More "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Weirdness...

A correspondent sends me to another academic's take on Jared Diamond. Here's David H. Holberg, Chair, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University:

The Einaudi Center - Guns, Germs, and Steel: All of you who were involved in an initial way in thinking about the Diamond book might be interested to know that Yali, whose question Diamond claims prompted his book, is the subject of a relatively long study in 1964 by the anthropologist Peter Lawrence. (Diamond met Yali in 1972). I thank Jane Fajans (who works in New Guinea) for alerting me to what is an extraordinary account giving much greater depth to Yali and the question he asked. A good portion of Lawrence's book entitled Road Belong Cargo is devoted to Yali's role in millenarian movements and other political activities. Lawrence's account (as does other expert testimony) contradicts several of Diamond's representations about Yali. From what I have read so far, I would conclude that Diamond's representations are fundamentally misrepresentations which, unconsciously perhaps, disguise a racist and ethnocentric position...

It's beginning to look as if people like Ozma's calling Guns, Germs, and Steel "quasi-racist" and Tak's saying that it "perpetuates racism" may simply be aping their elders. It appears to be a thing their sub-group does in order to close the circle of discourse against outsiders--just as economists close the discourse to outsiders by saying "they don't have a mathematical model" and historians close to discourse to outsiders by saying "they don't have any new primary-source evidence." If so, Ozma's and Tak's claims that Diamond is "quasi-racist," or "perpetuates racism" should not be understood as empirical claims about the world but merely as markers of their own commitment to a group that seeks to close the discourse to outsiders.

Holberg continues:

...Moreover, [Diamond's] patronizing objectification of Yali...

Here's Diamond's description of his meeting with Yali, in full:

... a remarkable local politician named Yali.... We walked together for an hour, talking during the whole time. Yali radiated charisma and energy. His eyes flashed in a mesmerizing way. He talked confidently about himself, but he also asked lots of probing questions and listened intently. Our conversation began with a subject then on every New Guinean's mind--the rpaid pace of political developments. Papua New Guinea, a Yali's nation is now called, was at that time still administered by Australia as a mandate of the United Nations, but independence was in the air. Yali explained to me his role in getting local people to prepare for self government.

After a while, Yali turned the conversation and began to quiz me. He had never been outside New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiousity was insatiable. First, he wanted to know about my work on New Guinea birds (including how much I got paid for it). I explained to him how different groups of birds had colonized New Guinea over the course of millions of years. He then asked how the ancestors of his own people had reached New Guinea over the last tens of thousands of years, and how white Europeans had colonized New Guinea within the last 200 years.

The conversation remained friendly, even though the tension between the two societies that Yali and I represented was familiar to both of us. Two centuries ago, all New Guineans were still "living in the Stone Age." That is, they still used stone tools similar to those superseded in Europe by metal tools thousand of years ago, and they dwealt in villages not organized under any centralized political authority. Whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as "cargo."

May of the white colonists openly despised New Guineans as "primitive." Even the least able of New Guinea's white "masters," as they were still called in 1972, enjoyed a far higher standard of living than New Guineans, higher even than charismatic politicians like Yali. Yet Yali had quizzed lots of whites as he was quizzing me, and I had quizzed lots of New Guineans. He and I knew perfectly well that New Guineans were on the average at least as smart as Europeans. All these things must have been on Yali's mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

It was a simple question that went to the heart of life as Yali experienced it. Yes, there still is a huge difference between the lifestyle of the average New Guinean and that of the average European or American. Comparable differences separate the lifestyles of other peoples of the world as well...

Patronizing? Objectification? I do not think those words mean what Holberg thinks they mean.

Holberg continues:

...for rhetorical purposes exposes in a clear way the conceptual deficiencies of his key arguments in the book. I will almost certainly use passages of Lawrence's book as the basis of freshman writing assignments in reference to Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Lawrence's long biography of Yali indicates that Diamond is wrong on the facts. Diamond writes, "He had never been out of New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable." Yali had in fact been in close contact with Europeans since an early age and joined the New Guinea Police Force as a young man. He got swept up into World War II activities and after excellent service was promoted to sergeant and joined the Australian army. In 1943 he received an initial six months of training in Australia. Later in 1943, he returned to Australia: "There he was promoted to the rank of Sergeant-Major, higher than which no native could rise in the Australian army." In 1944, after a series of war time incidents in New Guinea (including a trip on a U.S. submarine), he returned to Australia for six months more training in Brisbane.

I will not try to repeat many of the fascinating details of Yali's subsequent career as both a leader of millenarian movements and regional politics other than to emphasize that the question Diamond uses as a device to frame his account was one New Guineans had struggled with since the early days of contact.

Immediately after the war, Yali was the leader of a very prominent cargo movement (movement to acquire European goods). Lawrence divides the movement into five separate phases. The fifth led to the jailing of Yali and others in 1950 for five years. In the fifth phase, Yali directed a movement to return to native ritual practice. To give you a sense of the cultural politics of the scene I will quote a brief passage from Lawrence about this fifth phase:

"Thus almost overnight the pagan revival became the Fifth Cargo Belief. Although he had described his doctrine in full to Yali and his close associates, Gurek ['theologian' of the movement] gave only the barest outline to the people at the assembly at Sor, telling them simply that it was now known that the New Guinea deities as a whole were their true cargo source [not Christianity]. Yali's new policy was fully justified: the natives must abandon Christianity and go back to their own religion so that the goods they wanted would come. Gurek gave them the following instructions: Traditional rituals for agriculture, important artefacts, pig husbandry, and hunting, and the old taboos associated with them, were to be reintroduced; the Kabu Ceremony was to be performed in full, especially the secret parts of it reserved for adult males; and the Letub table ritual was to be instituted. Small tables were to be set up in private houses and near deity sanctuaries. They were to be covered with cotton cloth and decorated with bottles of flowers. Offerings of the spirits of the dead, who were to be invoked to send cargo. The invocations and offerings would ensure that the deities handed over presents to the ancestors who, pleased by the ritual (especially the Kabu Ceremony), would deliver them to their descendants. At such times, the natives would be told by the spirits during dreams where the goods had been leftCin deity sanctuaries or other parts of the bush. The cargo would include rifles, ammunition, and other military equipment.

"Gurek made other claims on this occasion. Apart from cargo in its usual sense, the deities would send also European domesticated animals, especially horses and cows. Additional 'laws' were laid down: Yali was henceforth to be addressed as King; and the days of the week were to be renamed. Gurek said that as Yali had been born on a Thursday, it was to be renamed Sunday and observed as the official day of rest from now on.....

"Once Gurek had laid the foundation of the doctrine of the Fifth Cargo Belief and the cult associated with it, Yali made a few minor additions of his own by attempting to draw parallels between the new ritual and what he had seen of European life. Gurek said that Mass was a hoax, and that the Kabu Ceremony and the table ritual were the true 'road of Cargo'. Yali corroborated this by saying that while he had been in Australia he had never once seen Mass celebrated, but he had often observed Europeans dancing and setting out vases of flowers in their house, restaurants, and other buildings. The dancing was obviously the equivalent of the ola of the Kabu Ceremony, in which men and women participated together outside the cult house. Again, floral decorations were the European version of the table ritual and, like the Kabu Ceremony itself, were means of honouring the ancestors. Although these ideas added little to the new cult, they were important in that they confirmed Yali's previous conclusions that the European and native religious systems were roughly similar in structure and function."

Diamond missed a lot when he was in New Guinea just as he misses a lot in his panoptic view of human history....

This is fascinating. It makes out Yali the ex-Australian army NCO and Cargo Cult leader to be much more and much less sophisticated than the charismatic politician Diamond describes. More sophisticated: rather than never leaving New Guinea, he spent a year in Australia and voyaged on a submarine. More sophisticated: he leaves Diamond with the impression that he is genuinely searching for answers, rather than cross-checking and seeking confirmation for conclusions he already holds. Less sophisticated: Yali has failed to recognize the distinction between natural technology and supernatural gifts of the gods, and has led many of his followers astray as well.

But how does this the fact that Yali is different from the man whom Diamond thinks it is "expose in a clear way the conceptual deficiencies of [Diamond's] key arguments in" Guns, Germs, and Steel? It is a mystery:

Holberg gives a clue:

...Most fundamentally, [Diamond] did not hear Yali's question and his book is no answer. Rather it perpetuates the colonial relation which Yali through oppositional politics attempted to transform. Yali, in a very fundamental sense, was concerned about what in our terms would be called inequality, justice, fairness, and morality...

Now it becomes clear. Holberg wishes that Yali had asked Diamond one of:

• Why don't the westerners share their wealth with the New Guineans?
• Why don't the westerners do more to teach New Guineans how to prosper?
• How do westerners live with themselves, knowing how unjust is the world that they rule?

Instead of:

• How did whites learn secrets of wealth and prosperity that New Guineans did not?

At least one of Holberg's beefs, it seems, is not with Diamond but with Yali: Yali is not following the script that Holberg wants him to follow.

And Holberg concludes:

Diamond provides no solace. On the contrary, his deterministic (and simplistic) argument has the opposite effect. Diamond tells us things are the way they are because that is the way that they have to be. Yali was not asking about the origins of unequal relations; he was asking about their perpetuation. In a word, Diamond denies Yali an equal humanity because he makes no attempt to understand Yali in his own terms. This failure is compounded in a more encompassing way in the key arguments of the book because Diamond's argument does not allow humanity in general any sort of culturally-inflected agency in the context of history.

And here we have why, in Holberg's eyes, Diamond is a racist: Diamond (in Guns, Germs, and Steel) focuses not on how human agency is culturally-inflected, but on how it is geographically-inflected and environmentally-inflected. That's materialism. That's reductionism. That's determinism. That's not racism.

P.S.: Road Belong Cargo is a very good book.

---

UPDATE: And still more weirdness:

Henry Farrell criticizes another Savage Mind, Tak Watanabe, accusing Jared Diamond of "perpetuating racism":

Frog in a Well - The Japan History Group Blog: There are also frightening parallels in the history of Japanese fascism to the kind of environmental determinism used by Diamond.... Diamond... shares with Watsuji a basic methodology of relying on environmental factors as a way to typologize groups of people according to 'race.' The danger here lies... in the biologism of his methodological assumption.... [H]e perpetuates racism by associating a group of people with specific traits...

Ralph Luker jumps in to defend Tak:

History News Network: Henry, It appears to me that... you all are talking past each other.... Isn't it possible that, read in a Japanese context, [Jared] Diamond's argument plays into a Japanese tradition of racialism or racism that isn't otherwise inherent in Diamond's argument in non-Japanese contexts? As Japan specialists, Tak and Jonathan have some obligation to make that point and make it reasonably forcefully, if we fail to understand it. I don't see them as attempting to shut down debate, but as arguing that we -- you and I -- simply don't know enough about the Japanese context to appreciate that fact. I don't have any problem with acknowledging that I don't know nearly enough about Japan to argue with them.

No. It is not possible. The Jared Diamond essay under discussion ends:

The Japanese Roots: WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE COMBINED EVIDENCE OF ARCHEOLOGY, physical anthropology, and genetics supports the transparent interpretation... [that] the Ainu are descended from Japan's original inhabitants and the Japanese are descended from more recent arrivals [from Korea about 2400 years ago]. But that view leaves the problem of language unexplained. If the Japanese really are recent arrivals from Korea, you might expect the Japanese and Korean languages to be very similar....

[M]odern Korean may be a poor model for the ancient Yayoi language of Korean immigrants in 400 B.C.... Modern Korean is derived from the language of the kingdom of Silla... but Silla was not the kingdom that had close contact with Japan in the preceding centuries. Early Korean chronicles tell us that the different kingdoms had different languages... the few preserved words of one of those kingdoms, Koguryo, are much more similar to the corresponding Old Japanese words than are the corresponding modem Korean words.... The Korean language that reached Japan in 400 B.C., and that evolved into modem Japanese, I suspect, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we should not be surprised that modem Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.

History gives the Japanese and the Koreans ample grounds for mutual distrust and contempt, so any conclusion confirming their close relationship is likely to be unpopular among both peoples. Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia as in the Middle East. As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

Trust me, to say that modern non-Ainu Japanese have the bulk of their ancestors not among the Jomon potters but among the rice-growing Koreans who migrated to Japan 2500 years ago, and have Koreans as their closest cousins--that does not "play into a Japanese tradition of racialism or racism."

Comments

[Tad Brennan]

"Lawrence's long biography of Yali indicates that Diamond is wrong on the facts. Diamond writes, "He had never been out of New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable." "

Okay, I think I got the part where Diamond was wrong about his not having been out of New Guinea (he spent some time in Australia). Was there anything to indicate that Diamond was wrong about his education?

I mean, yes, he had some military training as an adult. But "educated past high school" usually means "attended college/university", not simply "had some training after the age of 18".

That cargo cult stuff is *deeply* weird. I'm used to distinguishing between folk-theories and their scientific successors (folk-psychology, folk-kinematics, folk-astronomy, etc.). But has there ever been a folk-X that was as far off the mark as this was from real economic theories of production? And I usually think of economics *itself* as barely one step up from a folk-science!

[talboito]

I think attempting to use a magical stone to turn lead into gold is probably as far off the mark as you can get.

There is also an undercurrent of evangelical thought that claims wealth is a result of "goodness", that being some amalgamation of Christian virtue. People tend to want to attribute to some other power what's better often explained by luck.

[shah8]

Mr. Delong, I'm not sure, but are you (or Hollberg?) taking into account that Yali was being manipulative and cynical? A call towards tradition in the face of mandated change is about the friggin' oldest trick in the book of grabbing power, and the excerpts you provide, or that Hollberg does, does not give enough context to how much, he, Yali believes in his own cargo beliefs.

The Chinese stopped the naval/trade expeditions because of a new leader's need to retrench power, and that leader was essentially doing the same thing as Yali (We need to focus on our traditional beliefs and duties!). What's more, this *easily* could have happened in Europe as well. Let's not kid ourselves here, Columbus's voyage was expensive, and *known* to be in error before he even left! He only found some islands with little gold and some nice people and went back to Europe with that. And Europe could easily have said...eh, silly ole' man found a dinghy island, and left it at that and kept on with the sailing 'round Africa idea. It could have been a Turk fleet that found the Aztec, and in 1500, the Turks were *much* better capitalized for certain ventures. Heh, would be fun to think of islamic Aztecs, wouldn't it?

Second, I'm pretty sure there is a lingustic and anthropological issue here. How do we know much much that Yali question was a *question* and how much it was a *challenge* or *rhetorical*? Then your responses may look not so great, depending on what that meant?

Thirdly, I'm damned sensitive to determinist attitudes with regards to success. There is waaaaay too much that is meta in something as needsful of definition as success, than could be understood readily by reductionist terms.

Fourthly, while Diamond's arguments are fairly interesting in Guns Germs and Steel, they really *are* dangerously simplified for the mass audience. It can *easily* function as a more legit version of The Bell Curve (like one of the outs it tried to use was by saying Asian people were smarter than whites, so what's racist about that?) Fact is, Europe didn't *have* to succeed, and at several points, it survived potentially world changing inflection points. Specifically, the Mongol invasions could have come out differently in several different ways that would have drastically reduced European success (and in fact, were *more* likely than what *did* happen). And those potential events would have had nothing to do with the arguments Diamond made.

Try making counterarguments using Diamonds positions using a different civilization. It gets wierd. It's not just the Arabs/Turks and the Chinese. It's also about how the Songhay, various Hind empires, etc, didn't make it as well, and the arguments don't stretch all that well for them, because you say, oh the Sahara was to the north! Which is true, but waaay too simplistic. Which is to say, it's way too easy to go apply the criteria to another culture, before or after 1500, and come up with political or economic or some other reason that the society didn't make it, *and* say that it was more decisive a reason than the location of where that society was.

