Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris.

President Camacho · Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 12:02 pm Post subject:

http://www.infanticide.org/history.htm

I was going to make a nice little abridgment of this article for you but it is so short, and packed with great info that it's worth a glance. It doesn't go into any depth but covers infanticide over a very long period of human history with one sweeping stroke, missing many minor details and leaving questions needing answers. Better than nothing!

I don't think references are required when a fact is near common knowledge. Infanticide through neglect still happens today and it is widely known that it has been practiced throughout history.

The article in Wikipedia on infanticide is thoroughly cited and there are numerous cases of infanticide due to exposure and neglect throughout history.

The laurel leaf knife that he was talking about probably isn't a "crude weapon"- it was and is art. This knife, that is 11 inches long, is only "four tenths of an inch thick." It shows that whoever took the time to make it wasn't making a tool because it was most likely too fragile for its intended use. The craftsman was obviously striving for artistic excellence in the same manor as the sculptor of the Venus de Milo, albeit at a primitive level.

You're absolutely right though! He shouldn't have compared it to modern industrial techniques. I totally didn't think about that when I read it. I was just like "wow." He got me!!! Thanks for bringing that to my attention!

Laughing

I enjoyed the part about gossip, too. The butt print in the dirt where someone had been getting it on made me laugh. You know what though? Probably the best case of a society which constantly seeks to get 'away' from one another is Japan. These people have no where to go to get away from their fellow man and so they escape within themselves. By doing this they can comfortably live surrounded by people without going insane. I know I couldn't do it; I've tried. I need my personal space!!!

I had a hard night last night so I probably won't read chapter three until tomorrow. Also, we have books w/ different page numbers. Surprised

President Camacho · Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 12:37 pm Post subject:

I almost forgot. There have been well documented cases of ritualized infanticide! Take a look at Wikipedia.

Most of the ritualized infanticide described is for religious/sacrificial reasons but you can't deny that population control probably had a lot to do with it. It is easy to assume that religious leaders took it on themselves not only to control the population, but to do it in a way that makes infanticide acceptable!

Sparta is another case in which infanticide was acceptable. Here, infant males that were malformed or under-sized were killed, rather than females (I'm sure there was female infanticide too). What makes Sparta so interesting is its aberration from the prominence of female infanticide. They killed infant males.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 1:25 pm Post subject:

Thank you for the references about infanticide, it was really informative.
I agree with you that since so much is known about the subject (although it was not known by me personally) Harris didn't necessarily need to explain.
Something tells me though that he wanted this book to be sold as popular science (nothing wrong with that) and that his editor must have told him to keep things under a certain number of pages. On the one hand the author makes things clear and accessible to the general public, and on the other hand some things are just stated, rather than explained.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 1:51 pm Post subject:

Back to infanticide:

The article you quoted mentioned that infanticide in the US in the 1960's and 1980's was higher than in other western countries.

The only times when infanticide is mentioned in the news in France is in those strange stories about babies being killed and then put in the freezer, and one day the husband opens the freezer and finds two or three babies. In the worst stories the husband then denounces the wife to the authorities, saying he lived with the wife all the time and had never realized about the pregnancies!
I just have a very vague knowledge of those stories, and they don't amount to a lot of cases.
I wonder whether this is something recent. After all... I was going to say that we've had deep freezers for a long time. I think deep freezers have only become part of every home only since the 1990's in France. Before that, I'd say they were optional, like dishwashers.

Anyway if this happened in France, I'm sure this has been used in other countries as well.

In history, the stories I've read about infancitide in France were about people leaving their children in the middle of the forest, say in the seventeenth century.
This of course brings me to (so-called) children's stories, and for French children they are (or were!) mostly tales in the version written by Charles Perrault in the seventeenth century, and here "Le Petit Poucet"-- Tom Thumb.

I have a friend who is a psychologist, and I sometimes discuss topics like this with him. I asked him why people told children such horrible stories-- this is the only thing I had remembered about the story, my introduction to infanticide, with the explanation of extreme poverty, and the conclusion I had drawn was that the children didn't have a chance. Even if you were very clever and had taken precautions as with the bread crumbs, all that happened is that the parents took you back into the forest because they were still desperately poor, so you went through the ordeal a second time.

Now my friend told me this wasn't what people usually saw in it, that in fact after that second time in the forest some magic took place and the children were saved. I wonder whether the version I heard was different from his.
This is something that happens to me now and then. I think this is the most cruel story and really shows you it's hopeless and somebody else reads the story and tells me how wonderful it is and doesn't it show that people are resilient!
We're both right, we just didn't pay attention to the same things.
My friend says that in Perrault's tale Thumb Tom is a younger child and that the story is very important for the younger children in a family, it shows them that the youngest sibling can be important and save the day through his cleverness-- a fact that had escaped my attention.

President Camacho · Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 1:55 pm Post subject:

Yup, I was working air traffic as an enlisted member of the U.S. Air Force. I was stationed at Yokota AB, outside of Tokyo in a town called Fussa. (F's are pronounced as an H - Who-suh)

It was pretty wild. The people are so different in the strangest way. You know how your mind tries to make order out of everything by accepting generalizations (While in Rome...)? In Japan an American can't do that.

If I visited another country, I could throw my hands up in the air and accept everything another culture does because, after all, it is another culture. Japan is different in that it tries hard to mirror or is influenced so much by American culture that it is difficult for an American to keep sane there.

