says he told Diamond no such thing?”

I’m also a bit wondering about that lawyer that Shearer has hired.

Are you sure Shearer has a lawyer?

To be clear – it’s a shitty thing to take someone’s tall tale that may get them in trouble and reprint it in the New Yorker without changing names to protect the maybe-innocent, or warning them that it might be published and giving them a chance to reconsider. In this case, Diamond appears to be acting like an insensitive asshole.

Of course, it’s also shitty to claim that a writer defamed a person by accusing them of serious crimes that they didn’t commit without mentioning that said person told said writer that they commited said crimes, and only changed their mind when it started getting them negative publicity. Maybe shittier.

Re: 91
Over at http://randazza.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/well-in-our-culture-we-take-a-man-at-his-word-new-guinea-tribesman-lies-to-jared-diamond-and-now-wants-10000000/ in the comments she says “I also did not feel qualified to represent myself during this period and hired counsel to protect myself. “

Also, I don’t think Shearer is a party in the defamation lawsuit against the New Yorker. They might be being represented by Mako Kuwimb, the Ph.D. student whose paper got negative refereeing for not mentioning Diamond’s article.

Of course, it’s also shitty to claim that a writer defamed a person by accusing them of serious crimes that they didn’t commit without mentioning that said person told said writer that they commited said crimes

What did Isum say to Diamond?

For those of us who are lawyers, and are therefore always asking tedious questions about procedural posture, the filing by Wemp and Isum Mandingo can be found here: http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/misc/Mandingo_and_Wemp_vs_Advance_Publications_and_Jared_Diamond.pdf

It’s a Summons and Notice, not a Complaint, and thus entirely lacking in detail, so it is hard to tell how they plan to actually win, other than via media exposure and shaming Diamond and the New Yorker. It strikes me as a quite weak case for defamation, based on what I’ve read here and at Ms. Shearer’s site, but maybe there’s more to come.

(The legal merits are obviously largely independent of the moral merits, of course, and it is hard to see how this isn’t a huge blow to the reputation and credibility of Diamond and the New Yorker, regardless of how the case comes out.)

If you think NGOS just go out and get the first native around to drive a high profile guest around a third world country, I think you are dead wrong.

Roger @94 is missing the context here — Diamond, back in 2002 is not “a high profile guest”, he is a regular visitor doing follow-up work to his earlier research on PNG birds. PNG is not “a third world country” to him; it is practically a second home, though he still needs someone familiar with the state of local roads to drive him around.
This comment is not intended to agree or disagree with the general trend of discussion, but to suggest that Roger’s speculations are not founded in fact.

What a piece of work is man! Or rather, the language-puzzle solving module of the human brain.
And what a piece of mind is the error-making and word-substitution module of the human brain!

@98, there’s must be some confusion here. He didn’t need to blackmail anyone to join the Cheka, just like the head of the DEA or FBI doesn’t need to blackmail anyone to join his agency; people want to join, they compete to join.

Those who you have to blackmail are your potential secret informers, not your staff members.

Nothing, apparently. What crimes did Diamond accuse Isum of?

Being leader of a gang of rapists and murderers.

I agree with Jon that it´s really difficult to understand the purpose of Diamond´s article. But I really can´t understand the framing of him as a racist.

“Honor culture” is in fact a very common trait in many cultures. There is a beautiful brazilian movie called “Behind the sun” that depicts the same history of the book from Ismail Kadare (honor culture causing deaths in north Albania) in the context of brazilian northeast, where this kind of thing was very common, and also ritualized, until not much time ago (I´m sure we had this until the seventies):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Sun_(film)

Of course it would be an error to generalize and assume that “honor culture” is a cultural invariant in the “developing” world, but it´s wrong to say this should be automatically qualified as racism, imho.

And I’d bet the lawsuit never gets to court. The New Yorker is unlikely to treat Diamond like the NYT treated Judy Miller – given the facts as we know them at the moment, they are on the hook, and probably not pleased to be on the hook with Diamond. Given the Science articles interview with Diamond, they are on the hook with a guy who is doubling down, even as his story slips away from him (I particularly like how the accusation that Wemp stole 300 pigs is working out – even the New Yorker person has to say, well, that is a lot of pigs ). No notes for the first conversation, and then the four year follow up call in which, apparently, our bribed driver/joker just decided to confirm all kinds of fictions. Maybe Diamond sent him money afterwards. If Diamond has a sensible lawyer, they will all reach a settlement. If he decides to stubbornly stick by his story and go to court, he’ll look like a fool and a liar, and that is the kind of thing that kills hosting the next PBS special, or whatever. Isum simply has to stand up and take the witness chair to put the quietus on the report that he is paralyzed for life. Of course, maybe the New Yorker has been thinking that a display of legal force – compared to the comparatively feeble representation of the two New Guinea plaintiffs – will scare them off. My guess is, however, that the sudden burst of publicity kills that strategy. Retraction, damages, case withdrawn. That is how I envision the end game.

lemuel – if you read through the complaint you don’t get the sense that the story is false. There really was a tribal war, people really were killed, and these sorts of events are far from uncommon. The dates are apparently in dispute; the war was not as long as claimed, nor did it take as many lives as claimed. The central role of the narrator was overblown.

That is in the category of “sloppy”, in the sense that I’d expect some confirmation from another source. I’d reserve “false” for, say, just making things up. As opposed to getting a garbled story.

Many of the denials in the claim are pro forma: “We love peace and hate fighting, as all good people do.”

I do think that Diamond made a serious mistake by naming his interlocutor, as the complaint does clearly indicate that the publication of the article put him at risk. Not from the law, as some of the posters here claim – but rather, from extrajudicial retaliation. He might well have gotten some important clarifications or retractions if Wemp realized that it was going to a broader audience.

I leave this, however, with precious little regard for Shearer – and it drops the more I read on her website. She’s playing the role of judge, jury, and executioner, and the picture on her website is less true than Diamonds. Outrageous distortions in the service of vendetta strike me as pretty serious too. My opinion of the Savage Minds crowd was already quite low after my previous encounter with them, so it is thus unchanged. I think that Diamond clearly made mistakes and I’ll take his anecdotes with a serious grain of salt in the future; the burden is on him to be more careful if he wants to be taken seriously.

To protect himself, Diamond should have kept notes so that he could show that he had not changed or slanted what his driver said.

Indeed. His gullibility would then be unchallenged.

Fair enough.

He writes clearly, concisely
GGS is nearly 500 pages long. Whatever its virtues, concision is not among them.

Jake, Your scenario about how things happened (Mako John Kuwimb contacting Wemp, and creating a cover-up) is, with all due respect, silly. how would you jump into conclution with as such,when you dont know what really is happening back in Niugini where Wemp comes from.
I think while Mako being a PHD candidate in James Cook University hope he is trying his very best to at least put every information said about his tribes to be real and would be best reflectted to the outside world as how his people really are. and not as those as Daimond has said about.
Their-fore, If I were you Jake I would be are good observour rather then be part and puzzle of either Daimond or Wemp.

Also, if you think Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh is a blowhard, why don’t you leave the ivory tower and become a multimillionaire talk show host? Put up or shut up, fool.

Is there some sort of application process by which one can become a millionaire blowhard?

[cut -ed.]

To comment 120 who wrote:
” Diamond says things like ‘leader of a tribe in battle’, it’s Shearer who says things like ‘criminal, ‘rapist’, and ‘murderer’. Obviously the emphasis will be different.”

I quote from Diamond’s April 21, 2008 article in the New Yorker because my guess is many here have not read the original article. The quotes in isolation are telling.

“Though we might wonder how Daniel’s society came to revel in killing,”

“The maiming of Isum did not end the affair for Daniel.”

“As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.”

“For example, Daniel’s methods might seem quite familiar to members of urban gangs in America, and also to Somalis.”

“As I eventually came to realize, Daniel’s thirst for vengeance and his hostility to rival clans are really not so far from our own habits of mind as we might like to think.”

“Isum suited Daniel’s needs perfectly, because he was tall, handsome, and marked as a future leader, just as Soll had been. By killing Isum, Daniel would exact appropriate revenge for Soll’s death.”

The pay rate for a kill—payable in Daniel’s case to the man who shot the arrow that paralyzed Isum—is eighty pigs plus fifteen thousand kina, around fifty-four hundred dollars. Highland etiquette forbade Daniel to tell me who fired the arrow, but he did say that he was a member of another clan, who lived far away and had a grievance of his own: about twenty-five years previously, some Ombal clansmen had damaged his village and killed his grandfather.”

“When he succeeded in paralyzing Isum, his [Daniel Wemp’s] desire for revenge was satisfied, and the Handa-Ombal war ceased to concern him.”

Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting.”

“Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to ‘light elephants’: ‘They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.’ ”

“Normally, a clan first tries to obtain vengeance within three weeks. During that period, the situation is tense, and people feel especially aggressive.”

“Yet hiring killers to kill Isum was permissible. By killing Isum or arranging for Isum’s killing, Daniel explained, ‘I would lose Isum as an uncle, but that would be worth it, because I would gain my revenge.’ ”

“Daniel’s clan realized that it would have to enlist supporters from other villages. The selection of allies posed tricky and dangerous problems. The New Guinea Highlands are full of aggressive men seeking revenge for their own reasons, and skilled at using treachery to achieve it. Whenever a battle takes place, men not hired by either side are likely to present themselves, hoping for the opportunity to kill an enemy of their own. ‘You have to make sure that the men that you hire as paid killers or allies are real enemies of your target, bearing grievances….

“But it continued to concern Daniel, who was now, of course, a target for Ombal revenge. He told me that Ombal men tried for several years to kill him and three other Handa clansmen who had been fight-owners, but they never succeeded. “The four of us were too tough for the Ombal people to kill,” he boasted. I asked him whether he had feared for the safety of his wife and young son, who were surely not too tough to kill. Daniel explained that he worried about his son but not his wife. She was not a Handa, and, if the Ombals had made the mistake of killing her, they would have acquired a whole new set of enemies.”

