Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris.

Ophelia · Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 3:19 pm Post subject:

Hmm, chapter 3: agriculture.

I think the birth of agriculture is one topic on which David Landes in Wealth and Poverty of Nations was so clear and convincing that I tend to overlook what other authors may write.

I don't necessarily read non fiction in the order the chapters are presented, but so far Harris is at his best in Chapter 12 about sacred cows-- this is really excellent.

Chapter 4 (and 5): War.

Of course. Any effort that were not made in controlling births can and sometimes do end up in conflict as population regulation.
May I suggest that this way of solving problems strikes me as typical of a male-dominated society?
I note that in all those pages, in societies with no contraception, voluntary sexual abstinence is never mentioned, either because it was not used, or because nothing is known about this perhaps.
As an idea for culture to override nature it would seem less drastic than the killing of baby girls, followed, in one example he gives, by wars later because the males are fighting over... the remaining women.
But then in a society where it's worth fighting and dying over women you would hardly rule your life by abstinence.

The thing is, once you've started thinking on those lines, how about... the Catholic Church? Creating abbeys and monasteries where people would flock in great numbers and (in theory) not meet members of the opposite sex, that would control population. But again I've not heard about land problems at the time when the monasteries were very popular, in the Middle Ages.
In artistocratic families, the land went to the eldest son, the second son became a soldier, and one or two children would go to a monastery, as they were not allowed to work. I don't know about poor people.

Harris is convincing here, but when he included the two world wars in this reasoning I needed to think.
The reasoning is that when a society which depends heavily on agriculture suffers from overpopulation and the land gets divided until it is no longer possible to make a living from the very small farms, there is conflict.
I don't know if this is the case every time though.
France was very agricultural before World War II.
I've read many explanations for the war-- even with those it's still absurd, so I wonder if this pattern would have applied to france or other countries in 1914. Had the farms become too small? If they had I've never heard.

Since you're also reading Collapse it's worth reading chapter 10 in parallel with Harris's chapter 4: Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide.

This is the third time I've read the Rwandan chapter in two years, and each time it has given me a lot to think about.
It is very rare to read about an example from recent history, where a hypothesis can be checked and you don't rely as much on conjecture.
The fact that Diamond could rely on work by the two Belgian reseachers that had begun in 1993, so before the conflict, is also exceptional I think.
When you read his presentation, you see that they cumulated all the criteria for a deadly conflict:
- the consequences of bad governing by colonial rulers.
- very bad government after independence, so no family planning.
Thirty years later, what the people in government had not solved by birth control they solved through violent means, by importing and distributing machetes among their starving people.

We are now more than 10 years after the conflict.
One can imagine that the basic conditions have not changed: small country, bad government, no planning. In two or three decades the problem may be as bad as it was in 1994.
History sometimes has a way of repeating itself.

President Camacho · Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 11:18 am Post subject:

What forms of population control would be most popular in a female dominated society as opposed to a male dominated society? Are you suggesting that women would limit sexual encounters to limit population? Precedents for this?

Harris seems to teach that war and female infanticide in a patrilineal tribal society are somehow interdependent. Which came first - the chicken or the egg - he didn't seem very clear about that.

I think knowing about turmoil within a time when monasticism became popular - Benedict's time - is necessary for understanding why this type of lifestyle was chosen. Isolation and total abstinence is not the answer to creating adequate population control. It is a short-term response to an abhorrent cultural situation - a situation that is temporary and will change. The spiritual isolation of monasticism is seen in all parts of the world as a reactionary measure of people trying to find something better than Hegel's description of humanity.

It isn't a long-term, sustainable solution....obviously.

I can't read books out of order Sad

Ophelia · Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 1:06 pm Post subject:

President Camacho · Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 1:30 pm Post subject:

I can't remember where...maybe national geographic, discovery channel, or random person - I heard of a tribe that allowed men and women to gratify each other sexually in a tent with the only stipulation being that their clothes had to remain on. In other words - everything was ok besides penetration that would lead to pregnancy. I don't think this is a bad solution. Also, the women were the ones that chose who they wanted to be with. There were strict penalties for those who removed the female's clothing.