In the end, Mr. Delong, I tend to go with Cortez happened, and end with that. Probably just luck.

In a world where the Euros really may have won the world on a roll of the dice, it's imperative that any determinist arguments are more...finely resolved than is presented in Diamond's argument. The anthropologists really do have a point that this is going to feed racist sentiments, even if Diamond is scrupulously anti-racist.

[Chris]

I think anthropology belongs with the humanities and not the social sciences. The disciplinary thinking is ridden with romanticism and determinism. To treat their subjects as Rousseau's noble savages is just as patronizing as crude colonial racism.
Also, Diamond is ALWAYS very careful to emphasize, in both GGS and Collapse, that human behavior has multiple causes and that he does not pretend to exhaust them all, just to bring to light those he knows best. He never pretends that his explanations are the alpha and omega of human societies.
These critics could learn a thing or two on scientific humility.

[Steve]

Holberg's comment that Diamond "makes no attempt to understand Yali in his own terms" is interesting.

To understand Yali on his own terms denies the very comparisons that Yali was asking Diamond about. You cannot understand a society "on its own terms" and also compare it quantitatively with another society.

And herein lies the real difference (in my opinion): Diamond is talking about technology, economics, productivity, etc while Holberg is talking about "humanity." A person is not necessarily impuning the dignity of a civilization by saying they are not technologically advanced.

In fact, I would argue Holberg's conclusions contradict a certain strain of multiculturalism. Diamonds argument of geographic development denotes that society's development is not due to superior racial: intelligence, creativity, or ambition. Rather, their advancements can be in part explained by geographic and environmental factors.

That seems to me to be the antithesis of racism.

[Steven Rogers]

The problem with the Turks encountering the Aztecs is that Spain and Portugal were in the way. As for Columbus being ignored, could have happend. But remember that the Portugese discovered Brazil independantly of Spanish efforts, and quite by accident into the bargain.

[Julian Elson]

Hmmm... Yali's religio-political views remind me of David Frum, as described by John Holbo's famous review of "Dead Right."

http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html

Basically, the message seems to be, "if we get the culture right by going back to radical cultural conservatism, the economy will take care of itself."

[trevelyan]

What a fantastic and compelling book. I find two things particularly strange about this onslaught of criticism: (1) Diamond lays out his argument graphically somewhere around page 90, so there isn't really much excuse for misunderstanding it. (2) He goes FAR, FAR out of his way to defuse any claims that any portion of his book is based on cultural factors.

Surely it would be obvious to these people that Diamonds says nothing about the perpetuation of unequal social relations in a unified world with significant transcontinental interactions. Why Europe versus China is an interesting question, but China did not have epidemics on its encounter with the West in any way comparable to what happened in the Americas, and that's a very powerful dog that simply isn't barking somewhere in the recesses of history.

[Patrick]

Shah8

I don't understand how you can claim that GGS could serve as a Bell Curve. The claims he made are the precise opposite.

And your claim about the Mongols and Europe really miss the point. They almost make me think you haven't read the book. Diamond isn't trying to answer why Western Europe came to dominate the world after 1000 (when the Mongols or the Turks came to power) but why Eurasian societies developed the most advanced societies up 1000.

[shah8]

Steven Rogers:

The Turk navy was the best or the second best navy in the Medit by a close margin in the time area we are talking about. If some Morroccan or Turk trader made it back with claims of wealthy countries across the seas, the Ottoman Empire was *much* more capable than Hapsburg Spain in being able to send a fleet, or even a small expedition like Columbus's. Spain and especially Portugal wasn't in the way.

[PurpleStater]

I'm going to be a Meta-Anthropologist. I'll do fieldwork in university anthro departments, where I'll interview the graduate students, junior profs, and department heads. I'll map their complex social hierarchy; observe their secret religious rituals, and document their pidgin (in which English loan words like "ethnocentric" and "racist" have apparently been stripped of their original meanings).

We need to explode the para-ethnocentric (perhaps even hemi-racist) theory that Anthropologists generally have smaller buildings and less funding than Chemists, Biologists, and Engineers because the latter groups have knowledge of guns, germs, and steel. In fact, these differences in power arise solely from cultural considerations. Anthropologist culture has never recognized the value of buildings or money. Preferring to sit out in the rain, Anthropologists derive all necessary sustenance from the carbon dioxide exhaled by their research subjects.

Hopefully my fieldwork will support my thesis. Although, if it doesn't, I suppose I can just keep interviewing people until it does.

[STS]

I guess Jared Diamond is supposed to just shut up because some hypothetical readers might get bad racist ideas by misreading his rather explicit denial of racial advantages?

Some of these critics are so deeply enmeshed in the toils of theory, you have to wonder if they're breathing some toxic fumes from the library basement they're living in.

For example, of what Earthly relevance is the exact politico-social-philosophical standing of Yali anyway?
Diamond uses their conversation (whether real or imaginary) to provide a sort of inciting incident to motivate the reader to follow him through hundreds of pages of argument. Yali isn't functioning as some kind of "material witness" to 13,000 years of human history -- he's a narrative hook!

This is a case where the reading public seems to have a clear intellectual edge over the academic cadres. May Diamond's books sell and sell and sell!

[john c. halasz]

I was going to remark, slightly OT, that it appears we have quite a number of cargo cult followers amongst us back in the U.S.A. nowadays, but talboito pre-empted me. Still, the notion that economics is a rational discipline, concerned only with the literal technology of production and thereby itself immune from commodity fetishism, by abstracting from the social/anthropolgical dimensions of exchange and the different sorts of needs that they serve, might thereby identify it as itself a sort of anti-cargo cult.

[Julian Elson]

Daimond advances a sliver of a theory of Europe vs. China along the lines of "Europe was divided and strong due to institution evolution (see Poland-Lithuania), China united and weak." He concedes, though, that this isn't his forté, and that the consensus among most people is that China's falling behind Europe, the U.S., and Japan was due to proximal factors.

I think his caution is warranted. In 1500, China was ahead of Europe (I think?), in 2000, Europe was ahead of China. Who knows who will be ahead in 2500?

The U.S., on the other hand, is eternally mighty and shall be a superpower until the universe is ripped apart by cosmological forces, except for our somewhat embarassing period of invasion, defeat, and occupation at the hands of British forces from 1620 to 1776.

[shah8]

I also want to modify the previous comment that it was predominantly *cultural* issues that stopped the Turks from taking the lead in the exploration.

Next, I have read the book, but two years ago. I didn't participate in the conversation in the previous threads for that reason. I just felt inspired now. Especially when this is sounding a lot more like an arguments between geeks who are more comfortable with numbers and humanities people who are more comfortable with people.

I have read Collaspe recently, so I get the kind arguments that Diamond makes.

Now, I *have* cought Diamond making some not very wise remarks in both of his books or so I remember. As I remember, he is generally someone who isn't suspicious enough of his sources and tends to remark on any problem by essentially laying it on the reader to find out whether something is true or not.

Patrick, considering what the Mongols did and didn't do, and the sheer expanse of the consequences, it's really stupid not to consider counterfactuals about what happened then, especially considering the rapid expansion and collaspe of the empire. Now, I don't really care quite this much about that argument, so I'll let you have it. The only thing I would grant is that The Americas never had much of a chance. However, I believe that a main, if not *the* main cause was a lack of a bronze age in the Americas, and that would be something I'd like to explore at some point to see if theory has any validity.

Next point: Let's not be stupid, people. There are a *lot* of fuckin' crypto racists out there. He doesn't have to be accuratly represented for it to serve as a source for alot of racist arguments. People have made proxy arguments all the time to suffocate alternative explanations of why they have all the loot. The biggest issue is that this question is *alot* bigger than the kind of pop sci book that Diamond wrote. It isn't really even as deep as Pomeranz's book, and that gots loads of primary data, and loads of critics of its own as well.

[Steven Rogers]

Shah8,

Turkey had a first class navy for operations in the Mediterranean, operations in the North Atlantic were a different kettle of fish entirely

Spain and Portugal not in the way? That really is quite an odd statement. The Iberian powers had a lock on the strategic choke points which the Turks would have had to pass to gain access to the North Atlantic.

When it comes to grabbing the New World, the Iberian states got the jump on everybody - not just the Turks, because of a *very* advantageous geographic position.

[shah8]

Steven, if the Turks had *wanted* control of the exits, do you think Spain/Portugal could have stopped them? The Turks had already beaten Italian maritime powers and claimed their strategic spots...

next STS, Jared Diamond doesn't delve a great deal into the data in what I remember of Guns Germs Steel. What's more, he did not utilize hard data in any *counterfactuals* against his hypothesis, and it *is* very easy to read alot of what he says as merely PC, and take from it the lesson that Europe was probably gonna be on top anyways...

[Steven Rogers]

Shah8,

Considering what else the Turks had on their plate, yes I think the Iberian States could have stopped them. A general war against Spain and Portugal would have brought the Italian states back into play, and the Persians were always ready to jump on The Turk when his attention was heavily engaged elsewhere. And of course, the Arabs were as restive as always.

[shah8]

eh...already know I made some typos but still...

Short version:
Diamond says that materialist and geographic terms defined who won and who lost. If one reads history and studies human nature, one knows that such terms were only present in the background, and decisions based on culteral matrixes were in the foreground (ex Montezuma's superstition). He is in the end saying that terms made successful cultures.

He is one of a long series of people, most of whom are bullshit artists or seriously wrong (like the whole northern countries are colder and so they had to plan better than tropical countries and hence English are smarter and more prepared or whatever) to make materialist/reductionist imposition on culture. It is wisest to ask for *very* definite scholarship before acclaiming it as something new being understood.

[PurpleStater]

"There are a *lot* of fuckin' crypto racists out there. He doesn't have to be accuratly represented for it to serve as a source for alot of racist arguments."

A lot of racist arguments are sourced from the backs of cereal boxes. Shall we boycott Wheaties?

[Alan]

It's like Lepanto never happened...

The Iberians also had a wealth of navigational and geographical information and methodology the Turks didn't have.

[shah8]

Hah!

Turks were winning most of the battles at that point (around 1500) and had the big mo! If they didn't bog themselves down trying to conquer Eastern Europe, they most definitly *could* have taken on the Iberian states. I wasn't talking about the Turks adding yet another war on their plates, I was talking in pure capacity in which to wage war while holding on to territory. Not to mention that none of their territorial issues had much to do with naval issues!

Purplestater, I should make this clear. I don't have much against Diamond, I just feel that Delong et al are pretty insensitive and naive about what the anthropologists are saying. I also did alot of research in related fields. Anybody *with* substantive humanities experience, anywheres from criminology to some obscure branch of anthropology whatever, has a real academic cultural experience with alot of bull that sounded perfectly based on reality, when, well, the main reason a theory was upheld was that it upheld popular ego.

[Steven rogers]

Lepanto was in 1571, Shah8 and I are I agree that the Tuks lack of operational experience in the North Atlantic was going to be a big problem for them.

Shah8, not to be picking on you, but Montezuma running the Aztec show was an example of Spanish Luck. Either Montezumas predecessor or his successor would have chopped Cortez and his merry band of pirates into dog food.

[Colin Danby]

There are and have been many Yalis, culture-brokers who have served as "informants" for multiple foreign observers, and whose activity is as much inquiry of their own as it is simple response to questions. There's been some interesting work on this as anthro has become more self-critical.

In the case of GG&S the Yali story strikes me as a set-piece intro for a book that JD would have written anyway, though one can certainly look at how JD frames and portrays the encounter.

But why not look at Holberg's comment, right or wrong, as one of a range of positions or critiques that anthropologists might make? In other words, Brad, why decide based on a rather small number of data points that this is *the* hegemonic anthro position? (The same thing of course happens the other way -- if you say you're an economist, people often assume you're a "typical" economist.) Interdisciplinary conversation requires some willingness to see other disciplines not as unified wholes or rigid sets of answers but as ongoing and internally-disparate processes of inquiry.

Finally give anthro some credit for a tradition of self-critical work about what kinds of assumptions it has made about the nature of the world, how it has indeed at times romanticized people and treated "native informants" as naive relayers of cultural data. And this requires a certain level of nuance -- it's not like there are only two narrow positions, racist and not.

[Steven Rogers]

That post was mangled. I meant to type that Shah8 and I are discussing 1490-1520ish and I think that the turks lack of experience in the North Atlantic was a real problem.

The problem with the Turks going after the Iberians in a big way is indeed the balkans. This was not a bog, from their point of view, but one of their prime strategic concerns. They were not strong enough to take the Balkans and Iberia at the same time so they chose the balkans - and quite sensibly, too.

[shah8]

Ummm, 71 years after what we are talking about? And with Spain having the resources of the new world to even things out?

Lepanto isn't something that makes one *smarter* in this context.

Also, given the mercantile history of Europe, I daresay it probably would have been easy for the Turks to catch up with Spain, at least a little bit via spies.

don't worry, this is a fun digression for me. I don't actually believe that the Turks should have found the americas, I just don't believe that they didn't have the opportunity.

[Tad Brennan]

Mr. Elson--

I actually *do* hope that the US, or some suitable successor with a similar constitution, will continue to flourish until the depopulation of the galaxy.

But even *I* have to admit that there was another embarrassing episode a few decades after 1776. You know, some Brits came and torched the White House? "Rockets' red glare", all that?

[ogmb]

"This is a case where the reading public seems to have a clear intellectual edge over the academic cadres."

To qualify this, there's also been quite a number of academic cadres who found Diamond's books impressive and challenging.

[Michael Carroll]

I think what Holberg is getting at is that the question is not "please sir tell me why do you have so much stuff so I can change my ways and get some."

It is I am developing a plan to get some of that stuff so tell me what you know now and I'll what I can do with this information.

Diamond's Yali is a bit like Robinson Crusoe's Friday in that the operative attibute he brings to Diamonds book is inquisitiveness.

To Holgren, Lawrences Yali is truer because the operative attribute he posesses is cunning.

I'm sure Diamond is a nice man. But this goes back to my comment a few weeks ago (like anyone cares!). What makes this seem so colonial is the idea that the way the Developed world lives, that is the technology AND culture, is the way people are supposed to live. Whereas, the way other people live and by extention think is fundementally underdeveloped.

Mr. Diamond may make the statement that the technological can be differentiated from the cultural but no trained Anthropologist would have any patience for that contention and would likely regard it as a fig leaf.

[Steve]

Michael - I think that Diamond's argument is open to a lot of interpretation, but I dont think he's saying that people ought to live like Europeans. He's simply saying that if you want to know why Europeans came to North America first, and not the other way around, there are some good explanations as to why.

And really, Diamond's position makes it seem like its not the white race of the Europeans, or the Protestant work ethic, that explains their success (technologically), but they had certain "legs up" on the people they conquered, being in the right place, in the right time.

I agree culture and technology are related, however. Ancient society's (technologically primitive) deal with different issues than more technologically advanced ones. As the pace of technology advances, new problems and social issues arise the demand a different kind of society. Now, granted, you can take the Campbell Hero with a Thousand Faces position, but thats a religious rather than legal and cultural discussion.

[J Thomas]

I hardly commented on Yali because he doesn't have a lot to do with Diamond's story. Yes, I think Diamond misunderstood Yali or at least pretended to. But so what? This anthropologist is looking at Yali as a sort of metaphor of all the other things Diamond ignores while he goes after his own story. Here's a link that briefly describes Yali's place in politics:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2267426

It includes various hilarious side issues like the islanders who collected $75,000 to buy Lyndon Johnson from the USA and make him their king. Yali successfully got some cargo from the australians because they were concerned about cargo cults that were christian heresies. They tried to use him to eliminate the christian cargo cults, and he used them to set himself up as the head of a big unified nonchristian cargo cult.

