BookTalk.org

Robert, I'm glad you're reading the book. I've read about half of it as well. The only thing is that we've decided to have a go at the videos first, so the others won't have as much detail to draw on as you will. Do you think you'd be able to watch them, so we'll be on the same "page" for this part of the discussion?

DWill wrote: For me, the word "cargo" gets in because Yali used it in his question. That's what he is most interested in knowing from Diamond. I think cargo can be a stand-in for the technology needed to make all that stuff. But you're right that the question of values doesn't come up in the programs. The cultures who have all the stuff are also the cultures that have dominated others. That is supposed to be a statement of fact, but it isn't also a statement that those cultures are superior.

Diamond hasn't done a time and motion study on hunter-gatherers, to see if they have time to invent, but he wouldn't feel he needs to. The population that that life-style supports will always be quite small, so you won't have either a surplus of food or people needed to provide for specialists in technology or much else. So he apparently doesn't see time itself as an important factor. If the shift from hunter-gatherer to farming is going to be made, Diamond says there does need to be sufficient resources (your number 2). As for the motivation, this is where others have said that innate differences in groups have played a role, with some groups having become, somehow, more clever than others, or more motivated. Diamond doesn't believe this, though. He thinks that the pursuit of technology arises naturally for all humans, given the optimum conditions.

Cargo, or 'kago' has made its way into local languages in the Pacific island countries, including but not limited to PNG. It is exactly what Kali says, 'why is it that you white people have so much kago and we new guineans have so little' .. I guess kago could be technology but in their language it just means 'stuff' . There is a strange and interesting history of 'kago' and 'kago cults' in the Pacific particularly in connection with John Frum .. I inserted a link below.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/john.html

I believe the adoption of technology, for example, more efficient tools or weapons for hunting is mostly cultural choice and cost. The scene in the video with the men hunting with traditional bows and arrows makes nice footage but it doesn't mean they don't know about guns. There are lots of guns in PNG and have been for some time although unfortunately they are more often used for crime than hunting. PNG was on the front battle lines of the second world war, guns of all sorts were everywhere. But guns and ammunition are expensive (relatively speaking) and cannot be made locally. Also, if hunting became much more efficient the abundance of game would plummet very quickly and that scarcity would in turn make hunting more inefficient. So it is a balance of satisfying food needs while maintaining the game at sustainable levels. This might also be a reason that traditional weapons are used.

Efficiency of farming (really gardening in PNG and many other Pacific island countries) is not just a matter of tools and adoption of technology, its a matter of customary land ownership and a communal approach to food production. Custom and customary land have been part of PNG culture forever and it goes on because people want it too. Diamond brushes over this point in the video, I don't know if he mentions it in the book. Its a matter of cultural choice ... PNG land ownership is mostly communal (outside urban areas) and euro-based societies land is mostly held privately or by the government ... this is cultural choice that still goes on today ..

Papua New Guineans understand private ownership perfectly well, they just choose otherwise for their own reasons. But the choice has a huge impact on efficiency and productivity because the world's financial systems are set up to deal with private land not communal land so the great majority of local 'farmers' are grossly under-capitalized, in many cases, they can't even get small working capital loans to plant seasonal crops because they cannot provide the bank with security. Naturally, the exception are cash crop farms and plantations owned and operated mostly by foreign companies who manage to lease land from villages or perhaps purchase land if the national government has its way and have more than enough security and other means to raise capital.

The question I would ask is whether these cultural factors can explain what Diamond says is a fact: that although agriculture did develop independently in New Guinea, we see that it did not lead to the advances that agriculture produced in the Fertile Crescent. The reason, according to him, is that the plants available for domestication were few and lacked the nutrition of grains, and that no large animals lived on the island (or at least none that were candidates for domestication). The traditions regarding land ownership seem secondary to this baseline fact in both importance and chronology. No doubt these cultural choices now affect the speed and success of modernization, but I don't see Diamond's argument as needing to take into account the barriers to the catch-up that some societies, which can be seen as "losers" in the race to guns, germs, and steel, need to play.