“But the Huli candidate, as Daniel put it, ‘won the game,’ and the Nipas, considering this ‘a personal problem,’ responded by blocking highways on which supplies reached the Hulis, stopping vehicles, and killing Huli men they found in the vehicles and raping Huli women.”

“Daniel seems satisfied with these developments. Once he said to me, ‘I admit that the New Guinea Highland way to solve the problem posed by a killing isn’t good. Our way disturbs our day-to-day life; we won’t be comfortable for the rest of our lives; we are always in effect living on the battlefield; and those feelings go on and on in us. The Western way, of letting the government settle disputes by means of the legal system, is a better way. But we could never have arrived at it by ourselves: we were trapped in our endless cycles of revenge killings.’ ”

“I asked Daniel why, on learning of Soll’s death, he hadn’t saved himself all the effort and expense, and just asked the police to arrest Isum. ‘If I had let the police do it, I wouldn’t have felt satisfaction,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to obtain vengeance myself, even if it were to cost me my own life. I had to ask myself, how could I live through my anger over Soll’s death for the rest of my life? The answer was that the best way to deal with my anger was to exact the vengeance myself.’ ”

“Jozef remained tormented by regret and guilt—guilt that he had not been able to protect his parents, and regret that he had failed in his responsibility to take vengeance. That was the responsibility that Daniel had satisfied, and the terrible burden that Daniel had spared himself, by personally orchestrating the shooting of Isum…Yet, even if the killer had been properly punished, Jozef would still have been deprived of the personal satisfaction that Daniel enjoyed.”

50. . “Daniel concluded his story in the same happy, satisfied, straightforward tone in which he had recounted the rest of it. ‘Now, when I visit an Ombal village to play basketball, and Isum comes to watch the game in his wheelchair, I feel sorry for him,’ he said. ‘Occasionally, I go over to Isum, shake his hand, and tell him, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ But people see Isum. They know that he will be suffering all the rest of his life for having killed Soll. People remember that Isum used to be a tall and handsome man, destined to be a future leader. But so was my uncle Soll. By getting Isum paralyzed, I gained appropriate revenge for the killing of my tall and handsome uncle, who had been very good to me, and who would have become a leader.’”

And for the record, from my careful analysis of the facts, I do not believe that Wemp ever told Diamond that he was a killer or sponsored the “maiming” of Isum, nor do I believe that Diamond ever believed that Wemp WAS a killer.

I think the racial issues of GGS and this article are

1) GGS seems to imply that simply due to agricultural factors as opposed to a history of colonialization, Europe came out on top (More critique here: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm)
2) This article and the depiction of the parties involved protrays the PNG natives as violent tribal savages

I should add that in the NY article Diamond is explicitly claiming that his anecdotal accounts of the urge for vengeance in two different social settings somehow demonstrate a universal human trait – “what can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even.” The only conceivable basis for this argument is what anthropologists call the ‘comparative method’: traits and behaviors found in contemporary ‘primitive’ societies must be the same as those found in the ancient ‘primitive’ societies from which our own modern society evolved. Thus we moderns continue to display them as either cultural relicts from an earlier age, or as biologically innate qualities.

The comparative method was popular in anthropology in the 1920s or so, but has long since crumbled under the weight of overwhelming archaeological and ethnographic evidence. The only people still plugging away at it are sociobiologists or evolutionary psychologists or whatever they call themselves. Even if Diamond’s evidence were sound, which it patently isn’t, his actual thesis is still completely empty. And that leaves aside the anthropological critique of his loose definitions – is there any reason based on evidence to believe that the emotions and practices he lumps together under the heading “vengeance” are the same?

My point being, in connection with my comment above: no-one claims or cares that Diamond himself is racist. But he continues to make claims about history and biology that defy all expert consensus, and that support the racist ideology latent in at least American society… So whatever Diamond’s personal ideology and character, there’s racism at work in the popularity of his ideas and the general willingness to take him as seriously as we do.

“One reason why cultures in continent X lagged behind Eurasia in material culture is that no animals were available for them to domesticate. The absence of any such animals is shown by their failure to domesticate any.”

I’d like to know which Australian animal you think would be domesticable.

“things like the imperial subjugation of half the world are taken to have no relevance for understanding why Africa, say, is so darned poor”

No. His thesis is precisely that they are so darned poor because we had the guns, the germs and the steel and they didn’t. Are you suggesting that something else was responsible for it?

I think #96 nailed it. And since when was it racist to believe that tribal peoples conduct revenge killings? Cultures that include revenge killings are cultures that include revenge killings. I have read in more than one place that Albanians conduct blood feuds. Am I a racist for believing that that’s true? Or only if I repeat someone’s story that they shot someone for shooting their brother without going to their village and interviewing everyone involved? An idiot maybe. A racist? Hmm.

I’d like to know which Australian animal you think would be domesticable.
Dingos!!
Do I win a prize?

giotto @ 11:30 pm

“ ‘…it may be that Diamond was overly eager to believe the tall tale . . .’.

Well, such tales also resonate deeply with long and deeply held stereotypes about how savage are all those savages off in the savage lands. Can you imagine Diamond hearing that story in, say, Minnesota, and accepting it without question?”

Yes. Easily.

Authentic stories with mythic resonance are a dime a dozen in Minnesota and Wisconsin. To help you glom onto the total lack of difference between Papua New Guinea and the US of America, civilization-wise, consider for just a moment a tale of honor and revenge with the locale shifted to Kentucky. Or New Orleans. Or, just read a few Flannery O’Connor stories. Southern writers and tale-spinners display a mythic resonance that don’t avert their gaze from the utility and need for honor, righting wrongs and revenge. They at least acknowledge those human impulses. Northern cultural traditions that ignore those psychological traits don’t erase them, nor do they make the very real news stories endemic to the Upper Midwest, that clearly display the same qualities, somehow go away.

Your position defaults to ‘believes a story’ = ‘racist’. Yet you ascribe this to the ‘savage’ setting. I’d suggest it is you who stereotypes eagerly here, first by equating the indigenous setting in Papua New Guinea with ‘savageness’ and by assigning belief in such a long-dead prejudice to Diamond, who has plenty of experience seeing past that never-sturdy construct.

GGS is based on a specious argument for a dozen reasons

I think a little more specificity is needed here. The arguments in GGS are of some value for explaining the differences between Eurasia-Africa on the one hand and Oceania and the Americas on the other. They are of very limited and dubious value for explaining the differences between Eurasia and and Africa. (Africans have been making iron implements, if not steel ones, for as long as Europeans, and certainly didn’t lack for germs.) They are of no value at all for explaining differences within Eurasia, as Diamond basically acknowledges before engaging in some silly speculation in his last chapter anyway.

(On the within-Eurasia question, I highly recommend Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, which usefully refocuses the issue from internal dynamics to external constraints.)

[cut -ed.]

#134: GGS is not about colonialism – virtually the entire book, and all of the interesting part for me, is about periods of time which precede it by millenia. It is intellectually dishonest to fault a book about one topic because it isn’t about another. Certain places on the globe happened to have access to plants and animals, which allowed them a head start on agriculture. This in turn gave them advantages which explains some broad regional patterns – thus disproving the alternate idea that there were intrinsic genetic differences which were instead responsible. Claiming that this somehow, somewhere, supports racist ideologies is bizarre to those of us outside the hothouse. It’s a symptom of a lack of clear thinking and a tendency to wrap oneself in ideological pretzels. Confront the actual argument instead of saying that a completely different topic is more useful.

The debate over “is Diamond racist?” is less interesting than “how accurate/interesting is anything Diamond says?”

There’s lots of stuff in GG&S that looks “striking” at first glance but turns out to be wrong or fudged or misleadingly presented. What’s supposed to be its most “striking” contribution to geographical determinism, the whole east-west axis concept, is basically bullshit, based on a pile of inaccurate claims about the extent to which crops can adapt to different climates, misleading comparisons between staple crops, straightforwardly wrong attempts to claim virtues for the Mediterranean climate based on the prehistory of the Fertile Crescent (which doesn’t have a Mediterranean climate, or rather has many other climates besides, a rather large oversight on Diamond’s part), and so on.

Once the more “striking” claims go by the wayside owing to Diamond’s sloppiness about constructing them, GG&S really has nothing to offer that other, better geographical determinist explanations hadn’t already covered much more effectively. It’s ultimately one of the least essential books of its kind. The really tantalizing mystery it leaves us with is about the Pulitzer Prize committee that selected it.

Dr. Slack, can you provide some reading material which shows that Diamond’s claim about the east-west vs. north-south orientation is “bullshit”?

Albania’s blood feuds: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1964397.stm

There’s a LONG history of male anthropologists taking as true statements about social reality made by male informants, while female anthropologists record rather different statements about the same social reality made by female informants. Generally the male informants (and male anthropologists) ignore what the females have to say; generally the females are ….uh…skeptical… of male informants’ claims….

Ohmigod! I LOVE anthropology!

re: 144, advantages which explains some broad regional patterns – thus disproving the alternate idea that there were intrinsic genetic differences which were instead responsible.

One of the problems here is that the “intrinsic genetic differences” explanation for the current shape of the world is a straw man. Who exactly is making this argument? Diamond doesn’t cite anyone, and I can’t off the top of my head think of anyone in academia or the public sector who makes it.

Claiming that this somehow, somewhere, supports racist ideologies is bizarre to those of us outside the hothouse.

You can find it bizarre if you like, but it’s not complicated, and I don’t think your confusion represents everyone outside the “hothouse”. Most people would agree that it’s not a good thing that certain nations dominated world history, leaving white folks significantly better off than dark folks in some dramatic ways. But how did that situation come about? Oh thank goodness, it’s not because anybody made any racist decisions, it’s not because white supremacist ideas authorized the massive slaughter of less powerful folks, it’s just that the shape of continents gave some people some stuff that others didn’t have. Any other population in the same position would have done the same. Nothing to feel guilty about after all.