My suggestion was that somebody should have told him to tell the americans about communist cargo cults, so the americans would give him cargo to eliminate *them*. But it's too late now.

It was a very good move for Diamond to use Yali for his question, because unlike lots of other primitives, Yali and the cargo cults are interested in precisely the things Diamond is interested in -- getting cargo, getting stuff. They agree on what the issue is. Holmberg is right that the question Yali actually wanted answered was not "Why is it that you have stuff and I don't", but "How do I get cargo too". And of course Diamond's answer is basically, "You don't.".

New guinea has fine mineral resources including oil. They can produce more food than they need. They have a low population density. They've been doing agriculture for at least 10,000 years, they've been doing gardening for more like 60,000 years. But there are fundamental reasons why they aren't europe. One is that their land is mostly rain forest, and they basicly don't have winters. So they didn't develop crops that they can store for months to last through the winter, and without long-storing grain there was no way for a government to develop to take their grain. So it isn't like they've been developing agriculture for 10,000 years, it's more like they've been developing agriculture for one year, 10,000 times. They didn't take the path that would lead to centralised government, so they couldn't develop high technology and steamships and conquer the world. Also their geography works against central government.

"The indigenous population of Papua New Guinea is one of the most heterogeneous in the world. Papua New Guinea has several thousand separate communities, most with only a few hundred people. Divided by language, customs, and tradition, some of these communities have engaged in low-scale tribal warfare with their neighbors for millennia. The advent of modern weapons and modern migration patterns has greatly magnified the impact of this lawlessness.

"The isolation created by the mountainous terrain is so great that some groups, until recently, were unaware of the existence of neighboring groups only a few kilometers away. The diversity, reflected in a folk saying, "For each village, a different culture," is perhaps best shown The indigenous population of Papua New Guinea is one of the most heterogeneous in the world. Papua New Guinea has several thousand separate communities, most with only a few hundred people. Divided by language, customs, and tradition, some of these communities have engaged in low-scale tribal warfare with their neighbors for millennia. The advent of modern weapons and modern migration patterns has greatly magnified the impact of this lawlessness.

The isolation created by the mountainous terrain is so great that some groups, until recently, were unaware of the existence of neighboring groups only a few kilometers away." Many of these groups are doing low-intensity warfare against each other and have been for thousands of years. The villages claim land communally and don't believe in individuals selling land. The PNG government backs them up and agrees that the villages own 97% of the total land. That involves a lot of subsistence agriculture that isn't measured in GDP; is it any wonder that exports are around 47% of GDP and imports around 46%?

"Yali, in a very fundamental sense, was concerned about what in our terms would be called inequality, justice, fairness, and morality."

I don't really see that, I think Yali was asking how he could get rich and bring riches to his people. The sort of things economists think about.

"Diamond provides no solace. On the contrary, his deterministic (and simplistic) argument has the opposite effect. Diamond tells us things are the way they are because that is the way that they have to be."

I'm not clear Diamond is really saying that. He says things are the way they are because they happened as they had to happen, in general. But just as he doesn't have a firm geographic argument that says which part of eurasia had to conquer the world, he also doesn't say how things have to go from here. Diamond is no Hari Seldon. He just plays one on TV.

Is there an economist who'd make a guess how new guinea could become rich? Clearly they can't expect to do it with autarky, even with their rich resources they have only 5 million people. They don't particularly have iron and coal to make their own steel. So they must trade. But without a lot of development they must trade their raw materials for manufactured goods, and the more of that they do the better they learn how to extract raw materials to trade -- they aren't learning how to build an other-than-colonial economy. Dependent on a few exports to pay for a lot of imports, they'll have pricing turbulence and the uncertainty will make it hard to plan. And they've gotten entangled with the World Bank and IMF.

Per capita GDP was around $580 in 2003, I don't know how the recent dollar devaluations etc would affect that. And it's a bit misleading. It's more like 3/4 of the people are living like their ancestors 5000 years ago did (except they have steel tools and matches etc), and the remainder have a per capita GDP of around $2300.

How could they become wealthy like us? How could they get a whole lot of stuff?

[NBarnes]

>For example, of what Earthly relevance is the exact politico-social-philosophical standing of Yali anyway?
> Diamond uses their conversation (whether real or imaginary) to provide a sort of inciting incident to
> motivate the reader to follow him through hundreds of pages of argument. Yali isn't functioning as some kind
> of "material witness" to 13,000 years of human history -- he's a narrative hook!

This is precisely my problem with Holberg as well. Holberg seems to think that undermining (if one were uncharitable, one could call it 'nit picking') Diamond's account of his conversation with Yali, he is undermining Diamond's entire thesis. Diamond's thesis has nothing to do with the details of who Yali was or the nature of Diamond's conversation with Yali. Yali is, as STS perfectly puts it, 'a narrative hook'. It is rediculous to assert, as Holberg implicitly does, that by undermining Diamond's story of his conversation with Yali, Holberg has undermined GG&S's thesis; doing so is an error in critical reading on, frankly, a high school level. Holberg should be ashamed of himself and his peers in Anthropology should be ashamed of him as well.

There are plenty of nits to pick in the real arguments that Diamond puts forth (how did the Huns almost conquer Europe? Why aren't we all speaking Chinese?) that I would rather PhD anthropologists at Cornell University spend their time on, rather than engaging in the rhetorical-equivelent of accusing Diamond's mother of dressing him funny.

[NBarnes]

You know, I re-read that post three times. But I still, now reading it again, feel like I'm writing at a high school level tonight myself. Sorry. :(

[Michael Carroll]

Steven-

My point is that it doesn't matter whether Diamond meant to suggest that adopting the material lifestyle of the devoped world is "better" or not. My point is that its hared to write a book like that without it taking on that interpretation. Yeah, sorry I'm deconstructing here but lets not split hairs. In the Anglo Saxon world saying, "oh, I'm just explaining why we have all this stuff and those people don't," cannot be separated from saying "Aren't we lucky we have all this stuff and what a pity those people don't - what went wrong for them." without a lot of strain. That's because the latter question has been asked about five thousand times and our knowledge of that question and the ways in which people have tried to answer it biases our hearing anytime the next guy takes a crack at it.

He can't just jump into a question like this without seriously acknowleding the prexisting debates. There is along line of Geographic Determinists (e.g. Ellen Semple, or T.G Taylor) and Diamond's tools aren't THAT different than theirs's. These folks had some very interesting things to say that were similar to Diamond and then they also wanted to say the Europeans were superior to everyone else.

Oh, and 1500-1560 the Ottomans were tops, bar none. Nonetheless, they would have had no intersest in finding a short cut to the indies because they were the main reason people were looking for a short cut in the first place.

[Steve]

Michael

Even if what your suggesting is true, it does nothing to impune the logic of Dr. Diamond.

"Aren't we lucky we have all this stuff and what a pity those people don't - what went wrong for them"

well aside from the colorful language, there's nothing racist in aknowledging quantitative differences in technology and economics, and trying to explain it. I see no problem with that.

And I think the answer to the question you raise is in Dr. Delong's initial post - you want Dr. Diamond to address a different question from the one he attempt to answer. You are not attempting to disagree with his conclusions, only the fact that he attempted to formulate them in the first place.

One cannot prevent racists and ignorant people from leaching off bits and pieces of information in the academic community. And writing this does not create the racists to begin with.

[anne]

That so meticulous and fair a thinker and researcher as Jared Diamond becomes open to such untempered criticism is quite disheartening.

[Dr, Minorka]

shah8
The Turkish conquest of Hungary started well before 1500. 200 years were not enough them to accomplish the conquest.

[Chip Poirot]

Ever since I read The Third Chimpanzee and GGS I've had an amiguous view of both books. But first, let me say, that to call (or imply) that Diamond is a racist, or that his books lead to racism, suggests to me that someone is either not reading or simply reading in bad faith.

Nor do I think that Diamond's pop sci is going to lead people to racism. Quite the contrary.

On balance, I think Diamond has done materialist anthropology, economic history and related disciplines a big favor by putting a lot of views and ideas out into public debate. He is not an anthropologist or economic historian, he's a biologist and his explanations and explanatory style tend to reflect this. Here we have a biologist contributing to public discussion of economic anthropology and economic history, making it popular and getting people to think-and I for one think this can be only a good thing.

Now that said, yes, there are some things about Diamond that rankle me. His explanations are overly simplistic. He does miss important detail. And he seems to studiously ignore the fact that archaeologists and anthropologists and some economic historians have been working with ecological/infrastructure models of history for a long, long time. In that sense, Diamond is a bit of a johnny come lately and it would have been polite of him to acknowledge people like Julian Seward, Marvin Harris and Eric Wolf. In fact, I think that Wolf's explanation in Europe and the People Without History is a much better one. But the two explanations are not contradictory.

The problem is that those who want to turn anthropology (or economic history or archeology) or any other discipline into literary criticism are committing far worse sins than Diamond. They are a bunch of petti fogging obscurantists who ultimately leave us with no explanations and hence no solutions.

The message of GGS is not that Yali's people have to live without cargo. The message is that they are at a disadvantage due to a geographica accident of history.

[TimW]

Go upthread ^^ and read STS's comment. He sums this controversy up well.

[TimW]

BTW... I'm reading GGS right now after seeing an episode of the PBS series. It's great and I plan on continuing on with "Collapse."

[Brad DeLong]

Re: "There are and have been many Yalis, culture-brokers who have served as "informants" for multiple foreign observers, and whose activity is as much inquiry of their own as it is simple response to questions. There's been some interesting work on this as anthro has become more self-critical. In the case of GG&S the Yali story strikes me as a set-piece intro for a book that JD would have written anyway, though one can certainly look at how JD frames and portrays the encounter. But why not look at Holberg's comment, right or wrong, as one of a range of positions or critiques that anthropologists might make? In other words, Brad, why decide based on a rather small number of data points that this is *the* hegemonic anthro position?"

I don't think it is the hegemonic anthro position. I do now think that there is a subgroup that uses phony accusations of racism in an attempt to exclude others from discourse. Holberg doesn't like the fact that the question Yali asks Diamond doesn't fit the script that Holberg has assigned to Yali, and so Holberg calls Diamond a racist. It's that simple.

[anne]

Repeatedly Jared Diamond's work is taken as "pop science." This is absurd unless what is meant is that Diamond is a simple and clear and wonderfull engaging writer. Diamond's work shows the painstaking attention to layering of observation on observation that characterize the finst of evolutionary biologists from Charles Darwin on. Darwin was also a wonderfully clear and engaging writer. Look to Diamond and Ernst Mayr his teacher on birds and you will find presicely the same anecdotal research that he uses through "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel." We have a master scientist at hand, who has set down for us a brilliant robust framework for historical research that will be expaned for decades.

[anne]

Diamond's work in every way tears at any pretense of ethnic of racial stereotyping. The idea that it is otherwise is absurd, and shows not the slightest interest in understanding Diamond.

[sm]

How could they get a whole lot of stuff?

All 5 m of them move to Los Angeles County?

[James Wimberley]

I agree with PurpleStater on the profound weirdness of the culture of the tribe of Anthropologists. I wonder if they provide an exception to the hundreds of "cultural universals" identified by Donald Brown, and reproduced by Steven Pinker in an appendix to every other book he writes. For example, do they believe rape is wrong?

[sm]

>
>The Turkish conquest of Hungary started well before 1500. >200 years were not enough them to accomplish the >conquest.

The key event was the battle of Mohacs, 1526.

[Nicholas Mycroft]

Alan wrote:

>The Iberians also had a wealth of navigational and geographical information and methodology the Turks didn't have.

The Turkish navy was primarily composed of galleys--wonderful in the Med, and employed in Mediterranean navies well into the 19th century, but of no use in open ocean.

One technological innovation that the Iberians made was the caravel, a ship that combined square-rigged and lateen sails and could sail at many points vs. the wind, enabling global navigation. The Turks could have stolen or copied Iberia's navigational technology (compass, quadrant--heck, Arabs were the main navigational innovators in the Middle Ages) and they had access to the same ancient maps (Ptolemy) that were the basis of Iberia's mapping enterprises. However, building caravels instead of galleys would have necessitated a huge investment--and why do it, when galleys are more effective fighting ships in your sphere of influence?

[Walt]

anne: Diamond's book is a work of "pop science" because he fails to do what's required in a scholarly work -- credit his predecessors. According to experts in the field, very little of his argument is original.

[Henry Farrell]

I'm going to be a Meta-Anthropologist. I'll do fieldwork in university anthro departments, where I'll interview the graduate students, junior profs, and department heads. I'll map their complex social hierarchy; observe their secret religious rituals, and document their pidgin.

Already been done. Check out the discussion of the hidden hierarchies of anthropology in Rabinow, Paul. “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-modernity in Anthropology.” Clifford and Marcus 234­61

[J Thomas]

What kind of criticism can we expect in short articles and blog posts? Here's a book with a lot of data and a lot of handwaving, and short criticisms can't hope to do it justice. On the other hand, long criticism isn't worth doing -- an anthropologist who wrote a book demolishing Diamond's assertions point by point would be making a bad career move unless Diamond gets enough credibility to be worth spending a long time attacking. And the public wouldn't be interested, so it probably wouldn't make much money from sales.

It looks to me like Holmberg has done a shortcut. Here's Yali, who Diamond dismisses in a quick sketch, and that the TV show implies is just some shlub that Diamond met on a beach. But when you look at the details Yali is a fascinating and sophisticated figure who has clearly had a significant effect on new guinea history, who was asking a much deeper question than Diamond implies. And the implication is -- what other details has Diamond ignored? He has a simple easy-to-follow picture, but what is he missing? Well, scratch the surface anywhere and see. Holberg scratched the surface one place and Diamond's simple picture was way too simple. "Diamond missed a lot when he was in New Guinea just as he misses a lot in his panoptic view of human history." This looks to me like a valid criticism. It's a criticism that could be made of any book that tries to paint a simple clear picture of all of human history to 1500. Diamond is just the latest to try that and get the criticism. And yet, isn't the project worth doing even though it cannot be done adequately?

The accusation of ethnocentrism and unconscious racism looks to me like a natural thing to tag anybody who isn't an anthropologist. Of course Diamond is ethnocentric, if he wasn't he'd lose his popular audience. His assumptions ar widely shared. Most americans would agree that it's far better to be rich in new york or paris, than to be a rich new guinean who had to live in port moresby. And most would assume that it was far better to be rich in paris in 1600 than rich in new guinea in 1600. It's far better to kill your enemies with artillery and airstrikes than with stone knives and clubs -- particularly if you're the one dishing it out instead of taking it. It's better to be able to buy all the croissants and filet mignon and lobsters you want in the grocery store, than to have to grow your own taro and pick your own bananas. It's better to talk to a psychiatrist than a witch doctor. When you compare the best that a hi-tech society has to offer its rich people to the best elsewhere, we're clearly much better off. Aren't we?

And even if we aren't better off, even if we're putting up with a lot that we don't like, still there's no alternative. Because if we don't do it, somebody else will. And then they'll take our oil and we'll be poor.

It seemse to me that Diamond presents a valid argument why human choice is not very important in the long run. Your choices might speed things up or slow them down in your own culture, which will only affect whether your culture is the one that does the inevitable and gets whatever rewards come. He's probably wrong in detail, and a lot of his big ideas are probably wrong (since how often do we get things right before the data is in?) but the biggest picture may be right. For any environment some toolset will be best, meaning dominant. Somebody will eventually find the best toolset and use it to dominate everybody else. If you don't like it, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

And yet these anthropologists don't think it's all inevitable. Maybe that's because they see radically different cultures in similar environments, and so they think that it doesn't have to be just one way. They don't hold firmly to the concept that what it means for a culture to be different is that it has to be unsuccessful. They don't see the big picture.