It's interesting that in Diamond's next book,Collapse, cultural factors become significant in either facilitating adjustment to the environment or retarding it. For example, the European colonizers of Greenland refused to eat fish or to adopt any of the ways of the native peoples, in order to survive. They stuck to a wholly unsuitable European model of farming based on cattle, sheep, and goats. And they either died or abandoned the colony.

DWill wrote: It's interesting that in Diamond's next book,Collapse, cultural factors become significant in either facilitating adjustment to the environment or retarding it. For example, the European colonizers of Greenland refused to eat fish or to adopt any of the ways of the native peoples, in order to survive. They stuck to a wholly unsuitable European model of farming based on cattle, sheep, and goats. And they either died or abandoned the colony.

Maybe he took the criticism of G,G & S seriously and reconsidered the roll of cultural factors.

DWill wrote: Hi saffron. For me, the word "cargo" gets in because Yali used it in his question. That's what he is most interested in knowing from Diamond. I think cargo can be a stand-in for the technology needed to make all that stuff. But you're right that the question of values doesn't come up in the programs. The cultures who have all the stuff are also the cultures that have dominated others. That is supposed to be a statement of fact, but it isn't also a statement that those cultures are superior.

It also occurred to me that there is no discussion of (maybe it happens in the book) the fact that the more people in a society the more problems there are to solve and the more things will be needed to solved them. Also, as soon as a group stays in one place (as anyone who has lived in the same house for more than 5 years will attest) they begin to accumulate stuff. If you are mobile and have to carry everything you own, you are not going to be interested in acquiring much.

DWill wrote: Diamond hasn't done a time and motion study on hunter-gatherers, to see if they have time to invent, but he wouldn't feel he needs to. The population that that life-style supports will always be quite small, so you won't have either a surplus of food or people needed to provide for specialists in technology or much else. So he apparently doesn't see time itself as an important factor. If the shift from hunter-gatherer to farming is going to be made, Diamond says there does need to be sufficient resources (your number 2). As for the motivation, this is where others have said that innate differences in groups have played a role, with some groups having become, somehow, more clever than others, or more motivated. Diamond doesn't believe this, though. He thinks that the pursuit of technology arises naturally for all humans, given the optimum conditions.

Anthropologists have done studies to estimate how much time H/G spend on food. It is somewhat up for debate, but generally it is believed that they spend less time than most people in the modern world working and definitely less time than agrarian societies. The Yanomamo have been studied and they spend about 20% less time "working" than we westerners. Additionally, in both the Yanomano and the Ju/wasi Bushmen of the Kalahari the women spend the greater percentage of all time spent at any work; leaving the men with the free time to invent or specialize. Why haven't these men been busy inventing? I would say, there is no need to invent anything - no environmental pressure, no problem to solve.

Saffron wrote: Anthropologists have done studies to estimate how much time H/G spend on food. It is somewhat up for debate, but generally it is believed that they spend less time than most people in the modern world working and definitely less time than agrarian societies. The Yanomamo have been studied and they spend about 20% less time "working" than we westerners. Additionally, in both the Yanomano and the Ju/wasi Bushmen of the Kalahari the women spend the greater percentage of all time spent at any work; leaving the men with the free time to invent or specialize. Why haven't these men been busy inventing? I would say, there is no need to invent anything - no environmental pressure, no problem to solve.

In Diamond's terms, the transition to farming from H/G life made the difference, and it wasn't exactly a matter of inventing implements in order for this to happen, but of that gradual change from collecting from the wild to planting the seeds intentionally that would sprout up around the garbage heap. And so this led to a settled life and the ability to feed a larger population. Women could also have more children than they could when they had to be always on the move. The more people, the more invention needed to produce on a larger scale and the more organization available to keep the system working. This technology could still look pretty simple, like a terraced system of rice paddies, but it actually took a lot of effort and maintenance.

Why didn't this happen with the Ju/Wasi and other H/G groups? Diamond would say that it was purely because of the lack of sufficient materials from the environment, not because of any inherent properties of that people, or any cultural preferences favoring conservatism. If they coulda, they woulda, I think is his take. I largely agree with this, about 75% sure that I do.

Before I respond to the last post, made by DWILL, I want to ask a question. What does everyone think of the National Geographic doc? I am finished with 2 of the 3. I liked the first (mostly) and not so much the second. I really like reading Diamonds books and agree with most of what he says, but find him hard to watch.