It’s a symptom of a lack of clear thinking and a tendency to wrap oneself in ideological pretzels.

Like I said, the point is really quite straightforward, no pretzeling required. GGS claims to demonstrate that a bad set of outcomes is the inevitable result of unavoidable conditions rather than decisions and agency. Therefore no moral judgement can adhere to the original actors or us, their descendants. A loose analogy can be made to sexual assault: some might argue that rapists can’t help it, the biological urges to mate are innate and inevitable and in some cases irresistable. The “hothouse” term for this kind of argument is naturalizing something.

Confront the actual argument instead of saying that a completely different topic is more useful.

I think that’s what I’ve done. The point that I’m making, anyway is that GGS lends support to latent US racist ideology, and I’ve made a straightforward argument. Others can talk about the enormous factual and logical gaps in GGS itself – such as the SavageMinds essays y’all are so scared of. What’s interesting to me is why the book is so popular.

At the risk of becoming the anthropology police – you’re dramatically misrepresenting the Darkness in El Dorado episode, Theo. Anyone interested in what actually happened and why it’s quite a bit more interesting than an “anthropological blood feud” should check out Borofsky’s Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy, Tierney’s actual book, and Doug Hume’s archive on the subject.

Nothing to feel guilty about after all.

What’s morality without hellfire?

Adamhenne — Um umm ummm. I got a problem here.

Diamond set out to write a book explaining why Europeans ended up (at the current historical moment anyhow) running the world. Or as he originally phrased it, Why did Europeans show up in New Guinea with so much “cargo” while the native people of New Guinea had so little?

It is a moderately interesting question, and Diamond had moderately interesting answers to give. More than moderately interesting, actually. One can quibble. One might wonder why Western Europeans had so damned little “cargo” from say 400 to 1600 AD, and why the Chinese had so damned much from say 200 BC up to 1800 AD and did so little with it. But what the hey, no book’s perfect.

However, on about SEVENTEEN occasions now, you have stated that Diamond’s book is worse than useless, not because it contains bad answers to that interesting question, but because it justifies or provides cover for or excuses nasty people who answer that question with racist answers. How we make the transistion from Diamond’s geographism to racial supremacy pretty much escapes me, since Diamond doesn’t make it in the book and seems to be leaning backward — even by your admission — to establish that racism is NOT an answer.

But apparently, he committed the sin of discussing the topic of European supremacy and that’s enough for you to damn him to the outer reaches of hell — because of what people who won’t be troubled to read him, or never were in a position to read him, have said or thought over the last 500 years.

This is NOT reasonable. This is NOT sane. You’re basically condemning the man’s work not because you dislike his answers, but because the very question he originally asked drives you straight up the f***ing walls. As far as I can see here, there is no way Diamond or anyone else could have tried to answer “Why do Europeans have so much cargo?” that would not offend you, because you are so damned annoyed that Europeans did get that cargo.

History is a landslide, sir. It is a record of stuff that happened. The rocks bounced this way, the soil slithered along here, the child in the swimming pool was swamped by rubble here, the houses along the roadway were flattened at such and such a time…. This is reportage. Sure, looking back in retrospect we can see the disaster and regret the loss and suffering, but the account itself has no moral, no ethical demand. We are not required to be Republicans or Democrats or fervent Socialists when we read about a historical catastrophe; it is not reasonable to insist that every student of geology view a landslide and proclaim that henceforth she will be a libertarian. Some stuff just happens. Diamond wrote a book trying to explain why things happened as they did, and that doesn’t make him evil, despite your deepfelt concerns.

Pull the beam from your eye, sir. Please.

Adam, I can only repeat:

A: “But the paragraph you quoted is my capsule summary of Diamond’s argument”
B: “is a straw man”

A: “as read by the same general audience to which you refer”
B: “Who exactly is making this argument? ”

“And I have had that precise conversation with dozens of students and family members. ”

I really don’t want to be mean here, (though it’s sort of hard, what with this word “naive” being thrown around). So I won’t bother to explain this to you in detail. But let’s just say that your “students and family members” are probably not the target group you want to go to if you wish to have some good faith, honest, criticisms of your preconceptions that are of at least non-negative value.

To qualify my above statement, if an animal needs to have 10 or 20 generations to be transformed into something that can be domesticated, then if we’re talking people 12,000 years ago, that pretty much means it’s not domesticatable. On the other hand, an animal that is readily domesticatable through a generation or two (with some intermediate stages in between) – that’s gonna work a lot better.
How do you get animals that can be domesticated within a generation or two? Diversity and luck.
And that’s Diamond’s argument.

In my experience some closely related species do differ markedly in disposition; some will tame, others rarely. Examples: the Burmese python tames easily, sometimes in a week or two, while a reticulated python will still bite readily after years in captivity. The Burmese is common in the pet trade while the reticulated is not a popular pet.

One species of pit viper (Wagler’s) is given free run of some Malaysian temples. This is possible due to this species’ reluctance to bite during daylight hours. Any number of con-generic species will bite you any time of the day. Why these differences exist is a puzzle but they certainly impact their human interactions.

As for American bison, they are very, very large (males as much as 2200 lbs.), stubborn and not given to taking direction. Even today, with modern materials, it is very difficult to prevent a bison from breaking through a fence. Their size also makes them very dangerous to work with. Much easier to kill one and eat it than break it to a plow.

Keith Ellis —

Forgive me. It’s late. I’m old and tired and unsophisticated and impolite. But it seems to me, you’re giving us the kinder and gentler version of what we’ve already had from Adam Henne: some sort of racism is deeply embedded within every word that Jared Diamond has written and really clever people can recognize it and understand the weaknesses of his arguments.

And as an old tired crude and impolite person, I gotta say: You’re Wrong.

There’s one issue that really counts in this world, and has had that position for more than sixty years: Will the US and the USSR decide to blow the planet up, and all of civilization, and all the human race, this afternoon? From the late 1940’s up to the present, that’s been the quintessential human question. Arguably, we learned the answer was “No” around 1991 or so when the Soviet Union went south, but even in these better times it must be admitted that was A Real Serious Question.

But we’ve been permitted to move on, and if I understand you and Mr Henne, the great issue of the day is Whether Or Not We Recognize The Racism In Our Views?
Not What Should We Do About Our Racism? but whether or not we recognize that our popular culture has brainwashed us into being racists. And of course, the answer is NO. Only anthropologists and particularly anthropologists “aware of nuanced racism and erudite in the literature describing its history and how it socially functions” are really aware of how deeply sunk in racism we all are. The rest of us, being contemporary liberals, just aren’t sophisticated enough to understand.

And… and…. and…. I’m old and tired and unsophisticated. Words fail me.

Come visit. I’ll find a really big rock to hit you with.

“Keith, like you I am very dispassionate and objective about when I think about this.”

Me Too! I agree!!!

He said “felicitous”. Heh heh. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyel7CIjWcU&feature=PlayList&p=83D15EE5F38CE2FD&index=5

@ adamhenne, 154: GGS claims to demonstrate that a bad set of outcomes is the inevitable result of unavoidable conditions rather than decisions and agency. Therefore no moral judgement can adhere to the original actors or us, their descendants. A loose analogy can be made to sexual assault: some might argue that rapists can’t help it, the biological urges to mate are innate and inevitable and in some cases irresistable.

Even as a loose analogy this is a very bad analogy. There is the concept of “human agency” – rapist, acting as an individual, making decisions. OK, sure, there’s also a similar marxist concept of collective agency, having to do with socio-economic classes.

But I don’t think anyone would assign agency to a primitive society, which is what Diamond is describing in GGS. Societies, especially primitive societies, don’t make decisions, they adapt and they evolve.

You can’t think of a society comprised of thousands or millions of people as if it were a single individual. Isn’t it kinda obvious?

“…but in fact that is not how his argument is generally used.”

But it is. How is they’re poor because it’s from their biology that qualitatively different from they’re poor because it’s from their geography? Racism-as-biology intends to validate the status quo power and wealth relations on the basis of biology. Racism-as-geography does the same thing on the basis of geography.

That you or anyone else can be so blinkered that you think that removing biology from the argument necessarily makes it anti-racist is astonishing to me.

Also, your argument distinguishing EP from geographical determinism is very odd. Your argument is that EP is unlike Diamond’s theory because EP is used for the explicit purpose of limiting how much unjust social structure (distribution of power and wealth) can be said to be the responsibility of human politics. Yet Diamond’s geographical determinism says nothing at all if it does not also limit how much unjust social structure (distribution of power and wealth) can be said to be the responsibility of human politics. EP proponents claim that biology is the limiting factor. Geographical determinists say that the geography is the limiting factor.

But wait! A defender of EP might say that he/she is simply attempting to describe why certain human behaviors are what they are, without making moral arguments or even politically normative claims. Yet I’ve never seen anyone who dislikes EP to accept this assertion—and considering how often EP has been used to counter, say, feminist arguments in smug, patriarchal tones, I’m not surprised.

So, given that smug-toned assertions rebutting social justice arguments have been made upon a geographically deterministic basis—and they have; more’s the pity if you’re not aware of it—then why, exactly, do you expect the anthropologists to be any more convinced by your assertions of Diamond’s innocence than you are by EP-proponents who assert theirs?

Barbar, also, I don’t know if I’m either as dispassionate or objective as you. I don’t think, in fact, that I’ve claimed to be either dispassionate or unusually objective. What I did claim, however, was that I don’t have the same emotional investments in this argument that apparently almost everyone else here does. My own passions and subjectivity may be leading me astray, just not in the same way or with regard to the exact same things as are those here who are taking these two so notably and peculiarly opposing positions.

mike shupp, the concern is that a) geographical determinism can be a sort of “safe harbor” for racists; and b) an excuse for comfortable non-racists of the developed world to believe that they have not benefited from the racism of their ancestors (or, for that matter, contemporary political policy) and therefore have no responsibility for it or the state of the developing world today…not merely the need for the vapid soul searching of your straw man.