The big picture is that we're the successful ones, and if some other culture doesn't play by our rules then we'll grab all their stuff. It's inevitable.

[shah8]

Turks have consistently shown an ability and willingness to make huge investment in navies, almost on a dime (during that era). Caravels aren't *that* much of a problem...

[JRoth]

Walt:
"Diamond's book is a work of "pop science" because he fails to do what's required in a scholarly work -- credit his predecessors. According to experts in the field, very little of his argument is original."

Cites?

[Matt Austern]

I think it's entirely reasonable to describe Guns, Germs, and Steel as science popularization. It's not a book of original research. It wasn't published in a technical journal. It summarizes and synthesizes original research, some by the author but most by other people.

Calling it science popularization is not a putdown, and the fact that so many people think of it as a putdown is a deficiency in American intellectual culture.

There's a need for good, accessible writing about scholarly subjects that isn't part of the technical literature. If this had been technical literature I wouldn't have read it (I don't read technical journals in fields other than my own), and that would have been a real loss. This book, like the books of other good popularizers, showed me new things and new ways of thinking.

Diamond's latest book, by the way, Collapse, is slightly different. It's also a work of popularization, but parts of it are very clearly Diamond's own original research and contain specific references to journal articles that he published.

[sm]

Turkish navy:

The Turks, like the ancient Persians, could have captured the shipyards that made the ships.

Indeed, the huge surge in "Turkish" activity in the Med in the 16th c. was to a great extent the recruiting of Barbarossa and other "Barbary coast" pirates.

Any new sailor has to learn a whole bunch of new stuff almost immediately. Shipbuilders and navigators take longer, but they all start from scratch.

[J Thomas]

"Diamond's work in every way tears at any pretense of ethnic of racial stereotyping. The idea that it is otherwise is absurd, and shows not the slightest interest in understanding Diamond."

Since the claim is "unconscious racism", I can imagine how it could go -- though I don't see the proof.

Suppose that Diamond started out with the conclusion he wanted -- europeans are inevitably the best -- and worked backward to get hypothese and anecdotal evidence to support it. And then he carefully polished his language so he wasn't talking about race except occasionally to claim that some other races were as smart or smarter than europeans.

Then we'd get the result we got. But of course just because the data is compatible with this hypothesis doesn't mean the hypothesis is right.

And yet, isn't it very likely that this was how Diamond worked? If he'd started out with a map of the world and no knowledge whatsoever of history, and he looked at all the plants and animals available everywhere 40,000 years ago, and he tried to predict what would happen, do you think he'd get it right?

What he has done is a giant JustSo story. He started with the results and he tried to come up with ideas that would explain them. And then -- lo and behold! -- his ideas tend to fit the data. After all, if he knew they didn't fit the available data he'd cut and fit until they did.

And now that he's carefully crafted his hypotheses to fit the data he's heard about, how can they be tested? How can we for example test the idea that europe's geography left it with separate nations that competed on technology while china's geography left them with an empire that stifled? If we only had a couple hundred copies of the earth, and we could seed it with random races of people, and see how reproducibly his ideas came out....

To my way of thinking it isn't science. It just isn't. I dont understand people who'd call it science. They're from some other culture, some culture that has a very different idea what science is.

Incidentally, when Diamond attributes european innovation to the geography that gave them multiple nations, I'd tend to put more emphasis on the monasteries. European monasteries had a reliable surplus, and they experimented. They experimented with new ways to do crop rotation, they experimented with new plows, they did a whole lot of the nonmilitary R&D that got done before 1500. And they came up with methodologies for experiments. They came up with Bacon. There might be geographical reasons to explain why the monasteries developed, but I don't know what they are. No doubt Diamond could come up with some.

[Nicholas Mycroft]

in terms of galleys and caravels, to echo a line from one of my favorite movies, that's a different kind of sailing altogether.

Group, in unison: "that's a different kind of sailing."

It's not just shipyards, it's people--you need a lot of open-ocean, expert sailors, not just rowers (who were mainly slaves). More expensive, more difficult than adding galleys.

The Turks would have had to control the whole Med and Gibraltar just to get their ships -into- the ocean--would have needed as large or larger a galley-based navy for the Med as the one they actually had -and- a whole new navy of caravels and a whole new force of sailors for the Atlantic. Just an enormous investment, requiring a complete paradigm shift, and with an uncertain payoff. Highly unlikely, whereas Iberia + England + France, already accustomed to open-ocean sailing and closer to the New World, would quite naturally move towards exploration + colonization.

I guess my point is that even in the joyous world of counterfactual historical speculation, one is pushing pretty hard at the bounds of plausibility to see the Ottoman Turks embarking on a major effort to exploit the New World. I think Diamond's point is that people and cultures tend to do what they are more likely to do given the environment they find themselves in. Which, in this case, they did.

[Julian Elson]

I do think I understand why people are worried about the popularity of GGS. Basically, we've been burned by attractive, reductive theories of the fate of humanity before, from Marx to Condorcet to David Hackett Fischer. Inference and experience leads them to think, "well, if grand, bigthink theories of everything haven't worked to well before, this one probably won't work to well either." And I suspect they may very well be right. The thing is, they think it's wrong, because it has the same feel as a lot of other wrong theories, but they're not sure why yet, so they end up making even more wrongheaded attacks against it.

[Matt Austern]

I don't have a problem with arguing that Diamond's work is wrong. I don't even have a problem with an argument of the form "this seems too grand and overarching for me to take it all that seriously, for no other reason than that I'm skeptical of imputing huge chunks of history to single simple causes." I've even made that latter argument.

I do have a problem with saying that Diamond's work is not just mistaken but evil. Accusations of racism, even qualified with words like "quasi-" and "unconscious", strike me as crossing that line.

[Paul G. Brown]

Suppose the Turks had been the first from the European continent to make it to North America.

How does this affect Diamond's thesis, exactly? The point he's making is that the biology and geography of Europe gave the european strain of the 'African plains ape' a leg up.

Don't matter if the 'african plains ape' chose to wear a turban or pantaloons: he would still have brought 'guns germs and steel' across the broad Atlantic.

[shah8]

Matt Austern, you need more experience in dealing with crypto-racism and their use of code words and other schemes to inject tracts that reflects their beliefs, so as to allow for general acceptance. I don't see Diamond as one of that crowd. I'm not even sure he's wrong either. He was pretty convinceing when I read it two years ago. It's just that the topic that he proposed to work on is *simply* just *too* sweeping to really accept it as something other than some thought out doodling...

[Nicholas Mycroft]

I was thinking about forming an advocacy group to protect the rights and reputations of synthesists/generalists--surely the most reviled and oppressed minority in the intellectual community--but I could not find any scientific reason to think that it would improve the situation.

[shah8]

Nicholas: Read the history of the Ming trading fleets. They start off with shallow knowledge base of deep water navies as well, and fairly quickly converted alot of the brown water ships in existence to blue water. The Turks could have done the same, and the chinese had many foriengers aid in the construction and sailing of the fleet as well.

Paul G. Brown: I'm mostly having fun with the Turk arguments. Also, he had to focus alot more on Europe, as that his general premise was pretty dang vague. Considering how much of the world is europe, asia, and africa, compared to the americas, a conceiveable alt explanation is that greater land mass means more people, more people means that the competition was greater, and we wound up selecting best for the MF'ing tribe that conquers the world. So really, testing out a Turk counterfactual would probably weaken the bases of Diamond's theory, as later on he had to sorta admit with China.

[John Emerson]

Coming in late:

There are lots of examples of nations getting up to speed in new technologies quickly. n after 1850 is the best example. The Mongols in China attacked Japan and Java by sea, and while all these attacks were ultimately unsuccessful, this was the first and only time anyone from China ever attacked either place. JapaYes, they were using Chinese technology, but they improved it and used it better and more aggressively than the Chinese had ever done. I believe that the great Ming dynasty fleets were inherited form the Mongols.

With the help of renegades, the Turks could have easily discovered America, if they had gained control of Gibralter.

However, at least some of the time the Ottomans controlled the Indian Ocean sea route to India and China. So they didn't need the Atlantic Route.

Diamond's book is a general-interest book for educated people such as Brad DeLong. His specialist writings are in historical biological geography as it relates to human life, and he's very sharp on that. At the second level, his historical writing is on the model of William McNeill and, while more ambitious in scope than most professional history, it's not really popularization just because of that. The bias of history toward perfectly-argued monographs on limited topics has an enormous down side.

The way he wraps up his overall story with narratives of Decline and Racism (his third level) is indeed poppy, and I do find it annoying.

[John Emerson]

"Japan after 1850"

[gary]

I read GG&S a couple of years ago, and found it an interesting read, but I had no way to evaluate its thesis and wasn't about to start digging in the primary literature. Not my field! I have read some scholarly work on how the agricultural revolution got started about 10,000 ago, and it's a highly contentious and active field right now.

But because of this recent flap I just read "Road Belong Cargo" and I must recommend it to anyone interested in the career of Yali. He was quite the big man in New Guinea: he was the only survivor of a Japanese attack on his military patrol, and his epic trek through impenetrable jungle back to his home area became a legend among both the natives and the white colonists. He was a quasi-police officer in charge of suppressing cargo cults, which he dutifully did for some time.

But on his visit to Sydney he visited a museum and had the Darwinian theory of human origins explained to him, and it was a revelation -- but not the way we think it would be! He 'realized' that the whites had TWO totem systems: some believed in the God/Jesus totem as propounded by the white missionaries, while others believed they had come from early primates. So some whites were descended from Adam and Eve, while others came from the ancient ancestor 'monki'. He tried to figure out which one of them really controlled the channels to cargo.

The author of the book is convinced that Yali, in spite of his experiences with modern society, never left behind his native knowledge framework and eventually became involved in the cargo cults which he initially helped to suppress. Utterly, utterly fascinating.

[Nicholas Mycroft]

a good argument....

shah8, you are wearing me down, and now I have Emerson to contend with.

Perhaps it comes down to whether the Turks had the resources to take on the project (and I do maintain that it was a vast project). I'd need to know a lot more about the economic history of the Ottoman Empire than I do (my knowledge at present being minute and asymptotic as neurons decay) to tackle that one.

[AllenM]

The Turk did not have access to large forests within easy reach of the major shipbuilding areas- specifically tall trees that served as the masts. Even England and Spain were essentially out of large timber suitable for masts by 1600 and were importing them from the Baltic and Maine. The Turks could probably have got enough out of bulgaria and romania, but why bother if they were busy in their end of the Med. Vienna and Lepanto were the answer to Mohacs. Experience was the best teacher and infrequent sailing out of the med did not lead to developing long sailing ability. Paradoxiacally in the Red Sea, the sea of arabia and the east coast of africa there was quite a bit of long haul sailing by the arabs- but they didn't like the turks....

[anne]

Nicholas Mycroft

'I was thinking about forming an advocacy group to protect the rights and reputations of synthesists/generalists--surely the most reviled and oppressed minority in the intellectual community--but I could not find any scientific reason to think that it would improve the situation.'

Nice :)

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p2.html

How To Get Rich
A Talk by Jared Diamond

In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and sub-Saharan Africans, rather than vice versa.

Most of that book, was concerned with comparing the peoples of different continents, but I knew that I couldn't publish a book comparing the histories of different continents and considering Eurasia as a unit without saying something about the fascinating problem of the differences of history within Eurasia. Why, within Eurasia, was it Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or the Middle East? I devoted seven pages to that subject at the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think I arrived at the correct solution. Nevertheless, since the publication of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I've received a lot of feedback, and the most interesting feedback has been about the implications of that comparative analysis of the histories of China, Europe, India, and the Middle East.

In particular, in addition to the review of my book by Bill Gates, I've received a lot of correspondence from economists and business people, who pointed out to me possible parallels between the histories of entire human societies and histories of smaller groups. This correspondence from economists and business people has to do with the following big question: what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation, and wealth? Should your human group have a centralized direction, in the extreme having a dictator, or should there be diffuse or even anarchical organization? Should your collection of people be organized into a single group, or broken off into a number of groups, or broken off into a lot of groups? Should you maintain open communication between your groups, or erect walls between them, with groups working more secretly? Should you erect protectionist tariff walls against the outside, or should you expose your business or government to free competition?

These questions about group organization arise at many different levels and for many types of groups. They arise, of course, about the organization of entire governments or countries: what is the best way to govern a country? Remember the classic arguments about whether the best government is a benign dictatorship, or a federal system, or an anarchical free-for-all. The same questions also rise about the organization of different companies within the same industry. How can you account for the fact that Microsoft has been so successful recently, and that IBM, which was formerly successful, fell behind but then drastically changed its organization over the last four years and improved its success? How can we explain the different successes of what we call different industrial belts? When I was a boy growing up in Boston, Route 128, the industrial belt around Boston, led the industrial world in scientific creativity and imagination. But Route 128 has fallen behind, and now Silicon Valley is the center of innovation. And the relations of businesses to each other in Silicon Valley and Route 128 are very different, possibly resulting in those different outcomes.

Of course there are also the famous differences between the productivities of the economies of different countries: the differing national average productivities of Japan and the United States and France and Germany....

[oubliette]

All these charges of racism and anti-racism call to mind a favorite song from Avenue Q, which ends:

Everyone's a little bit racist
It's true.
But everyone is just about
As racist as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being
So PC
Maybe we could live in -
Harmony!

If I can offer some casual ethnographic observations on the field anthropology, perhaps we cold have a little more understanding of the various critiques going on here. Anthropology as a discipline developed as part and parcel of colonial enterprise. Much early anthropology was involved, often directly, in enabling and justifying colonial exploitation. More recent anthropology has been undertaking serious reflection on the role and complicity of the discipline in colonialism, racism, and ethnocentrism--in identifying their own covert racism. It has been a long and painful process, and debates over what to do about it are still ongoing.

In the process, anthropology has, I think, become one of the academic disciplines most aware of its impact--both current and historical--on the people and cultures it studies, and it has also developed an intense attention to structures of power starting at a very micro level.

This disciplinary history has at the same time lead to a high level of suspicion towards grand unifying theories--precisely because of the role such theories played in the history of anthropology.

Anthropologists don't always rehash this whole history for conversations among themselves, but it is important for an outsider to understand that internal to anthropology, there has been a lot of attention to uncovering and outing the field's own covert--and unconscious--racism and colonialism. There are certainly a few who will try to use that as a hammer to cudgel others with, or to cut off conversation & dialogue. But there are many for whom the question of unconscious racism is itself an important dialogue.

[J Thomas]

Oubliette, does your experience give any indication about good ways to deal with unconscious racism in others?

It occurred to me that if somebody accused me of unconscious racism my first response would be to notice that I didn't like them.

While of course my question doesn't say what my goals are, and I'm sure my goals would be different in different circumstances, I hope you might have meaningful advice anyway.

[Steven Rogers]

For the Turks to pick a fight with the Iberian states over control of Gibralter would have touched off a very big, messy and unneeeded war. They didn't need to do it, so they didn't.

I think the reason the Turks did not join the New World land grab was that their leadership had a pretty clear view of what the Ottoman Empires vital spheres were, and the the Western Hemisphere wasn't one of them. The Balkans were far more important, so that is the region that got their attention. Anyone who doubts their strategic judgement shoud bear in mind that the Turks maintained significant power in both absolute and relative terms to their neighbors longer than the Spanish did.