Primitive parallel to the condom? Yes. Effective population control? I would think so. Fun? Hell yeah! Twisted Evil

Ophelia · Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 2:20 pm Post subject:

What you wrote reminded me about customs among King Shaka's Zulu (male and female) warriors:
About King Shaka (1787-1828) and the customs he instituted for his warriors I found only one sentence:

Ophelia · Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 7:02 am Post subject:

As I wrote earlier I was intrigued about how well the Chinese one-child policy really worked.
The document I quoted before mentioned that the total fertility rate per woman was 2.1, which seemed incompatible with a successful one-child policy.
The CIA World Fact Book says the fertility rate is 1.77, which sounded more likely. I also wondered if the figures given by the Chinese government are relaible.
I asked somebody who is a PHD student from Taiwan, now studying in Hong Kong. Here is his answer: (the bold characters are mine).

President Camacho · Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:22 am Post subject:

Chapter 7 is a very important introduction into how caste and class systems might have began. Harris concentrates on Douglas Oliver's work concerning the Siuai on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. Apparently, the "big men" on the island, the ones with the most redistributive power, are called Mumis. Mumis are "great providers". They get people to work for them (especially relatives) generating vast amounts of food-stuffs for the great feasts they hold. Mumis even challenge one another by measuring who provides the greatest feast. The Mumi unable to match his challenger's feast will lose his Mumi-hood. The point of all this is of course that the Mumi is celebrated and holds the beginning of both coercive power to work and control over resources that are produced by people other than himself. This is the beginning of the class system. From competitive equality to a perverse monster.

It's easy to imagine how the Mumi can go from being merely a great provider with little coercive power to a king that holds ultimate power. It gives a person a good idea how allowing someone to control resources or hold redistributive power helps that individual rise above the common proletariat. Controlling resources for an entire population gives great power over that population.

This whole chapter is a good argument against large government. Not because it is an argument against large government but because it shows the how rather than the why. How people achieve power and how income is redistributed to the (in my opinion) undeserving.

Many of the people who work to make sure the Mumi has the largest feast, never eat the food that is presented at the feast. These people eat the scraps to ensure the Mumi is able to give away the largest amount of food possible. It is all for the glory of the Mumi. So, they work and then give away their "earnings" to whoever the Mumi decides to hold the feast for.

I read Chapter 8 and to be honest it was lost on me. I don't see the point of it and why Harris stuck it in this book hasn't hit me yet. The only thing it offered was that hyper-agro or non sustainable farming practices may bring about the decline of a civilization.

More to come later after Chapter 9 is read. King

Ophelia · Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008 2:19 pm Post subject:

Chapter 7 : The origin of pristine states.

I agree that this is an important chapter, and I' ll add that it raises more questions than it answers.
To take things in reverse order, and as far as European history is concerned, I am used to thinking in terms of the beginning being the feudal system— preceded by gaps of unknown eras with the Roman Empire somewhere in the middle briefly concerning what would become France.
It’s a good thing the author makes us think of what happened before the feudal system and after “tribal equalitarianism.” Of course I would be curious to know if and how this tribal equalitarianism concerned Europe and how the gradual change to feudalism came about. Something tells him that the book won’t answer this question ...

Here is a quotation from an article that makes the link (although not in detail) between the Roman Empire and serfdom:

President Camacho · Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 7:20 pm Post subject:

That was a great contribution to the discussion Ophelia. I enjoyed reading it very much. It clearly shows the departure from small village type cooperation to large societal co-dependency and subjugation. Once the monster begins to grow it seems unlikely that it will be stopped. It would be smart then to realize how the monster begins and find ways to eliminate it in order to undermine the subjugation of men and make them truly equal (in the sense of fair competition). Finding ways of allowing people to pay for exactly for what they want is a way to ensure equality and freedom. Once a person has control over the output of another human being the monster takes breath. I can't remember who said it, but - the power to help is also the power to do harm.

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 12:07 am Post subject:

Do you plan to read Our Inner Ape?
The official price at amazon is very high, but there are very cheap copies to be had through private sellers at amazon or elsewhere on the net, and I highly recommend this book.
I started discussing part 2, about power, yesterday, and I referred to the mumi Marvin Harris writes about in his seventh chapter. This led to a very interersting post by Robert, who knows about Papua New Guinea.


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