Um, Keith, one thing you need to realize is that for most people this is not about the ideological purity, but about the truth. If, for example, racial theories were correct, then it would’ve been silly to reject them because you’re on one “side of the divide” or the other. Similarly, with Diamond’s theories – to a rational individual it only matters whether they make sense or not. Doesn’t matter how it fits your ideology or how it can be used.

I think people here are using the word determinism in a mistaken sense. A historical explanation is not necessarily a deterministic one. Living in the Southern hemisphere does not doom everyone there to poverty in the future just because the people there were historically poor (if that was the case — that is to say “poor” by our standards, perhaps in actuality they were spiritually rich) during certain periods of history. The whole human race came from the Southern hemisphere originally (Africa) , then some of them went north as far as the Arctic and came back down to the Southern hemisphere — in the case of South America, for example. Where there was an abundance of protein in the form of fish, there was no need to domesticate animals or engage in complex farming.

It is not so much about Diamond, IMO, I don’t see why there should be an attempt to censor people from writing and/or speculating about this.

“How is they’re poor because it’s from their biology that qualitatively different from they’re poor because it’s from their geography? Racism-as-biology intends to validate the status quo power and wealth relations on the basis of biology. Racism-as-geography does the same thing on the basis of geography.”
That’s maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever read.

First of all, the fact that racism sometimes validates the status quo isn’t the only reason that its bad.

Second, saying that someone is poor because they were born into poor circumstances does not “validate” the status quo in the same way as does saying that someone is poor because they’re inherently inferior due to their race. To most people these are opposites, in fact.

These are not unobvious points.

notsneaky: can you provide some reading material which shows that Diamond’s claim about the east-west vs. north-south orientation is “bullshit”?

Given what are supposed to be the foundations of Diamond’s claim, this is a little like being asked to provide a cite refuting a claim that human behaviour is best explained by our hexapodia.

Take Diamond’s claims about crops, climate and the “east-west axis.” At one point in GG&S, he rather sneakily tries to imply that maize is essentially a tropical crop that Canadian farmers would be hard-pressed to cultivate (which would certainly come as a surprise to the corn farmers of Taber, Alberta)… yet corn is universally acknowledged by any source that discusses the subject as an essential part of the pre-Columbian horticultural package as far north as the Great Lakes. (Note that Diamond is careful not to actually say that corn can’t be cultivated outside its original range; he’s content to strongly imply it and then skate over the facts that would rather starkly undermine his attempt to build up the importance of the “east-west axis.”) If I had to pick a cite I’d suggest a general reference work on the archaeology of prehistoric Native America, most of which contain detailed summaries of the scholarly consensus about the diffusion of maize from Mesoamerica.

A further component of his claims about the Eurasian axis revolve around the role he supposes the Mediterranean climate to have played in the evolution of the region’s flora and fauna. Which single cite do you pick to refute this, when it’s trivially obvious from all available general reference material on the matter that the Fertile Crescent is — and has historically been — characterized by climate diversity, not by a single climate? It would probably be more interesting to make reference to other theories that address the same subject without getting their most basic facts wrong — the “Saharan pump theory” would be one of these. (And the Burroughs book cited in that WikiPedia article is quite good.)

What about misleading comparison between staple crops? GG&S spends a fair amount of time talking about the higher protein content of West Asian cereals as in some way establishing the importance of the Eurasian axis, a discussion that rather skates over, for the most part, the fact that all the crops being compared were being consumed in combination with other foods and the more meaningful comparison would be between the protein content of these various diets. Do we really need a specific cite to grant this?

Examples of that kind of sloppiness and fudging aren’t isolated in GG&S. They’re the rule. It’s just a shitty book, basically.

In my third paragraph above, first sentence: “the evolution of the region’s flora and fauna”

This obviously should have read “the evolution of the Ferticle Crescent region’s flora and fauna.”

The second point is more important, and stickier. I’m glad that Keith Ellis has arrived and said something sensible – and I’ll admit to being in fact a little intemperate and ideologically inflexible, that’s pretty accurate.

But pretty much every other comment in response to mine has been way off – misreading my points so thoroughly that I can only assume I’m being read in bad faith. So I’ma try one more time here:

I didn’t at any point say Diamond was a racist, or even that his book was racist. I think his book is dumb, but there’s a lot of dumb books out there. I said that the reading of his book by many many folks, and the role that it plays in popular discussion, lends support to racist ideology. If the distinction between those two things still isn’t clear, I don’t think I can help you any further.

The reason GGS plays this role is emphatically not that it dares to discuss the taboo topic of European domination. There are many good books that do so, and I wish that the American public and the CT commentariat would read them. The problem is that GGS provides one explanation for that domination – ultimately, the shape of the continents – and explicitly rejects all others as ‘proximate’. This writes out actual history, politics, ideology, and actually everything that anybody ever did said or thought. By itself on the shelf, that’s just bad thinking. In circulation on the bestseller list and the popular consciousness, it plays basically the same role as the ‘genetic determinism’ y’all would like to think it debunks.

Oops, sorry Patrick – I didn’t mean “you are making sure” as in you yourself, I meant as in “one”.

Thanks Katherine, I guess that’s so. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been overconfident about my own clarity – just ask my partner…

In no political universe is saying that the Earth’s geopolitical power and wealth imbalances are the result of “environmental factors” liberal.

Well prior to this exchange I had thought liberalism was some sort of mainstream school of thought. Now I realize that it’s basically a fringe perspective that insists that all human events must be fully explained by deliberate intentions. Also, liberals believe that when two cultures interact with each other, the less racist one is intrinsically doomed to be destroyed by war and disease. This is because real liberals aren’t racist at all, and would never exoticize the other.

“Why is there a racial test gap in the US? Some people would say that it’s because there are natural differences in intelligence between races, and others would say it’s because of environmental factors. Both these positions are illiberal and racist. A real liberal would emphasize racism as a causal factor and identify people who should feel guilty.” Right.

Look, I have no strong emotional stake in defending Diamond. I don’t think I’m familiar with a successful pop social science book that didn’t turn out to be full of shit in some important way. Laymen tend to be overly impressed by breezy “ultimate” explanations, and so it is entirely natural that people who spend their careers doing the real work of figuring out “proximate” explanations get pissed off. And then everyone else goes “Huh? Why are you so emotionally invested in defending your turf? Lighten up Francis, that pop book was fun,” which of course just adds to the frustration.

But this “I’m not saying that Diamond’s book is racist, it’s just that his arguments can be used by racists” thing is silly, especially when the guy saying that also writes:

One of the problems here is that the “intrinsic genetic differences” explanation for the current shape of the world is a straw man. Who exactly is making this argument? Diamond doesn’t cite anyone, and I can’t off the top of my head think of anyone in academia or the public sector who makes it.

I mean, come on.

“To most people these are opposites, in fact.”

Yes, well, more’s the pity. I guess this demonstrates that most people are idiots.

Rather than being opposites, the notion that a group of people, as a class, are poor because they are intellectually inferior is exactly the same sort of notion that a group of people, as a class, are poor because they were born into poverty. Both attribute the poverty to an external cause that is outside of that group’s agency. Both attribute the poverty to an external cause that is explicitly not the actions of other groups. (Such as discrimination against the poor and powerless by the wealthy and powerful.)

“Being born poor” is, in the context of Diamond’s argument, being a culture that happens to have an environmental handicap. The modern version of racism is the argument that a culture is “poor” because it happens to be made up of people with a genetic handicap. Environment, genetics…these are externalities beyond anyone’s control; these are explanations that are exculpatory.

An argument which is the opposite of modern racism would be that a poor and powerless group are thus because they choose to be poor and powerless—that it was not imposed upon them by anything or anyone except themselves. That this is no less an offensive and destructive argument should strongly suggest to you that it’s not the question of whether a poor and powerless group is so because they did it to themselves or it was the result of circumstance that makes it offensive and destructive…it’s something else. What is that something else? The denial that this powerlessness and poverty were done to them by someone else. That’s what’s offensive and destructive.

Genetic racism and geographical determinism are both essentialist arguments for a status quo of poverty and powerlessness. Both claim, for example, that there is something essential about being an “African” which ensures that one is poor and powerless—the former by biology and the latter by environment.

That you and, apparently, others so clearly and strongly believe that the destructiveness of racism lies in its notion that some people are biologically inferior only demonstrates how ignorant and shallow is your knowledge and awareness of racism.

“The argument isn’t between ‘circumstances’ and ‘genetics,’ it’s ‘what the hell do we mean by circumstances?’”

I wouldn’t put it this way. Genetics is a ‘circumstance’ no more and no less than poverty. The question is if a group is poor and powerless because of the actions made by others. There have historically been numerous varieties of racism. All answer that question with a “no”—they differ only in where else they place the responsibility. One might place it in biology, another in geography, and still another in God.

It is indeed a great eye-opener for me to discover that so many see the primary evil in racism—indeed, its nature—to be the claim that a group of people is biologically inferior and not its denial of human responsibility for the systematic oppression against such a group.

“But let me salvage this example by using it to show that people who argue that human agency and intentionality matters above all are also playing into the hands of racists.”

You’re mischaracterizing my argument to the point of absurdity.

For example, I wrote:

“In no political universe is saying that the Earth’s geopolitical power and wealth imbalances are the result of ‘environmental factors’ liberal.”

To which you responded:

“Well prior to this exchange I had thought liberalism was some sort of mainstream school of thought. Now I realize that it’s basically a fringe perspective that insists that all human events must be fully explained by deliberate intentions.”

Your response would make sense only if “Earth’s geopolitical power and wealth imbalances” is equivalent to “all human events” and if not by “environmental factors” then “fully explained by deliberate intentions”.

Nowhere have I argued that “human agency and intentionality matters above all”. Rather, I have argued that when human agency and intentionality have so unambiguously been demonstrated to have explanatory power with regard to things like racial disadvantage and “the Earth’s geopolitical power and wealth imbalances” it is really fucking suspicious when someone makes an argument entirely eliding human agency and intentionality, and large numbers of people eagerly embrace said argument. Furthermore, when someone points this out they are told they are stupid, uninterested in the truth, and motivated by jealousy of their academic turf.