[Kaleberg]

Diamond is an ornithologist who has done a lot of work in New Guinea. He does his research moving back and forth across the infamous Wallace Line. On one side there are small mammals filing a niche, and on the other side it's the birds filling the same niche. Head down to Australia for a break, and the place is crawling with marsupials! No wonder he's willing to accept that geography has some impact on human society and history.

This is an unpopular idea these days when it is argued in serious academic circles that only Western imperialism, racism and materialism can have any impact on human affairs, and then only to detrimental effect. Unfortunately, geography and culture both have their impacts, both positive and negative. In GG&S, Diamond argues that a large ecological zone confers certain advantages, if only that it provides more resources.

He says very little about politics. The Turks came out of Asia in the wake of the Khans, and they used their bombards and cavalry to demolish the last of Byzantium and found a rather durable empire. The Indo-Europeans who had colonized Iberia with their cattle, goats, wheat and olives thousands of years before the Turks came from the same ecological region running from central Asia to Iberia. If the Turks had conquered Iberia and the New World, and then gone on to colonize New Guinea, someone much like Diamond would have still postulated the same theory, based on the same geography and ecology.

Where was the Greater New Guinea Khan, conquering Indonesia, China, Persia and perhaps Portugal? Diamond argues that this lack was not the fault of the folks in New Guinea, but rather the geography, climate and ecology of New Guinea itself. New Guinea itself is broken in to two ecological regions, the coastal regions and the highlands, and for millenia there has been little or no communications or commerce between them.

It is all too easy for western academics, used to sending email, flying from conference to conference, and sending papers and artifacts by overnight express to underestimate the barriers that geography imposes. Having worked in science and technology, I have often been amazed at how unobservant and how uncurious so many who claim the life of the mind can be.

[J Thomas]

"Where was the Greater New Guinea Khan, conquering Indonesia, China, Persia and perhaps Portugal? Diamond argues that this lack was not the fault of the folks in New Guinea, but rather the geography, climate and ecology of New Guinea itself."

The idea that if you don't create a Khan who conquers the world then you're at fault is an interesting and unusual one.

I wonder how the maori etc will feel to be told that they shouldn't be blamed for failing to conquer portugal.

I can see it in a way. They're in the same boat with every other culture or nation that's so far failed to conquer portugal.

[Steven Rogers]

Don't feel to bad for the Maori, they did manage to conquer the Chatham Islanders.

[P.M.Lawrence]

In passing, I should mention that the Turks had access to a lot of navigational expertise. Has nobody around here ever heard of the map of Piri Reis?

But my main point is that there are a lot of Peter Lawrences around (I think there was once a Peter Lorenz who was a German politician). I have met a few myself, and it turns out that it is as likely a coincidence as meeting somebody called John Smith or John Anderson, though not so widely expected in our culture.

I have frequently been a victim of faulty data matching because of the systems designed by people with no grasp of statistics but just used their common sense. In particular, they aren't aware of Bayes' theorem, of skewed distributions, or of the Birthday Paradox. In the worst case, that led me to get into trouble because one of the others, who also shared my middle initial and date of birth, had left the country and I hadn't told the authorities. Common sense had told the authorities that first name, middle initial, surname, and date of birth were uniquely identifying - and then they said it was a one in a million mistake that would never happen again (Bayes, anyone?).

To add insult to injury, the faulty thinking of the bureaucrats has led to privacy regulations that prevent me from getting in touch with any doppelgangers to head off any of these mistakes. I typically get a minor or major problem every two or three years.

[Michael Carroll]

this is a fine thread.

Steven-

For the record, I never said Diamond was a racist and I don't think that critism of him would be fair. He seems like a pretty nice guy to me. I am not even saying Diamond is wrong.

All I am saying that Holberg is not wrong. Geographical determinism was a very important part of the ideology of imperialism. Another part was the idea that advanced peoples (Europeans) had an obligation to help people who were disadvantaged by their circumstances to achieve a higher level of civilization. This was to be accomplished in part by identifying the unque resources that each geographic region could render onto the world market and establishing admintrative and missionary institutions to help advance the natives.

To modern eyes it just looks like a lot of stealing and raping but a lot of these guys thought they were doing a hell of a lot of good. Treatments on 'the natives' did not always rail against their 'stupidity and backwardness'. Some of these treatments could be quite flattering. But there is a wide gap between flattery and respect. That is what Holberg is getting at.

Put yourself in Yali's shoes. Would you rather be remembered and noble, curious and impotent or as complicated, crafty and ambitious. Sure, everyone has to answer that for themselves; but there is certainly something emasculating about diminishing a man's ambition and presenting his impotence. Consiously or not, that act captures the colonial mindset vividly.

No that is not the question Diamond is asking but it is the point that Holberg raises and it is to me looking forwared a much more interesting one even if it is prone to a bunch of psychobabble.

[piotr]

For Ottomans to expand on Atlantic would require to leafrog over Italians and Spanish, not a very practical preposition (see Lepanto).

However, Ottomans conquered Egypt and lands on both shores of the Red Sea that were until then part of the cardinal trade route between Europe and South Asia. This route was cut off by the Portuguese who had decent technology and very few resources. It is withing realm of imagination that Ottomans would organize a Red Sea fleet that would wrest the control of Indian Ocean from the Portuguese.

Caravels were probably indispensible in stormy Atlantic waters, but not in the Indian Ocean. Turks had access to all needed technologies and the control of relevant ports. If anything, they would operate much closer to the home base and with much larger recources than the Portuguese.

However, Ottomans were not a mercantile power and their priorities were in their eyes much more "serious" than pepper or cinnamon.

[Barkley Rosser]

Just for the record, he is David Holmberg, not
Holberg. Ol

[Jon]

I read GGS a few years ago. I did not even remember Yali until he was mentioned here; his biography is not central to the book.

I don't see where people get the idea that the book is racist or Eurocentric; if anything it seems designed to refute the notion that genetic makeup or racial differences have brought about success.

I support of his thesis -- I have observed the social achievement of various members of ethnic groups in the US seems more related to how they got here then the racial features. Those that voluntarily came here over long distances or very difficult circumstances develop sub-cultures of highest achievers. These cultural distinctions gradually disappear with time.

[anne]

Kaleberg:

"Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal
Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based
« Why Are So Few Scientists Republicans? | Main | Greg Ip Reads the Mind of the Fed »

August 02, 2005
More "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Weirdness...
A correspondent sends me to another academic's take on Jared Diamond. Here's David H. Holberg, Chair, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University:

The Einaudi Center - Guns, Germs, and Steel: All of you who were involved in an initial way in thinking about the Diamond book might be interested to know that Yali, whose question Diamond claims prompted his book, is the subject of a relatively long study in 1964 by the anthropologist Peter Lawrence. (Diamond met Yali in 1972). I thank Jane Fajans (who works in New Guinea) for alerting me to what is an extraordinary account giving much greater depth to Yali and the question he asked. A good portion of Lawrence's book entitled Road Belong Cargo is devoted to Yali's role in millenarian movements and other political activities. Lawrence's account (as does other expert testimony) contradicts several of Diamond's representations about Yali. From what I have read so far, I would conclude that Diamond's representations are fundamentally misrepresentations which, unconsciously perhaps, disguise a racist and ethnocentric position...

It's beginning to look as if people like Ozma's calling Guns, Germs, and Steel "quasi-racist" and Tak's saying that it "perpetuates racism" may simply be aping their elders. It appears to be a thing their sub-group does in order to close the circle of discourse against outsiders--just as economists close the discourse to outsiders by saying "they don't have a mathematical model" and historians close to discourse to outsiders by saying "they don't have any new primary-source evidence." If so, Ozma's and Tak's claims that Diamond is "quasi-racist," or "perpetuates racism" should not be understood as empirical claims about the world but merely as markers of their own commitment to a group that seeks to close the discourse to outsiders.

Holberg continues:

...Moreover, [Diamond's] patronizing objectification of Yali...

Here's Diamond's description of his meeting with Yali, in full:

... a remarkable local politician named Yali.... We walked together for an hour, talking during the whole time. Yali radiated charisma and energy. His eyes flashed in a mesmerizing way. He talked confidently about himself, but he also asked lots of probing questions and listened intently. Our conversation began with a subject then on every New Guinean's mind--the rpaid pace of political developments. Papua New Guinea, a Yali's nation is now called, was at that time still administered by Australia as a mandate of the United Nations, but independence was in the air. Yali explained to me his role in getting local people to prepare for self government.

After a while, Yali turned the conversation and began to quiz me. He had never been outside New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiousity was insatiable. First, he wanted to know about my work on New Guinea birds (including how much I got paid for it). I explained to him how different groups of birds had colonized New Guinea over the course of millions of years. He then asked how the ancestors of his own people had reached New Guinea over the last tens of thousands of years, and how white Europeans had colonized New Guinea within the last 200 years.

The conversation remained friendly, even though the tension between the two societies that Yali and I represented was familiar to both of us. Two centuries ago, all New Guineans were still "living in the Stone Age." That is, they still used stone tools similar to those superseded in Europe by metal tools thousand of years ago, and they dwealt in villages not organized under any centralized political authority. Whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as "cargo."

May of the white colonists openly despised New Guineans as "primitive." Even the least able of New Guinea's white "masters," as they were still called in 1972, enjoyed a far higher standard of living than New Guineans, higher even than charismatic politicians like Yali. Yet Yali had quizzed lots of whites as he was quizzing me, and I had quizzed lots of New Guineans. He and I knew perfectly well that New Guineans were on the average at least as smart as Europeans. All these things must have been on Yali's mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

It was a simple question that went to the heart of life as Yali experienced it. Yes, there still is a huge difference between the lifestyle of the average New Guinean and that of the average European or American. Comparable differences separate the lifestyles of other peoples of the world as well...

Patronizing? Objectification? I do not think those words mean what Holberg thinks they mean.

Holberg continues:

...for rhetorical purposes exposes in a clear way the conceptual deficiencies of his key arguments in the book. I will almost certainly use passages of Lawrence's book as the basis of freshman writing assignments in reference to Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Lawrence's long biography of Yali indicates that Diamond is wrong on the facts. Diamond writes, "He had never been out of New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable." Yali had in fact been in close contact with Europeans since an early age and joined the New Guinea Police Force as a young man. He got swept up into World War II activities and after excellent service was promoted to sergeant and joined the Australian army. In 1943 he received an initial six months of training in Australia. Later in 1943, he returned to Australia: "There he was promoted to the rank of Sergeant-Major, higher than which no native could rise in the Australian army." In 1944, after a series of war time incidents in New Guinea (including a trip on a U.S. submarine), he returned to Australia for six months more training in Brisbane.

I will not try to repeat many of the fascinating details of Yali's subsequent career as both a leader of millenarian movements and regional politics other than to emphasize that the question Diamond uses as a device to frame his account was one New Guineans had struggled with since the early days of contact.

Immediately after the war, Yali was the leader of a very prominent cargo movement (movement to acquire European goods). Lawrence divides the movement into five separate phases. The fifth led to the jailing of Yali and others in 1950 for five years. In the fifth phase, Yali directed a movement to return to native ritual practice. To give you a sense of the cultural politics of the scene I will quote a brief passage from Lawrence about this fifth phase:

"Thus almost overnight the pagan revival became the Fifth Cargo Belief. Although he had described his doctrine in full to Yali and his close associates, Gurek ['theologian' of the movement] gave only the barest outline to the people at the assembly at Sor, telling them simply that it was now known that the New Guinea deities as a whole were their true cargo source [not Christianity]. Yali's new policy was fully justified: the natives must abandon Christianity and go back to their own religion so that the goods they wanted would come. Gurek gave them the following instructions: Traditional rituals for agriculture, important artefacts, pig husbandry, and hunting, and the old taboos associated with them, were to be reintroduced; the Kabu Ceremony was to be performed in full, especially the secret parts of it reserved for adult males; and the Letub table ritual was to be instituted. Small tables were to be set up in private houses and near deity sanctuaries. They were to be covered with cotton cloth and decorated with bottles of flowers. Offerings of the spirits of the dead, who were to be invoked to send cargo. The invocations and offerings would ensure that the deities handed over presents to the ancestors who, pleased by the ritual (especially the Kabu Ceremony), would deliver them to their descendants. At such times, the natives would be told by the spirits during dreams where the goods had been leftCin deity sanctuaries or other parts of the bush. The cargo would include rifles, ammunition, and other military equipment.

"Gurek made other claims on this occasion. Apart from cargo in its usual sense, the deities would send also European domesticated animals, especially horses and cows. Additional 'laws' were laid down: Yali was henceforth to be addressed as King; and the days of the week were to be renamed. Gurek said that as Yali had been born on a Thursday, it was to be renamed Sunday and observed as the official day of rest from now on.....

"Once Gurek had laid the foundation of the doctrine of the Fifth Cargo Belief and the cult associated with it, Yali made a few minor additions of his own by attempting to draw parallels between the new ritual and what he had seen of European life. Gurek said that Mass was a hoax, and that the Kabu Ceremony and the table ritual were the true 'road of Cargo'. Yali corroborated this by saying that while he had been in Australia he had never once seen Mass celebrated, but he had often observed Europeans dancing and setting out vases of flowers in their house, restaurants, and other buildings. The dancing was obviously the equivalent of the ola of the Kabu Ceremony, in which men and women participated together outside the cult house. Again, floral decorations were the European version of the table ritual and, like the Kabu Ceremony itself, were means of honouring the ancestors. Although these ideas added little to the new cult, they were important in that they confirmed Yali's previous conclusions that the European and native religious systems were roughly similar in structure and function."

Diamond missed a lot when he was in New Guinea just as he misses a lot in his panoptic view of human history....

This is fascinating. It makes out Yali the ex-Australian army NCO and Cargo Cult leader to be much more and much less sophisticated than the charismatic politician Diamond describes. More sophisticated: rather than never leaving New Guinea, he spent a year in Australia and voyaged on a submarine. More sophisticated: he leaves Diamond with the impression that he is genuinely searching for answers, rather than cross-checking and seeking confirmation for conclusions he already holds. Less sophisticated: Yali has failed to recognize the distinction between natural technology and supernatural gifts of the gods, and has led many of his followers astray as well.

But how does this the fact that Yali is different from the man whom Diamond thinks it is "expose in a clear way the conceptual deficiencies of [Diamond's] key arguments in" Guns, Germs, and Steel? It is a mystery:

Holberg gives a clue:

...Most fundamentally, [Diamond] did not hear Yali's question and his book is no answer. Rather it perpetuates the colonial relation which Yali through oppositional politics attempted to transform. Yali, in a very fundamental sense, was concerned about what in our terms would be called inequality, justice, fairness, and morality...

Now it becomes clear. Holberg wishes that Yali had asked Diamond one of:

Why don't the westerners share their wealth with the New Guineans?
Why don't the westerners do more to teach New Guineans how to prosper?
How do westerners live with themselves, knowing how unjust is the world that they rule?
Instead of:

How did whites learn secrets of wealth and prosperity that New Guineans did not?
At least one of Holberg's beefs, it seems, is not with Diamond but with Yali: Yali is not following the script that Holberg wants him to follow.

And Holberg concludes:

Diamond provides no solace. On the contrary, his deterministic (and simplistic) argument has the opposite effect. Diamond tells us things are the way they are because that is the way that they have to be. Yali was not asking about the origins of unequal relations; he was asking about their perpetuation. In a word, Diamond denies Yali an equal humanity because he makes no attempt to understand Yali in his own terms. This failure is compounded in a more encompassing way in the key arguments of the book because Diamond's argument does not allow humanity in general any sort of culturally-inflected agency in the context of history.

