Well this is certainly a very useful analysis, too; as I said I've only just started Collapse (and have not read the others.) And I did, as noted in an earlier posting, have one major bone of contention with the article which is the tendency to blame the poor and powerless as much or at least almost as much as the privileged & powerful. So I've not decided yet where I am overall on Diamond. Interesting discussion.
Jeanne -----Original Message----- From: Jon Bosak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Sustainable Tompkins County listserv <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 10:52 am Subject: Re: [SustainableTompkins] Diamond's Graphic of Collapsed Civilizations Tony Del Plato wrote: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/25/science/1211-sci-DIAMOND.gif I guess I'm in the minority on this, but I found the Jared Diamond hart particularly unhelpful in trying to gauge the probability of ollapse for *our* civilization. In fact, for all their enjoyable iterary qualities, I haven't gotten a lot out of Diamond's recent ooks beyond some great anecdotes (Greenlanders starving to death hile surrounded by seafood, for example). Apparently I'm not the nly person who finds Diamond's approach less than compelling; see elow for the article to which that chart was originally attached. Jon ================================================================== http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html The New York Times ecember 25, 2007 Question of Blame When Societies Fall y GEORGE JOHNSON As I pulled out of Tucson listening to an audiobook of Jared iamond’s "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," the irst of a procession of blue-and-yellow billboards pointed the ay to Arizona’s strangest roadside attraction, "The Thing?" The come-ons were slicker and brighter than those I remembered rom childhood trips out West. But the destination was the same: a urio store and gas station just off the highway at a remote histle stop called Dragoon, Ariz. Dragoon is also home to an archaeological research center, the merind Foundation, where a group of archaeologists, cultural nthropologists and historians converged in the fall for a eminar, "Choices and Fates of Human Societies." What the scientists held in common was a suspicion that in writing is two best-selling sagas of civilization -- the other is "Guns, erms and Steel" -- Dr. Diamond washed over the details that make ultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history. "A big-picture man," one participant called him. For nthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae -- the pecifics and contradictions of human culture -- the words are not ecessarily a compliment. "Everybody knows that the beauty of Diamond is that it’s simple," aid Patricia A. McAnany, an archaeologist at Boston University ho organized the meeting with her colleague Norman Yoffee of the niversity of Michigan. "It’s accessible intellectually without aving to really turn the wattage up too much." Dr. Diamond’s many admirers would disagree. "Guns, Germs and teel" won a Pulitzer Prize, and Dr. Diamond, a professor of eography at the University of California, Los Angeles, has eceived, among many honors, a National Medal of Science. It is is ability as a synthesizer and storyteller that makes his work o compelling. For an hour I had listened as he, or rather his narrator, escribed how the inhabitants of Easter Island had precipitated heir own demise by cutting down all the palm trees -- for, among ther purposes, transporting those giant statues -- and how the nasazi of Chaco Canyon and the Maya might have committed similar ecocide." By the time I approached the turnoff for Amerind’s boulder-strewn ampus, Dr. Diamond had moved on to the Vikings’ fate. But for the oment my mind was in the grip of "The Thing." Detouring past the conference center, I parked in front of the old ourist trap, paid the $1 admission and followed a path of tenciled yellow footprints to a building out back. Inside a inder-block coffin lay the subject of my quest, what appeared to e the mummified remains of a woman holding a mummified child. "The Thing" looked human, or maybe like pieces of human dolled up ith papier-mâché. Either way, it seemed like a fitting symbol for he complaints I’d been hearing about Dr. Diamond: that through he wide-angle lenses of his books, people appear not as thinking gents motivated by dreams and desires, ideas and ideologies, but s pawns of their environment. As things. The backlash had been brewing since a symposium last year, Exploring Scholarly and Best-Selling Accounts of Social Collapse nd Colonial Encounters," at a meeting of the American nthropological Association in San Jose, Calif. Although "Guns, erms and Steel" has been celebrated as an antidote to racism -- estern civilization prevails not because of inherent superiority, ut geographical luck -- some anthropologists saw it as excusing he excesses of the conquerors. If it wasn’t their genes that made hem do it, it was their geography. "Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame," said Deborah . Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. "The haves are ot to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots." Dr. Diamond anticipated this kind of reaction. In the epilogue to Guns, Germs and Steel," he acknowledged that human will was an mportant pivot in the turning of history, as were freak accidents nd chaotic "butterfly effects," in which tiny perturbations are mplified into cataclysms. But the accidents of geography -- the vailability of raw materials and crops, a hospitable climate, ccessible trade routes and even the cartographical shapes of ontinents -- step forth as prime movers. While "Guns, Germs, and Steel" explored the factors contributing o a society’s rise, "Collapse" tried to account for the ownfalls. Here, human agency played a more prominent role. In ase after case, Dr. Diamond described how a confluence of factors - fragile ecosystems, climatic change, hostile neighbors and, ltimately, bad decision making -- cornered a society into nadvertently damaging or even destroying itself. In his haunting chapter about Easter Island, he weighed the data - radiocarbon dating, charcoal and pollen analysis and botanical nd archaeological surveys -- and concluded that the inhabitants ad mined the forests to extinction, setting off a ataclysm. What, Dr. Diamond wondered in an often cited passage, as going through the mind of the Easter Islander who cut the last ree? But what was intended as a cautionary tale was taken by some eaders as blaming the victims. Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at he University of Hawaii, came to the Amerind conference with a ifferent story. Deforestation, he said, was caused not by people, ut by predatory Polynesian rats, with the human population emaining stable until the introduction of European diseases. Dr. Diamond, he said, "shifts all of the burden to people and heir stupidity rather than to a complex ecosystem where these hings interact." Taken together, the two books struck Frederick K. Errington, an nthropologist at Trinity College in Hartford, as a "one-two unch." The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their ontrol, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise. Dr. Errington and Dr. Gewertz, who are husband and wife, work in apua New Guinea, a treasure trove of ethnic groups speaking more han 700 languages. Dr. Diamond has also spent time on the island, here he first went to study birds. Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up "Guns, Germs, nd Steel" and seeing that it had been framed around what was alled "Yali’s question." Yali was a political leader and a member of a "cargo cult" that prung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing trips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets, slanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food, eapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that ad been airdropped to troops fighting Japan. One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, "Why is it that you white people eveloped so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black eople had little cargo of our own?" Thus began Dr. Diamond’s tale about the combination of eographical factors that led to Europeans’ colonizing Papua New uinea rather than Papua New Guineans’ colonizing Europe. "We think he gets Yali’s question wrong," Dr. Gewertz said. "Yali as not asking about nifty Western stuff." With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted, he islanders would have been able to trade with them as quals. Instead, they were subjugated. What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had ever treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility nd struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the orld through others’ eyes. In "Collapse," Dr. Diamond proposed that a precipitating factor in he Rwanda genocide of 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of utsis were slaughtered by Hutu compatriots, was Malthusian. The ountry had let its population outstrip its food supply. Christopher C. Taylor, an anthropologist at the University of labama at Birmingham, saw the tragedy through the other end of he telescope. One afternoon, he sat in the living room of merind’s old mission-style lodge, which looks out onto the esolate beauty of the Little Dragoon mountains, calmly describing ow he and his Tutsi fiancée had fled Rwanda just as the massacres egan. Safely back in the United States, he studied the country’s opular political cartoons, sensing that for many Rwandans, olitics was tangled in a web of legends involving sacred kingship nd fertility rites. The king, and by implication the president, as the conduit for imaana, a spiritual current symbolized by iquids like rain, rivers, milk, honey, semen and blood. In times of droughts, floods, crop failures, infant mortality or ther misfortunes, he might have to be sacrificed to spill his maana back into the soil. "In order to understand the motives of the Rwandans, you have to nderstand the local symbolism and the local cosmology," r. Taylor said. "Because, after all, what Diamond is doing is mposing his own cosmology, his own symbolic system." By the time I left Amerind, I realized that what I had witnessed as a clash of world views. Central to the "cosmology" of r. Diamond’s tribe is a principle celebrated throughout the hysical and biological sciences -- to understand is to simplify nd seek patterns. In an e-mail message, he said that progress in any field depends n syntheses and individual studies. "In both chemistry and hysics, the need for both approaches has been recognized for a ong time," he wrote. "One no longer finds specialists on olybdenum decrying the periodic table’s sweeping superficiality, or advocates of the periodic table scorning mere descriptive tudies of individual elements." For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than he rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to contextualize," "complexify," "relativize," "particularize" and ven "problematize," a word that in their dialect was given an ddly positive spin. At some moments, the seminar seemed less like scientific meeting than a session of the Modern Language ssociation. But the anthropologists had a point. As Einstein put it, xplanations should be as simple as possible -- but no simpler. Is t realistic to hope, as Dr. Diamond did at the end of "Guns, erms and Steel," that "historical studies of human societies can e pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs"? One afternoon I drove out to Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, bout 130 miles northwest of Dragoon. Turning off North Arizona oulevard near a Blockbuster Video store and KFC/Taco Bell, I saw he Great House, four stories high, loom into view. Abandoned over alf a millennium ago by the Hohokam people, the earthen ruins ave been incongruously protected from the elements by a steel oof on stilts designed in 1928 by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. One suspects that the Hohokam were content to let the place elt. Depending on which eyeglasses you are wearing, Casa Grande s a story of environmental collapse or of adaptation and esilience. When conditions no longer favored centralization the eople moved on, re-emerging as the O’odham tribes and a thriving asino industry. Abandonment as a strategy. Driving back on Interstate 10, past an mbilical cord of eastbound railroad container cars owned by anjin Shipping and the latest crests of urban sprawl, I tried to magine the good people of Tucson or Phoenix bowing out with such race. At the seminar, Dr. McAnany suggested that the very idea of ocietal collapse might be in the eye of the beholder. She was hinking of the Maya, whose stone ruins have become the Yucatan’s oadside attractions. But the descendants of the Maya live on. She ecalled a field trip by local children to a site she was xcavating in Belize: "This little girl looks up at me, and she as this beautiful little Maya face, and asks, 'What happened to ll the Maya? Why did they all die out?’" No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to he English. _______________________________________________ SS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ttp://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins ree hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org ________________________________________________________________________ More new features than ever. Check out the new AOL Mail ! - http://webmail.aol.com _______________________________________________ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