I agree that One was the best, Two spent a little too much time on the dramatization, and Three seemed to go a little astray in Africa. Three also repeated the title phrase "guns, germs, and steel" with a somewhat maddening frequency. But I think the book does condense well, since Diamond is not the most efficient or economical of writers. He is methodical, though.

DWill wrote:I agree that One was the best, Two spent a little too much time on the dramatization, and Three seemed to go a little astray in Africa. Three also repeated the title phrase "guns, germs, and steel" with a somewhat maddening frequency. But I think the book does condense well, since Diamond is not the most efficient or economical of writers. He is methodical, though.

Remember the National Geo version of Colapsed? Wasn't there some phrase repeated to the point of madness in that one too? I need to think a bit more before I fully respond to your other post, but here is just a side note of no real importance to the main discussion:

DW: Women could also have more children than they could when they had to be always on the move.

Saffron's response: Moving had nothing to do with why woman did not have more children. Increases in the regularity of calories and a reduction in amount of time and or lenght of time breastfeeding account for increase in fertility (number of children born to a woman).

DWill wrote:The question I would ask is whether these cultural factors can explain what Diamond says is a fact: that although agriculture did develop independently in New Guinea, we see that it did not lead to the advances that agriculture produced in the Fertile Crescent. The reason, according to him, is that the plants available for domestication were few and lacked the nutrition of grains, and that no large animals lived on the island (or at least none that were candidates for domestication). The traditions regarding land ownership seem secondary to this baseline fact in both importance and chronology. No doubt these cultural choices now affect the speed and success of modernization, but I don't see Diamond's argument as needing to take into account the barriers to the catch-up that some societies, which can be seen as "losers" in the race to guns, germs, and steel, need to play.
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I would have a slightly different interpretation. Diamond argues that big connected geographical areas – notably the whole northern temperate world of Eurasia, and in modern times extending across to North America – operate at a scale that generates competitive pressures for adaptation and evolution that enable them to overwhelm small isolated places when they come into contact. In the book, he uses the Maori invasion of the Chatham Islands near New Zealand as a case study for this process. The big and strong devour the small and weak.

So, with customary land tenure in PNG, the lack of advance has real geographic factors that go beyond the available fauna and flora. PNG has rugged terrain that generally restricts the size of cultural units to the clan. By contrast, the large flat plains of Eurasia enabled development of big empires as unitary nation-states. The economies of scale inherent in imperial organization produce a surplus value that enables research and development into more efficient and effective production systems. The shape of the land directly constrains the land ownership pattern, which in turn directly constrains economic development.

Now, as PNG operates as a modern nation-state, the tradition of communal land tenure means customary land cannot be bought and sold. My view is that this is a sensible security policy, given the tendency for illiterate people to be swindled over land. However, as Hernando De Soto of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru argues in his book The Mystery of Capital, this policy means that PNG locks itself out of investment because bank lending requires land as collateral.

It's interesting that in Diamond's next book,Collapse, cultural factors become significant in either facilitating adjustment to the environment or retarding it. For example, the European colonizers of Greenland refused to eat fish or to adopt any of the ways of the native peoples, in order to survive. They stuck to a wholly unsuitable European model of farming based on cattle, sheep, and goats. And they either died or abandoned the colony.

I have Collapse, but have not read it. The question here, as shown in the PNG example, is how long term adaptation to specific environmental conditions constrains cultural evolution. The Greenland example is similar to many settler societies, where they assume that methods that worked in their source country are superior. This links to the racist cultural pattern of assuming that because they could invade and destroy, everything about local traditions is worthless. One good example in Australia at the moment is debate over fire ecology. An excellent recent book by Bill Gammage proves that Aborigines had much more extensive fire ecology than is generally understood, such that Australia was mostly grassy parkland in the non-arid regions. Wiping out the Aborigines meant these open grasslands reverted to forest very quickly.

A similar meme in the USA is the Old World assumption that humans are above nature, not part of it. This religious belief clashes with the native view that the earth is our mother. The assumption of transcendental alienation from nature could send the USA down the same trajectory as the failed European settlers of Greenland. Cultures only adapt slowly to their natural context, sometimes too slowly.