And here we have why, in Holberg's eyes, Diamond is a racist: Diamond (in Guns, Germs, and Steel) focuses not on how human agency is culturally-inflected, but on how it is geographically-inflected and environmentally-inflected. That's materialism. That's reductionism. That's determinism. That's not racism.

P.S.: Road Belong Cargo is a very good book.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: And still more weirdness:

Henry Farrell criticizes another Savage Mind, Tak Watanabe, accusing Jared Diamond of "perpetuating racism":

Frog in a Well - The Japan History Group Blog: There are also frightening parallels in the history of Japanese fascism to the kind of environmental determinism used by Diamond.... Diamond... shares with Watsuji a basic methodology of relying on environmental factors as a way to typologize groups of people according to 'race.' The danger here lies... in the biologism of his methodological assumption.... [H]e perpetuates racism by associating a group of people with specific traits...

Ralph Luker jumps in to defend Tak:

History News Network: Henry, It appears to me that... you all are talking past each other.... Isn't it possible that, read in a Japanese context, [Jared] Diamond's argument plays into a Japanese tradition of racialism or racism that isn't otherwise inherent in Diamond's argument in non-Japanese contexts? As Japan specialists, Tak and Jonathan have some obligation to make that point and make it reasonably forcefully, if we fail to understand it. I don't see them as attempting to shut down debate, but as arguing that we -- you and I -- simply don't know enough about the Japanese context to appreciate that fact. I don't have any problem with acknowledging that I don't know nearly enough about Japan to argue with them.

No. It is not possible. The Jared Diamond essay under discussion ends:

The Japanese Roots: WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE COMBINED EVIDENCE OF ARCHEOLOGY, physical anthropology, and genetics supports the transparent interpretation... [that] the Ainu are descended from Japan's original inhabitants and the Japanese are descended from more recent arrivals [from Korea about 2400 years ago]. But that view leaves the problem of language unexplained. If the Japanese really are recent arrivals from Korea, you might expect the Japanese and Korean languages to be very similar....

[M]odern Korean may be a poor model for the ancient Yayoi language of Korean immigrants in 400 B.C.... Modern Korean is derived from the language of the kingdom of Silla... but Silla was not the kingdom that had close contact with Japan in the preceding centuries. Early Korean chronicles tell us that the different kingdoms had different languages... the few preserved words of one of those kingdoms, Koguryo, are much more similar to the corresponding Old Japanese words than are the corresponding modem Korean words.... The Korean language that reached Japan in 400 B.C., and that evolved into modem Japanese, I suspect, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we should not be surprised that modem Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.

History gives the Japanese and the Koreans ample grounds for mutual distrust and contempt, so any conclusion confirming their close relationship is likely to be unpopular among both peoples. Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia as in the Middle East. As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

Trust me, to say that modern non-Ainu Japanese have the bulk of their ancestors not among the Jomon potters but among the rice-growing Koreans who migrated to Japan 2500 years ago, and have Koreans as their closest cousins--that does not "play into a Japanese tradition of racialism or racism."

Posted by Brad DeLong on August 2, 2005 at 07:44 PM in Economic History, Economics, Economics: Growth, History, Moral Responsibility | Permalink

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"Lawrence's long biography of Yali indicates that Diamond is wrong on the facts. Diamond writes, "He had never been out of New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable." "

Okay, I think I got the part where Diamond was wrong about his not having been out of New Guinea (he spent some time in Australia). Was there anything to indicate that Diamond was wrong about his education?

I mean, yes, he had some military training as an adult. But "educated past high school" usually means "attended college/university", not simply "had some training after the age of 18".

That cargo cult stuff is *deeply* weird. I'm used to distinguishing between folk-theories and their scientific successors (folk-psychology, folk-kinematics, folk-astronomy, etc.). But has there ever been a folk-X that was as far off the mark as this was from real economic theories of production? And I usually think of economics *itself* as barely one step up from a folk-science!

Posted by: Tad Brennan | August 2, 2005 08:42 PM

I think attempting to use a magical stone to turn lead into gold is probably as far off the mark as you can get.

There is also an undercurrent of evangelical thought that claims wealth is a result of "goodness", that being some amalgamation of Christian virtue. People tend to want to attribute to some other power what's better often explained by luck.

Posted by: talboito | August 2, 2005 08:57 PM

Mr. Delong, I'm not sure, but are you (or Hollberg?) taking into account that Yali was being manipulative and cynical? A call towards tradition in the face of mandated change is about the friggin' oldest trick in the book of grabbing power, and the excerpts you provide, or that Hollberg does, does not give enough context to how much, he, Yali believes in his own cargo beliefs.

The Chinese stopped the naval/trade expeditions because of a new leader's need to retrench power, and that leader was essentially doing the same thing as Yali (We need to focus on our traditional beliefs and duties!). What's more, this *easily* could have happened in Europe as well. Let's not kid ourselves here, Columbus's voyage was expensive, and *known* to be in error before he even left! He only found some islands with little gold and some nice people and went back to Europe with that. And Europe could easily have said...eh, silly ole' man found a dinghy island, and left it at that and kept on with the sailing 'round Africa idea. It could have been a Turk fleet that found the Aztec, and in 1500, the Turks were *much* better capitalized for certain ventures. Heh, would be fun to think of islamic Aztecs, wouldn't it?

Second, I'm pretty sure there is a lingustic and anthropological issue here. How do we know much much that Yali question was a *question* and how much it was a *challenge* or *rhetorical*? Then your responses may look not so great, depending on what that meant?

Thirdly, I'm damned sensitive to determinist attitudes with regards to success. There is waaaaay too much that is meta in something as needsful of definition as success, than could be understood readily by reductionist terms.

Fourthly, while Diamond's arguments are fairly interesting in Guns Germs and Steel, they really *are* dangerously simplified for the mass audience. It can *easily* function as a more legit version of The Bell Curve (like one of the outs it tried to use was by saying Asian people were smarter than whites, so what's racist about that?) Fact is, Europe didn't *have* to succeed, and at several points, it survived potentially world changing inflection points. Specifically, the Mongol invasions could have come out differently in several different ways that would have drastically reduced European success (and in fact, were *more* likely than what *did* happen). And those potential events would have had nothing to do with the arguments Diamond made.

Try making counterarguments using Diamonds positions using a different civilization. It gets wierd. It's not just the Arabs/Turks and the Chinese. It's also about how the Songhay, various Hind empires, etc, didn't make it as well, and the arguments don't stretch all that well for them, because you say, oh the Sahara was to the north! Which is true, but waaay too simplistic. Which is to say, it's way too easy to go apply the criteria to another culture, before or after 1500, and come up with political or economic or some other reason that the society didn't make it, *and* say that it was more decisive a reason than the location of where that society was.

In the end, Mr. Delong, I tend to go with Cortez happened, and end with that. Probably just luck.

In a world where the Euros really may have won the world on a roll of the dice, it's imperative that any determinist arguments are more...finely resolved than is presented in Diamond's argument. The anthropologists really do have a point that this is going to feed racist sentiments, even if Diamond is scrupulously anti-racist.

Posted by: shah8 | August 2, 2005 09:16 PM

I think anthropology belongs with the humanities and not the social sciences. The disciplinary thinking is ridden with romanticism and determinism. To treat their subjects as Rousseau's noble savages is just as patronizing as crude colonial racism.
Also, Diamond is ALWAYS very careful to emphasize, in both GGS and Collapse, that human behavior has multiple causes and that he does not pretend to exhaust them all, just to bring to light those he knows best. He never pretends that his explanations are the alpha and omega of human societies.
These critics could learn a thing or two on scientific humility.

Posted by: Chris | August 2, 2005 09:18 PM

Holberg's comment that Diamond "makes no attempt to understand Yali in his own terms" is interesting.

To understand Yali on his own terms denies the very comparisons that Yali was asking Diamond about. You cannot understand a society "on its own terms" and also compare it quantitatively with another society.

And herein lies the real difference (in my opinion): Diamond is talking about technology, economics, productivity, etc while Holberg is talking about "humanity." A person is not necessarily impuning the dignity of a civilization by saying they are not technologically advanced.

In fact, I would argue Holberg's conclusions contradict a certain strain of multiculturalism. Diamonds argument of geographic development denotes that society's development is not due to superior racial: intelligence, creativity, or ambition. Rather, their advancements can be in part explained by geographic and environmental factors.

That seems to me to be the antithesis of racism.

Posted by: Steve | August 2, 2005 09:19 PM

The problem with the Turks encountering the Aztecs is that Spain and Portugal were in the way. As for Columbus being ignored, could have happend. But remember that the Portugese discovered Brazil independantly of Spanish efforts, and quite by accident into the bargain.

Posted by: Steven Rogers | August 2, 2005 09:21 PM

Hmmm... Yali's religio-political views remind me of David Frum, as described by John Holbo's famous review of "Dead Right."

http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html

Basically, the message seems to be, "if we get the culture right by going back to radical cultural conservatism, the economy will take care of itself."

Posted by: Julian Elson | August 2, 2005 09:23 PM

What a fantastic and compelling book. I find two things particularly strange about this onslaught of criticism: (1) Diamond lays out his argument graphically somewhere around page 90, so there isn't really much excuse for misunderstanding it. (2) He goes FAR, FAR out of his way to defuse any claims that any portion of his book is based on cultural factors.

Surely it would be obvious to these people that Diamonds says nothing about the perpetuation of unequal social relations in a unified world with significant transcontinental interactions. Why Europe versus China is an interesting question, but China did not have epidemics on its encounter with the West in any way comparable to what happened in the Americas, and that's a very powerful dog that simply isn't barking somewhere in the recesses of history.

Posted by: trevelyan | August 2, 2005 09:23 PM

Shah8

I don't understand how you can claim that GGS could serve as a Bell Curve. The claims he made are the precise opposite.

And your claim about the Mongols and Europe really miss the point. They almost make me think you haven't read the book. Diamond isn't trying to answer why Western Europe came to dominate the world after 1000 (when the Mongols or the Turks came to power) but why Eurasian societies developed the most advanced societies up 1000.

Posted by: Patrick | August 2, 2005 09:31 PM

Steven Rogers:

The Turk navy was the best or the second best navy in the Medit by a close margin in the time area we are talking about. If some Morroccan or Turk trader made it back with claims of wealthy countries across the seas, the Ottoman Empire was *much* more capable than Hapsburg Spain in being able to send a fleet, or even a small expedition like Columbus's. Spain and especially Portugal wasn't in the way.

Posted by: shah8 | August 2, 2005 09:32 PM

I'm going to be a Meta-Anthropologist. I'll do fieldwork in university anthro departments, where I'll interview the graduate students, junior profs, and department heads. I'll map their complex social hierarchy; observe their secret religious rituals, and document their pidgin (in which English loan words like "ethnocentric" and "racist" have apparently been stripped of their original meanings).

We need to explode the para-ethnocentric (perhaps even hemi-racist) theory that Anthropologists generally have smaller buildings and less funding than Chemists, Biologists, and Engineers because the latter groups have knowledge of guns, germs, and steel. In fact, these differences in power arise solely from cultural considerations. Anthropologist culture has never recognized the value of buildings or money. Preferring to sit out in the rain, Anthropologists derive all necessary sustenance from the carbon dioxide exhaled by their research subjects.

Hopefully my fieldwork will support my thesis. Although, if it doesn't, I suppose I can just keep interviewing people until it does.

Posted by: PurpleStater | August 2, 2005 09:36 PM

I guess Jared Diamond is supposed to just shut up because some hypothetical readers might get bad racist ideas by misreading his rather explicit denial of racial advantages?

Some of these critics are so deeply enmeshed in the toils of theory, you have to wonder if they're breathing some toxic fumes from the library basement they're living in.

For example, of what Earthly relevance is the exact politico-social-philosophical standing of Yali anyway?
Diamond uses their conversation (whether real or imaginary) to provide a sort of inciting incident to motivate the reader to follow him through hundreds of pages of argument. Yali isn't functioning as some kind of "material witness" to 13,000 years of human history -- he's a narrative hook!

This is a case where the reading public seems to have a clear intellectual edge over the academic cadres. May Diamond's books sell and sell and sell!

Posted by: STS | August 2, 2005 09:42 PM

I was going to remark, slightly OT, that it appears we have quite a number of cargo cult followers amongst us back in the U.S.A. nowadays, but talboito pre-empted me. Still, the notion that economics is a rational discipline, concerned only with the literal technology of production and thereby itself immune from commodity fetishism, by abstracting from the social/anthropolgical dimensions of exchange and the different sorts of needs that they serve, might thereby identify it as itself a sort of anti-cargo cult.

Posted by: john c. halasz | August 2, 2005 09:44 PM

Daimond advances a sliver of a theory of Europe vs. China along the lines of "Europe was divided and strong due to institution evolution (see Poland-Lithuania), China united and weak." He concedes, though, that this isn't his forté, and that the consensus among most people is that China's falling behind Europe, the U.S., and Japan was due to proximal factors.

I think his caution is warranted. In 1500, China was ahead of Europe (I think?), in 2000, Europe was ahead of China. Who knows who will be ahead in 2500?

The U.S., on the other hand, is eternally mighty and shall be a superpower until the universe is ripped apart by cosmological forces, except for our somewhat embarassing period of invasion, defeat, and occupation at the hands of British forces from 1620 to 1776.

Posted by: Julian Elson | August 2, 2005 09:46 PM

I also want to modify the previous comment that it was predominantly *cultural* issues that stopped the Turks from taking the lead in the exploration.

Next, I have read the book, but two years ago. I didn't participate in the conversation in the previous threads for that reason. I just felt inspired now. Especially when this is sounding a lot more like an arguments between geeks who are more comfortable with numbers and humanities people who are more comfortable with people.

I have read Collaspe recently, so I get the kind arguments that Diamond makes.

Now, I *have* cought Diamond making some not very wise remarks in both of his books or so I remember. As I remember, he is generally someone who isn't suspicious enough of his sources and tends to remark on any problem by essentially laying it on the reader to find out whether something is true or not.

Patrick, considering what the Mongols did and didn't do, and the sheer expanse of the consequences, it's really stupid not to consider counterfactuals about what happened then, especially considering the rapid expansion and collaspe of the empire. Now, I don't really care quite this much about that argument, so I'll let you have it. The only thing I would grant is that The Americas never had much of a chance. However, I believe that a main, if not *the* main cause was a lack of a bronze age in the Americas, and that would be something I'd like to explore at some point to see if theory has any validity.

Next point: Let's not be stupid, people. There are a *lot* of fuckin' crypto racists out there. He doesn't have to be accuratly represented for it to serve as a source for alot of racist arguments. People have made proxy arguments all the time to suffocate alternative explanations of why they have all the loot. The biggest issue is that this question is *alot* bigger than the kind of pop sci book that Diamond wrote. It isn't really even as deep as Pomeranz's book, and that gots loads of primary data, and loads of critics of its own as well.

Posted by: shah8 | August 2, 2005 09:57 PM

Shah8,

Turkey had a first class navy for operations in the Mediterranean, operations in the North Atlantic were a different kettle of fish entirely

Spain and Portugal not in the way? That really is quite an odd statement. The Iberian powers had a lock on the strategic choke points which the Turks would have had to pass to gain access to the North Atlantic.

When it comes to grabbing the New World, the Iberian states got the jump on everybody - not just the Turks, because of a *very* advantageous geographic position.

Posted by: Steven Rogers | August 2, 2005 09:58 PM

Steven, if the Turks had *wanted* control of the exits, do you think Spain/Portugal could have stopped them? The Turks had already beaten Italian maritime powers and claimed their strategic spots...

next STS, Jared Diamond doesn't delve a great deal into the data in what I remember of Guns Germs Steel. What's more, he did not utilize hard data in any *counterfactuals* against his hypothesis, and it *is* very easy to read alot of what he says as merely PC, and take from it the lesson that Europe was probably gonna be on top anyways...

