Robert Tulip wrote: 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.
Yet this bigness was made possible in the beginning, Diamond says, by the different direction the Maori took in providing for themselves. They developed intensive agriculture, whereas the Moriori reverted to hunting and gathering. The food focus is a reductive way to look at conditions that seem complex, but the question is whether it is reductive in the way of good scientific theories or reductive in the negative sense of the word: seeking a single-factor answer when to do so results in oversimplification. We can discuss that, of course. I think it's important also to stress that we should not say that the Moriori or other less complex societies
failed to become bigger and more diverse. Diamond points out that the Moriori's choices, dictated by the environment, were adaptive, smart ones. They just happened to put the Moriori at a disadvantage when the Maoris experienced growing pains and began to look for other territories.
I probably need to say something again about environmental determinism. since what I just said seems to contradict my claim that Diamond isn't an environmental determinist. It will depend on whether we're talking about the racial or the ecological variants of that idea. Diamond strongly denies that the environment shaped people in ways that made some have less innate ability to move to the stage of advanced civilization. The races, to the degree that races truly exist anyway, are equal in their biological capacities to make use of the environments in which they find themselves. The environmental hands that people are dealt, however, make a tremendous difference in determining the direction and extent of growth to larger economies.
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.
Diamond's interest in New Guinea is specifically in the Highlands (which I assume applies to both PNG and Papua), where agriculture developed independently. I wouldn't know whether this region has a more open, plateau-like quality than some other areas, which might lend itself to the existence of larger groups. But even if the terrain were very rugged, this would also be a factor in the types of flora and fauna available for domestication. In the case of technologies for food production that spread to areas that didn't originate them, the terrain does come into play as a barrier in itself, although that isn't a factor to look for early agriculture in the New Guinea Highlands, since these people developed farming on their own.
Right, the land-tenure system is adaptive, but it seems to be an adaptation to downstream effects, effects such as outside interference that came into play long after the establishment of basic farming. If farming had not been limited in extent by the environment, if it had been able to become more intensive and scaled-up, the custom involving how the land would be used would have developed differently, too.
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.
It's noteworthy that, if the Greenland colonizers had adapted to the environment, they would have gone backwards, in the loaded, inherently biased language that we always use to describe cultural/economic change. They would have needed to hunt and fish. But the culture of the more 'advanced' did indeed constrain them, that is if we are thinking that survival of that outpost is the only end worth working towards. They refused to adapt, choosing to wither away rather than 'give in' to what they considered inferior. But that is a choice that humans can also make. The example is a good one, because it shows us that cultural constraint occurs in every culture, regarding something that needs a response, even in our complex first-world culture.
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.
Well, of course we see no difference in the attitude toward nature in the East. There, it's probably political rather than religious ideology that fuels the conquest of nature. I would hesitate to go too far in generalizing about how native peoples view nature, since this is a category of immense diversity, and since relatively basic societies did render large changes in the land and ecology. There is a split in view between those contemporaries who see particular beliefs as primary drivers of economies, and those who think these take a backseat to the influence of geography and the environment. I'd lean toward the latter view while conceding that cultural chauvinism can sometimes keep people from doing what seems to be the smart thing, as with the Greenlanders.