This is even more remarkable because it is the typical pattern of behavior of the defenders of books like The Bell Curve and sexist evolutionary psychology, not CT progressives. But, apparently, because CT writers and commenters haven’t been sensitized against this particular variety of smelly thinking and, indeed, found it quite appealing…they behave similarly and rabidly as those defenders of racism from whom they have been heretofore (and onward, sadly) certain they are Completely Different and Undoubtedly Superior.

“He is trying to explain why group A gets to oppress group B and not vice versa. He thinks it could be explained by environmental factors.”

If I could imagine a more illiberal, immoral project than this, I don’t know what it might be. Keep posting, Henri, you’re making my argument better than I ever could.

If I could imagine a more illiberal, immoral project than this, I don’t know what it might be. Keep posting, Henri, you’re making my argument better than I ever could.

Sure, happy to help; so what is your explanation? Why did the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs and not vice versa? Surely you must have some sort of explanation, some idea, no?

And can someone clue me in on examples of people using Diamond’s argument to make politically objectionable claims? It’s interesting that we have 200 comments, many from people with no emotional stake in whatever is being debated, and yet there are no examples. Is this debate really raging because most people here are apologists for colonialism? Is whether or not “we” should feel guilty about colonialism a pressing political issue nowadays? (Collective guilt about colonialism… surely a sign of nuanced thought about racist assumptions, with no questionable assumptions about “our” racial identity.)

What’s so disturbing to me is that it seems that any given person’s reaction to GG&S and this most recent episode of Diamond’s can be predicted by a relatively simple description of the intersection of his/her professional affiliations and political ideologies.

I object to this simplistic, reductionist, determinist attempt to account for people’s responses to simplistic, reductionist, determinist accounts.

It happens that I’ve got a snarky post on this subject up over at my place, if anyone wants to wander over there and leave poor Crooked Timber alone. And while I’m linking, let me refer interested parties to some actual content, such as Gewertz and Errington’s Yali’s Question, West’s Conservation is Our Government Now, or Foster’s Coca-Globalization, just a sampler of works about the relationship between Papua New Guinea and the developed world that don’t explicitly reject history, politics, philosophy, culture, or people.

adamhenne- First of all, you haven’t actually answered me. There’s still a difference between calling a race genetically inferior and saying that someone was born into impoverished circumstances. The fact that you feel (or you perceive others to feel) that poverty is only something one should ameliorate if first someone other than the impoverished person can be blamed does not actually alter this.

Second, the logic as I see you advance seems to go as follows:

1. Explaining the historical origins of poverty in terms of geography leaves us without someone to blame.

2. Without someone to blame no one will do anything about poverty.

3. Therefore poverty cannot be explained in terms of geography, OR,

4. I should unfairly castigate people who do explain poverty in terms of geography so as to better achieve my political aims.

I disagree with all four of these.

1. When your use of geography relates to explaining why certain groups successfully exploited other groups, this does not leave you without someone to blame.

2. I do not believe that an inability to effectively blame someone will mean that no one will be interested in ameliorating poverty. This is easily proven, people donate to victims of natural disasters, groups give foreign aid to victims of violence not perpetrated by the donors, etc.

3. This obviously doesn’t follow except in a fantasy land where wishing makes things so.

4. And this is dishonest. I suppose maybe I could be moved to endorse dishonesty if I thought that crackpot arguments equating geographic determinism with racism were the only ways to accomplish good in the world, but I don’t, so I don’t.

Note that none of these arguments actually require me to accept any degree of geographic determinism- the “geography = racism because it excuses inaction so we should castigate it” position is a crackpot argument no matter what your thoughts may be on Diamond’s book.

Diamond claims to be answering the question “Why does group A have all the stuff and group B have nothing”

From my reading, he seems to be answering a somewhat different question: “why, at the time Group A colonized and dominated Group B, were they in a position to do so and not vice versa?” I don’t see him offering geography as a complete explanation for poverty today or denying the contribution of political factors to modern poverty.

I’ve given up on this discussion.

Why did the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs

Again, it would help if we could acknowledge that the answer to this question might be *different* from the answer to the question of why, let’s say, the British ended up ruling India and not vice versa. Notsneaky thinks the idea that technological differences are explained by imperialism, rather than vice versa, is so obviously wrong that a a sarcastic “right” is enough to refute it. But you only have to know a smidgen of history to realize that Europe’s technological advantages over China, India, the Islamic world, etc. came *after* it’s military dominance of those regions, not before.

But while I’m basically on the side of Adam Henne, Keith Ellis, etc., there is one thing Adam keeps saying that I don’t get: He criticizes Diamond for “let[ting] Euro-America off the hook for centuries of conquest and colonialism” and for implying that “anyone in our position would have done the same.” This seems orthogonal to the main line of debate, and it’s not clear why Adam’s other (very convincing) criticisms of GGS should point this way. Do you really think military conquest is a unique, or even distinct, European proclivity?

And what does who is on the hook have to do with anything? We’re not St. Peter here. Our goal to build a world where all individuals and cultures can develop all their capacities, not to assign blame for the nightmare from which we’re still trying to wake up. And even if we didn’t want to do the latter, what does it even mean to hold “Europe” morally accountable?

Also, Adam (I argue with people in proportion as I feel on common ground with them), you’re simplifying the picture of colonialism to the point of distortion. It’s well known that the common formula of empire was “indirect rule where possible, direct rule where necessary.” The most characteristic, and ideal from the imperialists’ point of view, form of imperial rule has always through local elites — just look at the American empire today. Direct conquest, as a rule, is an inferior choice that’s only taken to exclude other imperial powers.

And why is that? Well, one big reason is that anti-colonial struggles tended to become social revolutions. Indirect rule ensures that resistance to empire remains safely ‘external’. To challenge the colonizing power is in the scheme of things no big deal; to challenge the colonized population’s role in the larger division of labor is much more serious.

So what from follows from this? That imperialism is in general a collaboration between the elites of the colony and the metropolis, not just a project of the latter.

And second, that framing the imperial relationship as being between states/nations, as opposed to classes, is part of what makes imperialism successful. Just look at the history of neoliberalism. All over the third world, local elites were anxious to reduce wages, reduce taxes, privatize (i.e. steal) public assets, etc. Largely because of the legacy of anti-colonial struggles, however, there were strong popular movements in most of these countries that blocked moves in that direction. But now suddenly, bang, the external constraint starts to bite and here’s the IMF and the 1st-world creditors demanding exactly local elites’ wishlists. The truth is, the costs of default on external debt would probably have been modest, but it was in the interests of the elites to exaggerate their own powerlessness — to claim they had no choice. And I hate to say it, but 1st world activists who wanted the moral clarity of blaming their own governments were in a small way complicit in that process.

Let’s try not to replace Diamond’s just-so stories with fables of our own…

Sure, I’m with you, lemuel. Imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, all exceedingly complex without a lot of good guys. My point just being, none of those complex dynamics to which you refer have much to do with the shape of continents. And were we to take GGS at its word, we wouldn’t need to talk about any of those complexities – which I believe would be a mistake. It’s worthwhile to talk in simple terms of “Europe” and “not-Europe” only in so far as Diamond does so – Yali’s question that frames GGS is “Why is it that you white folks developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, while we black folks had so little?”

“How is it even possible for technological advantages to come after military domination; how do you achieve military domination?”

So, you’re implying that military domination is only possible via technological superiority? Really?

Wait…do you work for a US defense contractor? That would explain much.

Keith, it doesn’t matter who I work for. We are talking here about interrelationships between civilizations over a span of hundreds of years. For one to assume dominance over another, it certainly requires some sort of advantage; technological advantage seems like the most obvious and most important.

In the battle of Cajamarca, for example, a few dozen Spaniards defeated an army of tens of thousands of Incas. Without their swords, cannons, horses, and armor Pizarro and his men would’ve been killed in two minutes, or, rather, they would’ve never even tried to attack. And that’s just one incident out of thousands; it took decades.

In fact, they needed technological advantage just to get there ahead of the Incas building their ships and sailing to Europe to impose their dominance.

intruding on henri’s and keith’s tiff is unlikely to end well for me — like trying to referee a quarrel between lovers late on at a party — but isn’t the seemingly unbridgeable difference here simply that “superiority” for keith entails “moral superiority”; hence “technological superiority” can’t be considered a reason for military or political domination (because domination is immoral, hence the technology can’t be termed “superior”)

whereas henri thinks it’s unproblematic to describe something as “technologically superior” when measured by some merely material or practical or technical metric* — a V2 is “technologically superior” to a V1, a gun to a spear, and so on…

*(or possibly geopolitical: “that which allows them to dominate politically and militarily” as a *definition* of technological superiority?)

I am astounded that someone here argues that assuming people are basically the same is racist and assuming they are genetically different is also racist. Also saying anything positive at all about non-Europeans is tantamount to idealizing them (which is racist, albeit unconscious) and is just as bad as saying negative things about them. This is setting the bar rather high.

I don’t know much about New Guinea but my impression was that in their case their poverty (lack of stuff) was caused by isolation, not conquest by evil Europeans. A historical and geographical explanation (therefore racist), according to some people here.

Perhaps, it is true that we need a more populist voice for Anthropology because there is much very basic anthropology getting lost in this thread and, I might add, the exchanges at Savage Minds.

When I conducted my fieldwork in the 1980’s and 1990’s (before IRB’s), I was told many a story in a pick-up truck. Those stories were the jumping off point for my research. I would have followed that story up with formal interviews, with the notebook out, quotes recorded as carefully as possible, and having obtained informed consent as to what would be recorded and what published. It would have taken a long time to contextualize the meaning of that story. (Read that last sentence, carefully, because it speaks volumes about what Jared Diamond failed to do.)