Posted by: shah8 | August 2, 2005 10:09 PM

Shah8,

Considering what else the Turks had on their plate, yes I think the Iberian States could have stopped them. A general war against Spain and Portugal would have brought the Italian states back into play, and the Persians were always ready to jump on The Turk when his attention was heavily engaged elsewhere. And of course, the Arabs were as restive as always.

Posted by: Steven Rogers | August 2, 2005 10:21 PM

eh...already know I made some typos but still...

Short version:
Diamond says that materialist and geographic terms defined who won and who lost. If one reads history and studies human nature, one knows that such terms were only present in the background, and decisions based on culteral matrixes were in the foreground (ex Montezuma's superstition). He is in the end saying that terms made successful cultures.

He is one of a long series of people, most of whom are bullshit artists or seriously wrong (like the whole northern countries are colder and so they had to plan better than tropical countries and hence English are smarter and more prepared or whatever) to make materialist/reductionist imposition on culture. It is wisest to ask for *very* definite scholarship before acclaiming it as something new being understood.

Posted by: shah8 | August 2, 2005 10:27 PM

"There are a *lot* of fuckin' crypto racists out there. He doesn't have to be accuratly represented for it to serve as a source for alot of racist arguments."

A lot of racist arguments are sourced from the backs of cereal boxes. Shall we boycott Wheaties?

Posted by: PurpleStater | August 2, 2005 10:27 PM

It's like Lepanto never happened...

The Iberians also had a wealth of navigational and geographical information and methodology the Turks didn't have.

Posted by: Alan | August 2, 2005 10:37 PM

Hah!

Turks were winning most of the battles at that point (around 1500) and had the big mo! If they didn't bog themselves down trying to conquer Eastern Europe, they most definitly *could* have taken on the Iberian states. I wasn't talking about the Turks adding yet another war on their plates, I was talking in pure capacity in which to wage war while holding on to territory. Not to mention that none of their territorial issues had much to do with naval issues!

Purplestater, I should make this clear. I don't have much against Diamond, I just feel that Delong et al are pretty insensitive and naive about what the anthropologists are saying. I also did alot of research in related fields. Anybody *with* substantive humanities experience, anywheres from criminology to some obscure branch of anthropology whatever, has a real academic cultural experience with alot of bull that sounded perfectly based on reality, when, well, the main reason a theory was upheld was that it upheld popular ego.

Posted by: shah8 | August 2, 2005 10:40 PM

Lepanto was in 1571, Shah8 and I are I agree that the Tuks lack of operational experience in the North Atlantic was going to be a big problem for them.

Shah8, not to be picking on you, but Montezuma running the Aztec show was an example of Spanish Luck. Either Montezumas predecessor or his successor would have chopped Cortez and his merry band of pirates into dog food.

Posted by: Steven rogers | August 2, 2005 10:42 PM

There are and have been many Yalis, culture-brokers who have served as "informants" for multiple foreign observers, and whose activity is as much inquiry of their own as it is simple response to questions. There's been some interesting work on this as anthro has become more self-critical.

In the case of GG&S the Yali story strikes me as a set-piece intro for a book that JD would have written anyway, though one can certainly look at how JD frames and portrays the encounter.

But why not look at Holberg's comment, right or wrong, as one of a range of positions or critiques that anthropologists might make? In other words, Brad, why decide based on a rather small number of data points that this is *the* hegemonic anthro position? (The same thing of course happens the other way -- if you say you're an economist, people often assume you're a "typical" economist.) Interdisciplinary conversation requires some willingness to see other disciplines not as unified wholes or rigid sets of answers but as ongoing and internally-disparate processes of inquiry.

Finally give anthro some credit for a tradition of self-critical work about what kinds of assumptions it has made about the nature of the world, how it has indeed at times romanticized people and treated "native informants" as naive relayers of cultural data. And this requires a certain level of nuance -- it's not like there are only two narrow positions, racist and not.

Posted by: Colin Danby | August 2, 2005 10:42 PM

That post was mangled. I meant to type that Shah8 and I are discussing 1490-1520ish and I think that the turks lack of experience in the North Atlantic was a real problem.

The problem with the Turks going after the Iberians in a big way is indeed the balkans. This was not a bog, from their point of view, but one of their prime strategic concerns. They were not strong enough to take the Balkans and Iberia at the same time so they chose the balkans - and quite sensibly, too.

Posted by: Steven Rogers | August 2, 2005 10:48 PM

Ummm, 71 years after what we are talking about? And with Spain having the resources of the new world to even things out?

Lepanto isn't something that makes one *smarter* in this context.

Also, given the mercantile history of Europe, I daresay it probably would have been easy for the Turks to catch up with Spain, at least a little bit via spies.

don't worry, this is a fun digression for me. I don't actually believe that the Turks should have found the americas, I just don't believe that they didn't have the opportunity.

Posted by: shah8 | August 2, 2005 10:50 PM

Mr. Elson--

I actually *do* hope that the US, or some suitable successor with a similar constitution, will continue to flourish until the depopulation of the galaxy.

But even *I* have to admit that there was another embarrassing episode a few decades after 1776. You know, some Brits came and torched the White House? "Rockets' red glare", all that?

Posted by: Tad Brennan | August 2, 2005 10:51 PM

"This is a case where the reading public seems to have a clear intellectual edge over the academic cadres."

To qualify this, there's also been quite a number of academic cadres who found Diamond's books impressive and challenging.

Posted by: ogmb | August 2, 2005 10:51 PM

I think what Holberg is getting at is that the question is not "please sir tell me why do you have so much stuff so I can change my ways and get some."

It is I am developing a plan to get some of that stuff so tell me what you know now and I'll what I can do with this information.

Diamond's Yali is a bit like Robinson Crusoe's Friday in that the operative attibute he brings to Diamonds book is inquisitiveness.

To Holgren, Lawrences Yali is truer because the operative attribute he posesses is cunning.

I'm sure Diamond is a nice man. But this goes back to my comment a few weeks ago (like anyone cares!). What makes this seem so colonial is the idea that the way the Developed world lives, that is the technology AND culture, is the way people are supposed to live. Whereas, the way other people live and by extention think is fundementally underdeveloped.

Mr. Diamond may make the statement that the technological can be differentiated from the cultural but no trained Anthropologist would have any patience for that contention and would likely regard it as a fig leaf.

Posted by: Michael Carroll | August 2, 2005 10:53 PM

Michael - I think that Diamond's argument is open to a lot of interpretation, but I dont think he's saying that people ought to live like Europeans. He's simply saying that if you want to know why Europeans came to North America first, and not the other way around, there are some good explanations as to why.

And really, Diamond's position makes it seem like its not the white race of the Europeans, or the Protestant work ethic, that explains their success (technologically), but they had certain "legs up" on the people they conquered, being in the right place, in the right time.

I agree culture and technology are related, however. Ancient society's (technologically primitive) deal with different issues than more technologically advanced ones. As the pace of technology advances, new problems and social issues arise the demand a different kind of society. Now, granted, you can take the Campbell Hero with a Thousand Faces position, but thats a religious rather than legal and cultural discussion.

Posted by: Steve | August 2, 2005 11:40 PM

I hardly commented on Yali because he doesn't have a lot to do with Diamond's story. Yes, I think Diamond misunderstood Yali or at least pretended to. But so what? This anthropologist is looking at Yali as a sort of metaphor of all the other things Diamond ignores while he goes after his own story. Here's a link that briefly describes Yali's place in politics:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2267426

It includes various hilarious side issues like the islanders who collected $75,000 to buy Lyndon Johnson from the USA and make him their king. Yali successfully got some cargo from the australians because they were concerned about cargo cults that were christian heresies. They tried to use him to eliminate the christian cargo cults, and he used them to set himself up as the head of a big unified nonchristian cargo cult.

My suggestion was that somebody should have told him to tell the americans about communist cargo cults, so the americans would give him cargo to eliminate *them*. But it's too late now.

It was a very good move for Diamond to use Yali for his question, because unlike lots of other primitives, Yali and the cargo cults are interested in precisely the things Diamond is interested in -- getting cargo, getting stuff. They agree on what the issue is. Holmberg is right that the question Yali actually wanted answered was not "Why is it that you have stuff and I don't", but "How do I get cargo too". And of course Diamond's answer is basically, "You don't.".

New guinea has fine mineral resources including oil. They can produce more food than they need. They have a low population density. They've been doing agriculture for at least 10,000 years, they've been doing gardening for more like 60,000 years. But there are fundamental reasons why they aren't europe. One is that their land is mostly rain forest, and they basicly don't have winters. So they didn't develop crops that they can store for months to last through the winter, and without long-storing grain there was no way for a government to develop to take their grain. So it isn't like they've been developing agriculture for 10,000 years, it's more like they've been developing agriculture for one year, 10,000 times. They didn't take the path that would lead to centralised government, so they couldn't develop high technology and steamships and conquer the world. Also their geography works against central government.

"The indigenous population of Papua New Guinea is one of the most heterogeneous in the world. Papua New Guinea has several thousand separate communities, most with only a few hundred people. Divided by language, customs, and tradition, some of these communities have engaged in low-scale tribal warfare with their neighbors for millennia. The advent of modern weapons and modern migration patterns has greatly magnified the impact of this lawlessness.

"The isolation created by the mountainous terrain is so great that some groups, until recently, were unaware of the existence of neighboring groups only a few kilometers away. The diversity, reflected in a folk saying, "For each village, a different culture," is perhaps best shown The indigenous population of Papua New Guinea is one of the most heterogeneous in the world. Papua New Guinea has several thousand separate communities, most with only a few hundred people. Divided by language, customs, and tradition, some of these communities have engaged in low-scale tribal warfare with their neighbors for millennia. The advent of modern weapons and modern migration patterns has greatly magnified the impact of this lawlessness.

The isolation created by the mountainous terrain is so great that some groups, until recently, were unaware of the existence of neighboring groups only a few kilometers away." Many of these groups are doing low-intensity warfare against each other and have been for thousands of years. The villages claim land communally and don't believe in individuals selling land. The PNG government backs them up and agrees that the villages own 97% of the total land. That involves a lot of subsistence agriculture that isn't measured in GDP; is it any wonder that exports are around 47% of GDP and imports around 46%?

"Yali, in a very fundamental sense, was concerned about what in our terms would be called inequality, justice, fairness, and morality."

I don't really see that, I think Yali was asking how he could get rich and bring riches to his people. The sort of things economists think about.

"Diamond provides no solace. On the contrary, his deterministic (and simplistic) argument has the opposite effect. Diamond tells us things are the way they are because that is the way that they have to be."

I'm not clear Diamond is really saying that. He says things are the way they are because they happened as they had to happen, in general. But just as he doesn't have a firm geographic argument that says which part of eurasia had to conquer the world, he also doesn't say how things have to go from here. Diamond is no Hari Seldon. He just plays one on TV.

Is there an economist who'd make a guess how new guinea could become rich? Clearly they can't expect to do it with autarky, even with their rich resources they have only 5 million people. They don't particularly have iron and coal to make their own steel. So they must trade. But without a lot of development they must trade their raw materials for manufactured goods, and the more of that they do the better they learn how to extract raw materials to trade -- they aren't learning how to build an other-than-colonial economy. Dependent on a few exports to pay for a lot of imports, they'll have pricing turbulence and the uncertainty will make it hard to plan. And they've gotten entangled with the World Bank and IMF.

Per capita GDP was around $580 in 2003, I don't know how the recent dollar devaluations etc would affect that. And it's a bit misleading. It's more like 3/4 of the people are living like their ancestors 5000 years ago did (except they have steel tools and matches etc), and the remainder have a per capita GDP of around $2300.

How could they become wealthy like us? How could they get a whole lot of stuff?

Posted by: J Thomas | August 3, 2005 12:16 AM

>For example, of what Earthly relevance is the exact politico-social-philosophical standing of Yali anyway?
> Diamond uses their conversation (whether real or imaginary) to provide a sort of inciting incident to
> motivate the reader to follow him through hundreds of pages of argument. Yali isn't functioning as some kind
> of "material witness" to 13,000 years of human history -- he's a narrative hook!

This is precisely my problem with Holberg as well. Holberg seems to think that undermining (if one were uncharitable, one could call it 'nit picking') Diamond's account of his conversation with Yali, he is undermining Diamond's entire thesis. Diamond's thesis has nothing to do with the details of who Yali was or the nature of Diamond's conversation with Yali. Yali is, as STS perfectly puts it, 'a narrative hook'. It is rediculous to assert, as Holberg implicitly does, that by undermining Diamond's story of his conversation with Yali, Holberg has undermined GG&S's thesis; doing so is an error in critical reading on, frankly, a high school level. Holberg should be ashamed of himself and his peers in Anthropology should be ashamed of him as well.

There are plenty of nits to pick in the real arguments that Diamond puts forth (how did the Huns almost conquer Europe? Why aren't we all speaking Chinese?) that I would rather PhD anthropologists at Cornell University spend their time on, rather than engaging in the rhetorical-equivelent of accusing Diamond's mother of dressing him funny.

Posted by: NBarnes | August 3, 2005 12:41 AM

You know, I re-read that post three times. But I still, now reading it again, feel like I'm writing at a high school level tonight myself. Sorry. :(

Posted by: NBarnes | August 3, 2005 12:43 AM

Steven-

My point is that it doesn't matter whether Diamond meant to suggest that adopting the material lifestyle of the devoped world is "better" or not. My point is that its hared to write a book like that without it taking on that interpretation. Yeah, sorry I'm deconstructing here but lets not split hairs. In the Anglo Saxon world saying, "oh, I'm just explaining why we have all this stuff and those people don't," cannot be separated from saying "Aren't we lucky we have all this stuff and what a pity those people don't - what went wrong for them." without a lot of strain. That's because the latter question has been asked about five thousand times and our knowledge of that question and the ways in which people have tried to answer it biases our hearing anytime the next guy takes a crack at it.

He can't just jump into a question like this without seriously acknowleding the prexisting debates. There is along line of Geographic Determinists (e.g. Ellen Semple, or T.G Taylor) and Diamond's tools aren't THAT different than theirs's. These folks had some very interesting things to say that were similar to Diamond and then they also wanted to say the Europeans were superior to everyone else.

Oh, and 1500-1560 the Ottomans were tops, bar none. Nonetheless, they would have had no intersest in finding a short cut to the indies because they were the main reason people were looking for a short cut in the first place.

Posted by: Michael Carroll | August 3, 2005 01:48 AM

Michael

Even if what your suggesting is true, it does nothing to impune the logic of Dr. Diamond.

"Aren't we lucky we have all this stuff and what a pity those people don't - what went wrong for them"

well aside from the colorful language, there's nothing racist in aknowledging quantitative differences in technology and economics, and trying to explain it. I see no problem with that.

And I think the answer to the question you raise is in Dr. Delong's initial post - you want Dr. Diamond to address a different question from the one he attempt to answer. You are not attempting to disagree with his conclusions, only the fact that he attempted to formulate them in the first place.

One cannot prevent racists and ignorant people from leaching off bits and pieces of information in the academic community. And writing this does not create the racists to begin with.

Posted by: Steve | August 3, 2005 02:18 AM

That so meticulous and fair a thinker and researcher as Jared Diamond becomes open to such untempered criticism is quite disheartening.

Posted by: anne | August 3, 2005 03:13 AM

shah8
The Turkish conquest of Hungary started well before 1500. 200 years were not enough them to accomplish the conquest.