It's hard for me to explain. The sensation would be similar to one produced whereby a person putting money into a gumball machine, full of red gumballs, gets a blue one. Your brain is just like... "huh? That isn't supposed to happen."

If you had never seen the gumballs, you wouldn't care. A gumball is a gumball. But because they often mimic American ways of doing things, the differences in our cultures that manifest themselves make for a jarring and stupefying experience.

You get in the same mode as being in America and then a slight change occurs, nothing too dramatic, just a slight change that makes you question your sanity.

Like someone reading out of a book, you're somewhat familiar with, and getting a few words wrong. Did they get those words wrong? I think they did. I wish I had my book here to check. Did they? I don't really know anymore. Maybe I'm going crazy.

The stereotypical cultural differences are easy to accept and it is the only way that an American can keep sane there. I had to constantly remind myself that Japan was a totally different country and culture by eating strange food, going to festivals, and immersing myself in ancient Japanese culture.

The weirdest things I ate? Horse and Whale

I know... I'm a terrible person for eating whale.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 2:25 pm Post subject:

I understand part of what you're saying about Japan, but without more examples it's a bit difficult to get your meaning.

President Camacho · Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 3:07 pm Post subject:

Culture is a crazy thing. Humans communicate on so many different levels and have been doing it for so many years. Small towns, for instance, create their own idioms from a common language that has been around for hundreds of years, and in doing so delineate themselves from the rest of their country. They are creating a new subset of the original culture through language. This is just one small example. How can anyone keep up with culture who isn't constantly privy to all the recent nuances that the culture has adapted? It's almost impossible.

Ophelia · Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 8:40 am Post subject:

Population control, continued.

Here is a link to a document entitled "Population Campaigns".

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/worldbalance/campaigns.html

There are a few interesting details, ands also the campaign posters are interesting.

For each of the countries mentioned, you see undeniable successes in family planning, and yet results that are still worrying.

India 's total fertility rate has declined by more than 40 % since the 1960's, and yet its population has more than doubled at the same time, and is projected to be going to overtake China's.

China's one-child policy that we have heard so much about results in a fertility rate of about two children per women.
Apparently the rule is only strictly enforced in the cities, and yet we always hear those stories of medical staff in the countryside going from one village to the next and putting pressure on pregnant women to have abortions...
So, aim at a one-child policy and hope that on average people will have two. This sounds strange. The stories of the millions of one-chil families are not invented, so it must mean that millions of other families in the countryside have three children.

Kenya is an African country with governments that are said to do better than average.
The results of the campaigns are good: the number of children per woman has dropped from 8 in the 1960's to 4 in the 1980's (they don't give more recent figures). You can't expect more progress than this within 20 years.
Jared Diamond notes in chapter 10 of Collapse (published in 2005) , page 311 that the rate of population growth in Kenya is 4.1 %, resulting in the population doubling every 17 years.
The CIA World factbook shows that the number of children per woman grew again since 2000, and was 4.8 in 2007.

President Camacho · Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 6:22 pm Post subject:

That's amazing Ophelia. It's primitive, tribal, population control measures implemented on huge 'civilized' societies. Forced abortions and forced sterilization... incredible!

"The country's official population policy calls for matching population size with available resources..."

Kenya's Malthusian answer to population control highlights the danger of food aid to poor countries. Farm subsidies that create excess commodities in developed nations get dumped on these poor countries and raises their amount of available resources. How can they succeed if we keep dumping food on them and distorting their resource availability?

President Camacho · Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 6:48 pm Post subject:

Chapter 3 : The Origin of Agriculture

I had to fight to keep awake during this one Smile

Here, Harris offers a cost/benefit approach to farming to prove how multiple civilizations could discover and advance agricultural methods simultaneously and separately.

This was possible due to the changing climate and landscape of the earth when it warmed, some 13,000 years ago, coupled with improved hunting techniques perfected around 30,000 years ago, which enabled man to hunt the largest animals. The earth warmed, grazing lands were slowly taken over by trees, man killed nearly all the large animals (virtually succeeded in Mesoamerica), and agriculture proved a necessity for survival. This led to some animals being domesticated (besides the dog which had already been domesticated), such as the ancestors of today's cows and goats.

He introduces Paul C. Martin's theory that man was ultimately responsible for the extinction of many Pleistocene Megafauna. I can see why when he shows how the human population could have grown large enough to easily wipe out these animals through hunting.

"Martin's scenario remains useful as an illustration of the vulnerability of large, slow-breeding species to hunter-collectors who decide to increase their kill rates as a result of reproductive pressures and threats to their standard of living."

As animal numbers declined, it became harder and harder to find prey. Early hunters would have spent more time and energy in the form of calories. Agriculture it seems, would have provided better labor efficiency in the form of more calories per caloric exertion.

This is where Harris' cost benefit comes into play. He advocates this same scenario playing out almost everywhere, I imagine, but gives two very clear areas in which it most likely did.

I have to say that he makes a good argument on his own behalf. I'm inclined to believe that agriculture could have definitely occurred simultaneously on two sides of the globe without either side having knowledge of the other. The pyramids... I'm still not sure about.

The domestication of animals and inability of Mesoamericans to have their own was pretty interesting. That it hindered their technological development is a tiny bit of a reach as far as I'm concerned. I see how it could affect them but I don't see why they wouldn't want to create more efficient machines to make up for their deficiencies.

If they had proved to be more technologically endowed than the European cultures, I feel that Harris would have gone the other way and said the opposite. But - that didn't happen and I imagine that the answer Harris gives is as close to the truth as we may have come (for now).


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