The ethics dilema: As an anthropologist, I am compelled to “do no harm”. The determination of harm can only come from a detailed participant observation experience in which we struggle (with much weakness and some arrogance) to determine the consequences of our research. I, myself, have a pile of fieldnotes with names, dates, and detailed stories. In graduate school at Northwestern, where there is a large African studies program, we young students–anthropologists, historians, and political scientists, alike–drank many a beer while pondering the fate of our yet uncollected notes: should we keep them ourselves, place them on deposit in the library to be viewed upon request, seal them up with a 30 year rule. But, most importantly, how will we know what is “harm” when we doing that recording? At no time would we have concluded that a story in a pick up truck from one individual admitting to acts deemed illegal in a modern nation-state be appropriate for publication. This would clearly be harm. This is clearly unethical.

(I often point out to my students that a film like China Blue, which was made inside the PRC with hidden cameras, could not have been made by an anthropologist. We are simply not permitted those liberties according to our ethical codes.)

But back to our main point. Diamond’s ethical lapse reveals the reasons why we cannot place any stock in his anaylsis. Diamond, apparently, had no rapport with what we anthropolgists might call a research population. He did not have the kind of on-going, “boots on the ground” (if you will permit the tortured metaphor), hard-fought, give and take relationship with the individuals he purports to discuss. Had he that relationship, we would not be having this debate. Nor would we be speculating on his possible alternate motives. It would not be about him, if you will; rather, we would be discussing the data that he brings to the table, the multiplicity of stories and discussions that he should be citing to support his argument. But that would have been just another boring ethnography and, after all, who wants to read that?

I venture to say that the story seemed “sellable” because it tapped into that great white hunter/intrepid explorer meme. Driving with savages is way more cool than watching birds or sweating over fieldnotes. Sucks to be professional and ethical. (Before everyone jumps on the bitter anthropologist attack, I am laughing my ass off in this last bit.)

I think part of the problem here is that there are different ways to read GGS. The way I read it was “Over the past 8000 years why has Euraia (plus north africa) held an overwhelming technological lead over the rest of the world?” and I think it does a decent job answering this question. Where Diamond strays from this argument are the weakest parts of the book. I thought the last chapter discussing the rise of Europe was very poorly argued. But the main parts of the book were about the very long trends which happened to make Eurasia the most prosperous continent. Comparing and contrasting the Roman Mediterranean, Han China, and Maurya India with Aztex Mexico, the Kingdom of Hawaii, and Pre Bantu expansion South African hunter gatherers is what I see the book being essentially about, and I don’t think those are racist comparisons to make.

The reading that the people who think GGS ” lends support to racist ideology,” seem to make is “Right nowWhy does the west politically dominate the world.” A good answer to this question is that the west has exploited the rest of the world over the past 400 – 200 years and has concocted racist ideologies to serve them in this purpose. So if you read GGS as trying to answer the modern question I can see how it could come off as being wrong. But I still don’t think that this is the the argument Diamond is making.

Because of these fundamental differences in interpretations of the book, people are pretty much just going to continue to talk past each other.

One, now in abeyance (though advocates of the position are not exactly rare on the Internet) is that the Europeans were biologically superior. The other is that Europeans were culturally superior.

A variant, intersecting with both, was that Europe herself was innately superior as an environment and thus bred superior cultures. And that’s an argument that Diamond does eventually get round to making, quite explicitly: it is in fact his argument for how Europe pulled ahead of China, which proves to be as typical an example of Eurocentric bullshit about “Oriental despotisms” as it gets. Diamond’s “novelty” is overrated.

But you only have to know a smidgen of history to realize that Europe’s technological advantages over China, India, the Islamic world, etc. came after it’s military dominance of those regions, not before.
…
I’m not about to (or qualified to) address the very large topic of what created, in the 18th-19th centuries, a European technological advantage over most of Asia, but it is nonsense to pretend that it did not exist, or that it post-dated (and derived from??) European “military dominance” in the region.
No, it’s not nonsense. Not all technology has equal military value, and especially by the 1600s, military technology represented a major strategic decision and investment of resources by the state. The Ottoman and Chinese governments made a choice not to invest in more powerful navies at various points in time (I’m not just inferring that, they actually debated this). Military technology did not descend upon various Early Modern societies from the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some abstract, non-contextual “human ingenuity”.

But lemuel, you do not distinguish between India and China, which have very different histories of military interaction with Europe. The East India Company already controlled much of India by the late 18th century, while China was never conquered by European powers, and was not even subject to anything like military subjugation until the Opium Wars starting in 1839. There was a substantial British Empire in India, and more importantly, ongoing conquests, for many decades before their technological/organizational superiority and the strategic situation was such that Britain and France could actually rule over substantial parts of the Middle East and small parts of China. It would seem that, like the Ottomans had done in the 1500s, the British refined their military technologies and techniques of political domination by practicing them through conquest and the incorporation of new territories into an empire. Also, Andre Gunder Frank is not the first person to observe strong environmental similarities between societies that most quickly and effectively modernized in the 1800s (Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and I would add the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to India, China, North Africa).

As for GGS, isn’t the importance of environment and geography to macro-history, as a general principle, just way, way too obvious to require a 500-page book to demonstrate it? Especially when we’re talking about the differences between the Americas (to say nothing of Australia or Papua New Guinea) and the huge Afro-Eurasian landmass. Given the Afro-Eurasian landmass is much, much larger than the Americas, wouldn’t we expect the social formations most effective at conquest and domination (and the most virulent germs, &c.) to emerge from somewhere in there–not even taking into account technological synergy between the different social formations in the Afro-Eurasian landmass? So it’s all the more odd that Diamond should be taking 500+ pages to assert something that, at least in the very broad, rough outlines, is not surprising, and offering what are apparently a lot of really sloppy arguments as support. In other words, the structure and strategy of Diamond’s argument stand apart from the general principles and specific, detailed arguments on which it’s founded, and which is why the kind of critical reading Savage Minds has been doing is pertinent.

Does Diamond say something about superiority of the European culture in his book (of course he didn’t),

The argument about geography and its role in European political fragmentation versus Chinese political consolidation is precisely such an argument, yes, and absolutely bog-standard. Diamond doesn’t make it because he consciously realizes it’s Eurocentric, of course, AFAICT he just never bothered to think about the issue.

That’s just in the Epilogue, of course, so you can try to bracket it out from the rest of what he says if you like. But after the stuff about the supposed innate properties of Mediterranean climates and Fertile Crescent selfer cereals — and a dozen other little hints besides — it didn’t surprise me. It’s not an isolated error, it’s a product of his often building on flawed theories without having investigated them. One might also note that in the book’s preamble, when he’s talking about the Battle of Cajamarca, he embarks on a rather dubious infantilization of the Incas that more than hints at cultural-superiority beliefs. (One of the Inca’s disadvantages, you’ll recall, was that the invaders had vast reserves of political and military lessons to draw upon owing to their literary tradition, and they would never have made Atahualpa’s mistake of walking the top tier of his command structure directly into the hands of the enemy.)

Supplementary to what Lemuel Pitkin, says, BTW: Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism trilogy is a little old by now but still really, really good reading on the commercial mechanisms underlying European colonialism and the context in which it happened.

Yes, I do remember his argument about the advantage having written history, lessons from history.

Yet I still don’t see how this translates into “cultural superiority.” His argument, IIRC, goes something like this: good climate, good soil, good plants and animals (plus the amount of time it takes to migrate from Africa) create conditions for evolving faster from hunting/gathering/struggling for survival to a society with a division of labor, society with food reserves, with soldiers, priests, scientists, and yes, historians. From this everything else follows.

But that’s just a question of timing; it doesn’t mean that the Incas would’ve never had libraries, only that they would’ve had libraries a bit later. Only they weren’t given a chance; Europeans got there and fucked them up.

So, what’s so controversial here, let alone racist? And what’s an alternative explanation that you find more plausible?

I’ll third the Braudel for sure – if only everyone who likes GGS would read Braudel, we’d have a very different conversation here. Of course, it’s pretty damn far from poppy and accessible, but hey… While we’re citing, let me add Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism and most anything by Richard Grove – Ecology Climate and Empire, Green Imperialism, or El Nino, History and Crisis. There’s lots of good ways to think about how societies and environments have interacted over time without reducing everything to the shapes of continents.

Yes, I do remember his argument about the advantage having written history, lessons from history.

And it sounds kinda neat until you look over some of those lessons and realize how often overconfident commanders who did have those “advantages” also walked into obvious traps. At which point it gets harder to see as a particularly decisive advantage in itself, and the whole point rather loses its force. (Literary traditions are of course a basic element of the totalities we refer to as “culture,” so if you honestly don’t see how it could tie in to “cultural superiority”… I don’t know, maybe think on it a bit before your next snark? I’m confident some possibilities may present themselves to you.)

His argument, IIRC, goes something like this: good climate, good soil, good plants and animals (plus the amount of time it takes to migrate from Africa) create conditions for evolving faster from hunting/gathering/struggling for survival to a society with a division of labor

Well, he does argue from “good climate” and “good plants” starting with the Fertile Crescent, and gets significant elements of both arguments either completely wrong or fudges elements of them enough that it’s not advisable to take his version of this narrative seriously. Because of mistakes like that, the “striking” insights that were supposed to be the book’s selling point, especially “ultimate factors” like the “east-west axis,” don’t hold up as he describes them. And where he finally does attempt an explanation of Europe’s ascendancy specifically — ultimately supposed to have been the goal of the whole exercise — he winds up recycling a bowdlerized version of discredited history about how China’s despotic governments supposedly held it back compared to Europe’s multi-centred dynamism. (In doing so, he doesn’t even trouble to avail himself of a much more convincing geographical-determinist explanation that would have bolstered his “guns and germs” theme and actually does fit the evidence, to wit that once Europe became interested in long-distance trade and exploration, it was advantageously positioned to sustainably exploit the New World in the Age of Sail, the advantage that eventually led to its commercial dominance viz. other centres of the New World.)

I don’t think there’s a particular problem with big-picture postulates about the role of climate and geography in history. But we don’t need Diamond for that. Call me crazy, I think that kind of case should be made competently without getting basic facts wrong and without recourse to outdated Eurocentric historiography that introduces plenty of noise and little signal to the overall picture. You want Big Ideas history? Hang up the “you’re calling Diamond a racist” strawmen and give me a Felipe Fernandez-Armesto book any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

@242, Ok, if you don’t have a problem with his main concept, then we’re in agreement.
I don’t care about the details.

I still disagree with your first paragraph, though. Getting into a tactical trap is a far cry from mistaking your enemies for gods because there is no recorded description of a horseman from 50 years ago (or whatever the story). And I don’t think this has anything to do with “literary traditions” as I understand the phrase.

And again: yes, perhaps some of these things are a part of what we call “culture”, but all it means is that Incas culture was on a earlier stage than European, not that it was inferior. Anyway, it’s in my comment 238, why repeat.

Doctor Slack @ 182 “Take Diamond’s claims about crops, climate and the “east-west axis.” At one point in GG&S, he rather sneakily tries to imply that maize is essentially a tropical crop that Canadian farmers would be hard-pressed to cultivate (which would certainly come as a surprise to the corn farmers of Taber, Alberta)… yet corn is universally acknowledged by any source that discusses the subject as an essential part of the pre-Columbian horticultural package as far north as the Great Lakes. (Note that Diamond is careful not to actually say that corn can’t be cultivated outside its original range; he’s content to strongly imply it and then skate over the facts that would rather starkly undermine his attempt to build up the importance of the “east-west axis.”) If I had to pick a cite I’d suggest a general reference work on the archaeology of prehistoric Native America, most of which contain detailed summaries of the scholarly consensus about the diffusion of maize from Mesoamerica.”

It would also be nice if critics of Diamond didn’t resort to misrepresentations of his arguments like this. What Diamond actually argued was that Corn took an extremely long time to be breed successfully for planting in a northern climate. This is well supported by the historic evidence. The plant that was the corn precursor, Teosinte, was first harvested 10,000 years ago and corn based agriculture started in mesoamerica 8,000 years ago. Corn was not grown in north eastern north America until 1200 C.E. and it did not become the dominate crop of the hemisphere we know today until European colonists cross bred northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere varieties.

Now you could have argued that the relatively early dispersal of corn to South America 4,000 years ago is a strike against Diamond’s thesis, but the tropical Andean lowlands are more similarly climatically to mesoamerica than temperate north America. Anyway, if you want to criticize someone for sloppy arguments you should probably do better than creating straw men of your own.

At risk of again being edited out, I feel some further comments are in order. @243, Crowley: indeed. By and large, the Diamond critics have been far more intemperate and willing to question the motives and intelligence of those who disagree with them, however mildly. Pitkin @215 is a case in point when he slurs Marc @207 (although I must admit, dude, that it did come as a surprise to me that racism exists. Color me naive and stupid).

Take Keith @232: “I’d be astounded, too, had anyone said that. However, no one did.” This is on a par with “Oh who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Discourses are not only something that academics elucidate and reveal to us great untutored masses. They create their own discourses and that is pretty much what’s been going on here. Notsneaky probably had the right idea, although I’m fascinated by train wrecks.

Hi, Adam. First, let me correct my mistake, it was Keith @233 I quoted. My point remains. That was not snotty although I was sarcastic in response to the usually more reasonable Lemuel Pitkin. Keith claims that no one has done any such thing in so many words. No, no one has been that blunt in those exact terms but a whole string of comments and references amount to the same thing. And I rather suspect that you are familiar enough with the construction of discourses to know that very well. The other Henry didn’t say to someone “go kill the damn priest,” it was hardly necessary. However, I’m glad to learn that we’ve evolved enough to merely be reactionaries.

Oops, I’m sorry Henri. That was one mr. anon, actually. My mistake.

And David, I understood what you were getting at, and I just think you’re wrong. The comments directed at me and Keith, anyway, have been considerably more hostile and dismissive (and with less content!) than anything I’ve written, anyway. And now you are putting words in Keith’s mouth: he never said, implied, hinted, or framed a discourse around the idea that “assuming people are basically the same is racist and assuming they are genetically different is also racist.” No one here has, and claiming that we did isn’t ferreting out our sneaky sneaky (and homicidal, apparently?) academic discourse – it’s misunderstanding the argument altogether.

I’ve noticed, to my consternation, that racists sometimes employ syllogisms. Does that mean I should henceforth avoid using syllogisms, even non-racist ones, because they are a kind of structural argument that racists also use? Does using syllogisms in fact play into the hands of racists?

steven, are they syllogisms which implicitly deny culpability and explain apparent injustice as matters of historic necessity? If so, then I would avoid them.

Any argument which denies or largely makes irrelevant issues of culpability and, in its place, asserts a determinism which explains unequal cultural outcomes is either a racist argument, or very nearly a racist argument. It doesn’t matter what deterministic mechanism is at the heart of the argument.

I was typing this whole long other interloping entry into the thread, but this cuts to the core of what I was saying. I merely flipped through GGS for about 90 minutes several years ago, so I’m asking a question of those who have read it:

Does Diamond actually deny issues of culpability or does he simply not discuss them? Because, look, there are numerous reasons (some defensible, some misguided, some objectionable) why he might choose not to discuss them. Maybe it’s my poor reading comprehension, but I have trouble keeping track sometimes of when people are denouncing Diamond for the things he wrote and when they’re denouncing the way some people are going to receive the argument Diamond advances. (Happily, I think I’m pretty clear on when people are denouncing Diamond for being factually wrong about his assertions.)

As someone who thinks he has a thin grasp on the outline of the argument Diamond proposes (however factually incorrect it actually is), I don’t see what it is about that argument that essentially forecloses the question of culpability, unless Diamond specifically makes noise in that direction.

Once again Keith tries to define speech he doesn’t like as racist. I find his “logic” utterly without merit – once again arguing that “group X got lucky and group Y did not” with “group X is better than group Y.” No amount of wordplay will create sense from that.

Words mean things. People in this thread are agreeing with Diamond’s thesis, which Keith (once again) calls racist, and thus he is calling a bunch of us racists. This isn’t “pearl-clutching”, a la Lemuel – it is targeting hateful and hurtful speech employed *without cause* in the sake of an argument and which cannot be backed up. You want to accuse people here – in this community – of being bigots. Bring on the evidence – and don’t be surprised when the reaction against you is fierce and personal. That’s what happens when you toss around personal insults at people. This thread got to 200+ comments for a reason, and that reason is worth stepping back and thinking about.

Keith(et al): No sarcasm. Apparently I haven’t understood a word you’ve written. Just as apparently, you haven’t understood a word I’ve written.

How dreary.

People in this thread are agreeing with Diamond’s thesis, which Keith (once again) calls racist, and thus he is calling a bunch of us racists.

So, if I have reason to believe an idea is racist, I should just keep that to myself, for fear of offending the sensibilities of those who might agree with the idea? That sounds like a recipe for a healthy intellectual exchange right there. I think pearl-clutching was right on, and furthermore lemuel was way right about how gross it is when people have seizures about the word racism.

Right, it might be a racist move, or it might not. Devastating analysis.

I have to commend the courage of the racism-fighters in this thread. 266 comments, none of which are tagged as racist. Even Diamond is not accused of being racist. And yet people are patting themselves on the back for bravely calling a spade a spade.

I don’t get it, Barbar. For 150 posts I’ve been hearing “how dare you call me a racist” and “it’s such a serious thing to call an idea racist” and blah blah blah – and now you’re annoyed because I’m not calling anyone a racist? Can’t win with you people. And I don’t see anyone patting themselves on the back here – that was just more snottiness in place of an argument, right? Which appears to be the dominant theme here.

Oops, a double-post. That’s a foul.

A word on racism.

The type of argument that I (and I suspect Adam, Keith etc., tho I can’t speak for them) are objecting to takes the form of (a) dividing the world into distinct, homogeneous peoples (whether “perople is about genes, language, religion, culture, whatever), (b) treating those peoples as having more or less immutable traits, which (c) are implicitly or explicitly placed on a scale of better or worse (more versus less advanced, rational versus mystical, individualist versus collective) and (d) regarding the actual hierarchies and power relations that pass through the lines between “peoples” as being the direct, inevitable results — the vindication or proof — of the better traits of the winners.

A lot of us would say that arguments like that just constitute racism, on an intellectual level. And there is definitely a fair amount of that kind of argument in GGS. But none of us who have criticized Diamond on this thread, I’m pretty sure, have described Diamond or anyone else as racist. Racism in this sense is a property of ideas and institutions, not of individuals.

Lemuel

As far as I can tell from reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond doesn’t do from a) to d). If anything, his point is the opposite. His point is that privileged position held by certain soci0-political groups is NOT the result of some inherent superiority, but the result of chance. European “superiority” is nothing more than brute geographical luck. I am simply at a loss to think how this could be interpreted

However, it seems to me that c) and d) are equivocal and almost certainly question-begging. Saying that Europeans had more advanced weaponry and deadlier diseases than the Aztecs did does not struck me as racist. It becomes racist once someone says, “The Europeans had more effective weaponry and deadlier diseases because they were inherently better/smarter/blessed by God when compared to the Aztecs.”

You seem to want to say that claiming that “Europeans had better weaponry” MUST commit oneself to (or the idea that they had better weaponry is somehow inherently connected to the idea that) the claim that “Europeans are better.” But that just seems obviously false. It seems so obviously false that I cannot imagine someone actually thinking it in good faith.

Sleepy,

For one thing, Diamond doesn’t make an argument as to why Europeans, in particular, ended up being the colonizers. His is an account of how certain societies on the Eurasian landmass came to have the CAPABILITY to conquer other societies.

It is simply false, and a gross slander, that Diamond thinks/claims that/is committed, from anything said in GGS, to the moral absolution of Europeans.

It would also be nice if critics of Diamond didn’t resort to misrepresentations of his arguments like this. What Diamond actually argued was that Corn took an extremely long time to be breed successfully for planting in a northern climate.

Oh, I had forgotten about that half-paragraph on p. 188. You’re absolutely right, he does in fact (extremely briefly) mention this.

Unfortunately it doesn’t do much for the whole “east-west axis” business except to demonstrate that the diffusion of crops between regions tends to happen in fits and starts and take a long time. Fertile Crescent crops took, what, about 6,000 years from the appearance of cultivation to make their east-west way to Iberia? A rate of about, if you break down the timespan, about 2 miles / year accounting a distance of about 3,000 miles from Mesopotamia to Iberia. Maize, which if we accept Galinat’s account would have journeyed some 4,000 miles to become established east of the Great Lakes by 1200 CE, took a smidge over 2 miles / year to do so. Of course, that rate varied significantly over the total timespan, but the point is that in the big picture — and remember, this theory is supposed to be explaining big picture data — the overall speed of diffusion from the Fertile Crescent along its “east-west axis” isn’t so much more impressive as to indicate that the barriers those crops faced in reaching Iberia were less significant than those faced by maize expanding into northern latitudes. The primary difference is that maize got a later start (which itself might be because teosinte was much harder to domesticate, as Diamond theorizes, or may simply be because the New World was settled much later than the Old World).

Multiple independent domestications as one of the disadvantages of the “north-south” axis turn up there, too. Hmmmm, I wonder what he has to say about the multiple independent domestications of rice… ISTR rice being another one of the doozies…

Multiple independent domestications as one of the disadvantages of the “north-south” axis turn up there, too. Hmmmm, I wonder what he has to say about the multiple independent domestications of rice… ISTR rice being another one of the doozies…

Fair enough, I’m certainly open to arguments that the book got facts wrong, still can’t wrap my head around the racist angle, this for example…

Any argument which denies or largely makes irrelevant issues of culpability and, in its place, asserts a determinism which explains unequal cultural outcomes is either a racist argument, or very nearly a racist argument. It doesn’t matter what deterministic mechanism is at the heart of the argument.

Does this argument really apply to pre-modern cultures? If I say the New Foundland native were able to dominate the Iceland Vikings because of inherent geographic advantages is that close to a racist argument. What about Homo Sapiens vs. Neandertals?

I think the Vietnamese, Uigers, and Koreans would deny that the Chinese were not imperialists. All of China was conquered by the Han people.

@274 & 276
Apart from general obtunesenss, I think part of the reason GGS’s relationship to racism is confusing is that Keith, Adam, and others are overemphasizing the issue of guilt vs determinism, when a lot of what makes this book Eurocentric is its very definition of the problem, the whole project of identifying European hegemony as the central fact of modern existence that needs to be repeatedly explained and (over-)theorized, inflating the importance of this portion of history at the expense of others. Look at how Diamond (taking his cue from a real historian, McNeil) deals with China:

@277 However, Diamond explicitly acknowledges that both the Chinese and European social groups had those capabilities, yet only one engaged in colonization. He does engage in some small speculation as to why Europeans did what they did (William McNeil, for example, suggests that the political balkanization of Europe as opposed to the unity of the Chinese polity played a significant role).

I don’t see how Diamond or McNeil can get away with arguing China was not expansionist in much the same way that Europe was. What about China’s massive 18th-century expansion into Central Asia? Look at a map of the PRC and compare that to a map of China during the Ming–China expanded massively, and most of that territory was taken during the Qing period, between 1644 and the early 1800s, and held continuously, and practically none of this new territory had been held for any length of time by previous dynasties. It’s at least comparable to Russia’s expansion into Central Asia.

So why on earth is China characterized as not effectively expansionist? Why does imperial expansion in the 1800s make European powers expansionist, but China’s expansion in the 1700s not qualify? It looks to me like Eurocentrism. As Dr Slack said @227, just-so stories told from a European perspective–Europe was expanding into Asia in the 1800s, so that’s the important period to look at when comparing imperial expansions. Not the 1500s when the Ottomans were expanding or the 1700s when China was expanding. Not the 1900s when Asian nationalist movements were expanding at the expense of European political control.

And European transport and military devices in 1500 were not more devastating than those elsewhere in Asia. The Ottomans conquered about a third of Europe in the 1500s, using military organizational techniques that were far more effective and more similar to later, modern techniques (advanced, if you will) than those of European states at that time. Why are so few people even aware of this now, much less feeling compelled to explain it? Europeans in the 1600s were certainly aware of it.

So why all this interest in only those periods when European states expanded at the expense of non-European states? Why is there such fascination with this, and a virtual denial or so-glaring-it-almost-seems-willful ignorance of periods of conquest OF Europe BY Asian states (or, more firmly in GGS territory, reverses inflicted by Native Americans)? Why are these not in need of explanation? Why is expansion into the Americas or India more representative of a state’s power to expand than expansion into Central Asia?

So what I am now seeing in GGS is less a faulty explanation or justification of European hegemony as a Eurocentric assertion of European hegemony that makes it look bigger and more unchallenged than it really was, and sneakily subsuming all of Afro-Eurasian history under the umbrella of Europe, as if Europe were commercially and technologically all but independent of the larger Asian economy by the 1500s when the conquest of the Americas was underway. GGS is part of a wider practice of rehearsing European hegemony as transcendental historical fact, a practice exacerbated by both GGS’s proponents, and the “guilt” line of reasoning.

What a bad-faith, deliberately provocative and unproductive comment.

Hilarious. The engine behind this whole comment thread is people complaining about how Diamond’s argument can be used in racist ways. Then when a Diamond “defender” says that the argument is not necessarily racist, the same people shake their heads and wonder why there’s so much resistance to seeing racism. This is how we can get to nearly 300 comments about racism without anyone actually putting forth a racist argument.

And then there’s the side arguments about how to weigh human agency and structural factors in assessing causal historical forces. On one side, there are apparently people who believe that human agency is completely irrelevant to history. On the other side, there are people who bravely argue that “human agency matters.” Ironically these very same people are quite quick to complain about straw man arguments.

My favorite two comments so far:
154: Oh thank goodness, it’s not because anybody made any racist decisions, it’s not because white supremacist ideas authorized the massive slaughter of less powerful folks, it’s just that the shape of continents gave some people some stuff that others didn’t have. Any other population in the same position would have done the same. Nothing to feel guilty about after all.

198: If I could imagine a more illiberal, immoral project than this, I don’t know what it might be. Keep posting, Henri, you’re making my argument better than I ever could.

BTW, as I said above, ignorant laymen love so-called “ultimate” explanations, and educated experts who actually care about facts hate them. Enough said.

While any discussion of “European dominance” is bound to bring up racist ideas, highlighting “sensitivity to racism” as the big divider between sophisticates and non-sophisticates is really just a lot of unproductive back-patting. Do anthropologists and laypeople differ on Diamond just because anthropologists have a more nuanced understanding of racism? Please. adamhenne thinks the most important thing “we” should take away from colonial history is a feeling of guilt. How nuanced.

Meanwhile we have the endless loop:
“Diamond’s arguments can be used by racists.”
“I don’t want to hold this against him, because the argument is not necessarily racist.”
“It’s so suspicious that Diamond’s defenders refuse to see racism and are so offended by accusations of racism.”
“Listen, the argument is not necessarily racist.”
“Man, so much obtuseness. I knew Diamond’s book and its popularity was fishy. Not that I’m accusing anyone of racism.”

Still not sure what you’re getting at, Barbar. There have been nearly 300 comments about a racist argument – some of us pointing out the way GGS lends support to racist ideology, and some getting all in a tizzy that we’d dare suggest such a thing. And I’ve explained over and over what I mean, and haven’t gotten more than a couple of responses that indicate any comprehension of things I’ve said. Certainly nobody’s responded to my arguments in a way that makes me reconsider them.

And I think human agency matters – is that weird? GGS flatly denies it, and its supporters here seem untroubled by that. I’m not sure what straw man arguments you’re referring to, or why it’s ironic. In other words, what are you on about?

And finally, 154 was me, and I stand by that. I think it’s exactly the sentiment at the heart of GGS, and it sure sounds like the reason a lot of people around here are so attached to the book. Some of us have pointed that out and been roundly attacked, with a lot of heat and very little light. And you drop in occasionally to make snotty comments devoid of content, so that certainly cheers things up around here. So I’m wondering, what’s going on? Nearly three hundred comments now and I’ve read, like, maybe 10 that presented a meaningful challenge to my argument? With like 100 that are nothing more than insults. Now, clearly I’m some kind of masochist, but what’s your motivation for keeping this up?

Hm, I just lost a comment – probably just as well. On re-reading 288, I am still confused – you don’t make much sense in writing, Barbar. But on the one hand, if that little parody is supposed to represent me, then you seem to feel I’m repeating myself – which I probably am. I tend to do that when I feel like no-one is listening to me, which is obviously happening here. On the other hand, you also say “ignorant laypeople”; “sophisticates” vs “non-sophisticates”; and “educated experts”. None of which seems relevant to me – I’ve come clean as an academic anthropologist, I don’t know what Barbar or anyone else here does for a living. But you know, it’s understandable – is some of this buckshot hostility a response to perceived academic posturing? Because if so, y’all could just say so and maybe this could be finished before bedtime.

Yet racism exists which asserts that two cultures are made up of people who are biologically similar (or the difference irrelevant), yet one is favored by God and the other disfavored. Or that one language is superior and the other inferior. These arguments and those similar must be, by the above spectacularly wrong reckoning, the opposite of racism merely because they assert that people are biologically the same.

As the person who used the phrase “opposite of racism” far, far above, I object most strongly to this gross misrepresentation of what I must therefore think. It is a huge and unjustified extrapolation of a one line comment.

And by the way, Adamhenne, when you say that you have not been negative about other commenters on this thread, may I remind you that earlier you accused people of having read you in bad faith?