Posted by: Dr, Minorka | August 3, 2005 04:00 AM

Ever since I read The Third Chimpanzee and GGS I've had an amiguous view of both books. But first, let me say, that to call (or imply) that Diamond is a racist, or that his books lead to racism, suggests to me that someone is either not reading or simply reading in bad faith.

Nor do I think that Diamond's pop sci is going to lead people to racism. Quite the contrary.

On balance, I think Diamond has done materialist anthropology, economic history and related disciplines a big favor by putting a lot of views and ideas out into public debate. He is not an anthropologist or economic historian, he's a biologist and his explanations and explanatory style tend to reflect this. Here we have a biologist contributing to public discussion of economic anthropology and economic history, making it popular and getting people to think-and I for one think this can be only a good thing.

Now that said, yes, there are some things about Diamond that rankle me. His explanations are overly simplistic. He does miss important detail. And he seems to studiously ignore the fact that archaeologists and anthropologists and some economic historians have been working with ecological/infrastructure models of history for a long, long time. In that sense, Diamond is a bit of a johnny come lately and it would have been polite of him to acknowledge people like Julian Seward, Marvin Harris and Eric Wolf. In fact, I think that Wolf's explanation in Europe and the People Without History is a much better one. But the two explanations are not contradictory.

The problem is that those who want to turn anthropology (or economic history or archeology) or any other discipline into literary criticism are committing far worse sins than Diamond. They are a bunch of petti fogging obscurantists who ultimately leave us with no explanations and hence no solutions.

The message of GGS is not that Yali's people have to live without cargo. The message is that they are at a disadvantage due to a geographica accident of history.

Posted by: Chip Poirot | August 3, 2005 04:30 AM

Go upthread ^^ and read STS's comment. He sums this controversy up well.

Posted by: TimW | August 3, 2005 06:44 AM

BTW... I'm reading GGS right now after seeing an episode of the PBS series. It's great and I plan on continuing on with "Collapse."

Posted by: TimW | August 3, 2005 06:45 AM

Re: "There are and have been many Yalis, culture-brokers who have served as "informants" for multiple foreign observers, and whose activity is as much inquiry of their own as it is simple response to questions. There's been some interesting work on this as anthro has become more self-critical. In the case of GG&S the Yali story strikes me as a set-piece intro for a book that JD would have written anyway, though one can certainly look at how JD frames and portrays the encounter. But why not look at Holberg's comment, right or wrong, as one of a range of positions or critiques that anthropologists might make? In other words, Brad, why decide based on a rather small number of data points that this is *the* hegemonic anthro position?"

I don't think it is the hegemonic anthro position. I do now think that there is a subgroup that uses phony accusations of racism in an attempt to exclude others from discourse. Holberg doesn't like the fact that the question Yali asks Diamond doesn't fit the script that Holberg has assigned to Yali, and so Holberg calls Diamond a racist. It's that simple.

Posted by: Brad DeLong | August 3, 2005 07:08 AM

Repeatedly Jared Diamond's work is taken as "pop science." This is absurd unless what is meant is that Diamond is a simple and clear and wonderfull engaging writer. Diamond's work shows the painstaking attention to layering of observation on observation that characterize the finst of evolutionary biologists from Charles Darwin on. Darwin was also a wonderfully clear and engaging writer. Look to Diamond and Ernst Mayr his teacher on birds and you will find presicely the same anecdotal research that he uses through "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel." We have a master scientist at hand, who has set down for us a brilliant robust framework for historical research that will be expaned for decades.

Posted by: anne | August 3, 2005 07:18 AM

Diamond's work in every way tears at any pretense of ethnic of racial stereotyping. The idea that it is otherwise is absurd, and shows not the slightest interest in understanding Diamond.

Posted by: anne | August 3, 2005 07:22 AM

How could they get a whole lot of stuff?

All 5 m of them move to Los Angeles County?

Posted by: sm | August 3, 2005 07:28 AM

I agree with PurpleStater on the profound weirdness of the culture of the tribe of Anthropologists. I wonder if they provide an exception to the hundreds of "cultural universals" identified by Donald Brown, and reproduced by Steven Pinker in an appendix to every other book he writes. For example, do they believe rape is wrong?

Posted by: James Wimberley | August 3, 2005 07:31 AM

>
>The Turkish conquest of Hungary started well before 1500. >200 years were not enough them to accomplish the >conquest.

The key event was the battle of Mohacs, 1526.

Posted by: sm | August 3, 2005 07:32 AM

Alan wrote:

>The Iberians also had a wealth of navigational and geographical information and methodology the Turks didn't have.

The Turkish navy was primarily composed of galleys--wonderful in the Med, and employed in Mediterranean navies well into the 19th century, but of no use in open ocean.

One technological innovation that the Iberians made was the caravel, a ship that combined square-rigged and lateen sails and could sail at many points vs. the wind, enabling global navigation. The Turks could have stolen or copied Iberia's navigational technology (compass, quadrant--heck, Arabs were the main navigational innovators in the Middle Ages) and they had access to the same ancient maps (Ptolemy) that were the basis of Iberia's mapping enterprises. However, building caravels instead of galleys would have necessitated a huge investment--and why do it, when galleys are more effective fighting ships in your sphere of influence?

Posted by: Nicholas Mycroft | August 3, 2005 08:28 AM

anne: Diamond's book is a work of "pop science" because he fails to do what's required in a scholarly work -- credit his predecessors. According to experts in the field, very little of his argument is original.

Posted by: Walt | August 3, 2005 08:32 AM

I'm going to be a Meta-Anthropologist. I'll do fieldwork in university anthro departments, where I'll interview the graduate students, junior profs, and department heads. I'll map their complex social hierarchy; observe their secret religious rituals, and document their pidgin.

Already been done. Check out the discussion of the hidden hierarchies of anthropology in Rabinow, Paul. “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-modernity in Anthropology.” Clifford and Marcus 234­61

Posted by: Henry Farrell | August 3, 2005 08:35 AM

What kind of criticism can we expect in short articles and blog posts? Here's a book with a lot of data and a lot of handwaving, and short criticisms can't hope to do it justice. On the other hand, long criticism isn't worth doing -- an anthropologist who wrote a book demolishing Diamond's assertions point by point would be making a bad career move unless Diamond gets enough credibility to be worth spending a long time attacking. And the public wouldn't be interested, so it probably wouldn't make much money from sales.

It looks to me like Holmberg has done a shortcut. Here's Yali, who Diamond dismisses in a quick sketch, and that the TV show implies is just some shlub that Diamond met on a beach. But when you look at the details Yali is a fascinating and sophisticated figure who has clearly had a significant effect on new guinea history, who was asking a much deeper question than Diamond implies. And the implication is -- what other details has Diamond ignored? He has a simple easy-to-follow picture, but what is he missing? Well, scratch the surface anywhere and see. Holberg scratched the surface one place and Diamond's simple picture was way too simple. "Diamond missed a lot when he was in New Guinea just as he misses a lot in his panoptic view of human history." This looks to me like a valid criticism. It's a criticism that could be made of any book that tries to paint a simple clear picture of all of human history to 1500. Diamond is just the latest to try that and get the criticism. And yet, isn't the project worth doing even though it cannot be done adequately?

The accusation of ethnocentrism and unconscious racism looks to me like a natural thing to tag anybody who isn't an anthropologist. Of course Diamond is ethnocentric, if he wasn't he'd lose his popular audience. His assumptions ar widely shared. Most americans would agree that it's far better to be rich in new york or paris, than to be a rich new guinean who had to live in port moresby. And most would assume that it was far better to be rich in paris in 1600 than rich in new guinea in 1600. It's far better to kill your enemies with artillery and airstrikes than with stone knives and clubs -- particularly if you're the one dishing it out instead of taking it. It's better to be able to buy all the croissants and filet mignon and lobsters you want in the grocery store, than to have to grow your own taro and pick your own bananas. It's better to talk to a psychiatrist than a witch doctor. When you compare the best that a hi-tech society has to offer its rich people to the best elsewhere, we're clearly much better off. Aren't we?

And even if we aren't better off, even if we're putting up with a lot that we don't like, still there's no alternative. Because if we don't do it, somebody else will. And then they'll take our oil and we'll be poor.

It seemse to me that Diamond presents a valid argument why human choice is not very important in the long run. Your choices might speed things up or slow them down in your own culture, which will only affect whether your culture is the one that does the inevitable and gets whatever rewards come. He's probably wrong in detail, and a lot of his big ideas are probably wrong (since how often do we get things right before the data is in?) but the biggest picture may be right. For any environment some toolset will be best, meaning dominant. Somebody will eventually find the best toolset and use it to dominate everybody else. If you don't like it, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

And yet these anthropologists don't think it's all inevitable. Maybe that's because they see radically different cultures in similar environments, and so they think that it doesn't have to be just one way. They don't hold firmly to the concept that what it means for a culture to be different is that it has to be unsuccessful. They don't see the big picture.

The big picture is that we're the successful ones, and if some other culture doesn't play by our rules then we'll grab all their stuff. It's inevitable.

Posted by: J Thomas | August 3, 2005 08:42 AM

Turks have consistently shown an ability and willingness to make huge investment in navies, almost on a dime (during that era). Caravels aren't *that* much of a problem...

Posted by: shah8 | August 3, 2005 08:42 AM

Walt:
"Diamond's book is a work of "pop science" because he fails to do what's required in a scholarly work -- credit his predecessors. According to experts in the field, very little of his argument is original."

Cites?

Posted by: JRoth | August 3, 2005 09:10 AM

I think it's entirely reasonable to describe Guns, Germs, and Steel as science popularization. It's not a book of original research. It wasn't published in a technical journal. It summarizes and synthesizes original research, some by the author but most by other people.

Calling it science popularization is not a putdown, and the fact that so many people think of it as a putdown is a deficiency in American intellectual culture.

There's a need for good, accessible writing about scholarly subjects that isn't part of the technical literature. If this had been technical literature I wouldn't have read it (I don't read technical journals in fields other than my own), and that would have been a real loss. This book, like the books of other good popularizers, showed me new things and new ways of thinking.

Diamond's latest book, by the way, Collapse, is slightly different. It's also a work of popularization, but parts of it are very clearly Diamond's own original research and contain specific references to journal articles that he published.

Posted by: Matt Austern | August 3, 2005 09:11 AM

Turkish navy:

The Turks, like the ancient Persians, could have captured the shipyards that made the ships.

Indeed, the huge surge in "Turkish" activity in the Med in the 16th c. was to a great extent the recruiting of Barbarossa and other "Barbary coast" pirates.

Any new sailor has to learn a whole bunch of new stuff almost immediately. Shipbuilders and navigators take longer, but they all start from scratch.

Posted by: sm | August 3, 2005 09:23 AM

"Diamond's work in every way tears at any pretense of ethnic of racial stereotyping. The idea that it is otherwise is absurd, and shows not the slightest interest in understanding Diamond."

Since the claim is "unconscious racism", I can imagine how it could go -- though I don't see the proof.

Suppose that Diamond started out with the conclusion he wanted -- europeans are inevitably the best -- and worked backward to get hypothese and anecdotal evidence to support it. And then he carefully polished his language so he wasn't talking about race except occasionally to claim that some other races were as smart or smarter than europeans.

Then we'd get the result we got. But of course just because the data is compatible with this hypothesis doesn't mean the hypothesis is right.

And yet, isn't it very likely that this was how Diamond worked? If he'd started out with a map of the world and no knowledge whatsoever of history, and he looked at all the plants and animals available everywhere 40,000 years ago, and he tried to predict what would happen, do you think he'd get it right?

What he has done is a giant JustSo story. He started with the results and he tried to come up with ideas that would explain them. And then -- lo and behold! -- his ideas tend to fit the data. After all, if he knew they didn't fit the available data he'd cut and fit until they did.

And now that he's carefully crafted his hypotheses to fit the data he's heard about, how can they be tested? How can we for example test the idea that europe's geography left it with separate nations that competed on technology while china's geography left them with an empire that stifled? If we only had a couple hundred copies of the earth, and we could seed it with random races of people, and see how reproducibly his ideas came out....

To my way of thinking it isn't science. It just isn't. I dont understand people who'd call it science. They're from some other culture, some culture that has a very different idea what science is.

Incidentally, when Diamond attributes european innovation to the geography that gave them multiple nations, I'd tend to put more emphasis on the monasteries. European monasteries had a reliable surplus, and they experimented. They experimented with new ways to do crop rotation, they experimented with new plows, they did a whole lot of the nonmilitary R&D that got done before 1500. And they came up with methodologies for experiments. They came up with Bacon. There might be geographical reasons to explain why the monasteries developed, but I don't know what they are. No doubt Diamond could come up with some.

Posted by: J Thomas | August 3, 2005 09:25 AM

in terms of galleys and caravels, to echo a line from one of my favorite movies, that's a different kind of sailing altogether.

Group, in unison: "that's a different kind of sailing."

It's not just shipyards, it's people--you need a lot of open-ocean, expert sailors, not just rowers (who were mainly slaves). More expensive, more difficult than adding galleys.

The Turks would have had to control the whole Med and Gibraltar just to get their ships -into- the ocean--would have needed as large or larger a galley-based navy for the Med as the one they actually had -and- a whole new navy of caravels and a whole new force of sailors for the Atlantic. Just an enormous investment, requiring a complete paradigm shift, and with an uncertain payoff. Highly unlikely, whereas Iberia + England + France, already accustomed to open-ocean sailing and closer to the New World, would quite naturally move towards exploration + colonization.

I guess my point is that even in the joyous world of counterfactual historical speculation, one is pushing pretty hard at the bounds of plausibility to see the Ottoman Turks embarking on a major effort to exploit the New World. I think Diamond's point is that people and cultures tend to do what they are more likely to do given the environment they find themselves in. Which, in this case, they did.

Posted by: Nicholas Mycroft | August 3, 2005 09:36 AM

I do think I understand why people are worried about the popularity of GGS. Basically, we've been burned by attractive, reductive theories of the fate of humanity before, from Marx to Condorcet to David Hackett Fischer. Inference and experience leads them to think, "well, if grand, bigthink theories of everything haven't worked to well before, this one probably won't work to well either." And I suspect they may very well be right. The thing is, they think it's wrong, because it has the same feel as a lot of other wrong theories, but they're not sure why yet, so they end up making even more wrongheaded attacks against it.

Posted by: Julian Elson | August 3, 2005 09:40 AM

I don't have a problem with arguing that Diamond's work is wrong. I don't even have a problem with an argument of the form "this seems too grand and overarching for me to take it all that seriously, for no other reason than that I'm skeptical of imputing huge chunks of history to single simple causes." I've even made that latter argument.

I do have a problem with saying that Diamond's work is not just mistaken but evil. Accusations of racism, even qualified with words like "quasi-" and "unconscious", strike me as crossing that line.

Posted by: Matt Austern | August 3, 2005 09:46 AM

Suppose the Turks had been the first from the European continent to make it to North America.

How does this affect Diamond's thesis, exactly? The point he's making is that the biology and geography of Europe gave the european strain of the 'African plains ape' a leg up.

Don't matter if the 'african plains ape' chose to wear a turban or pantaloons: he would still have brought 'guns germs and steel' across the broad Atlantic.

Posted by: Paul G. Brown | August 3, 2005 09:48 AM

Matt Austern, you need more experience in dealing with crypto-racism and their use of code words and other schemes to inject tracts that reflects their beliefs, so as to allow for general acceptance. I don't see Diamond as one of that crowd. I'm not even sure he's wrong either. He was pretty convinceing when I read it two years ago. It's just that the topic that he proposed to work on is *simply* just *too* sweeping to really accept it as something other than some thought out doodling...

Posted by: shah8 | August 3, 2005 09:56 AM

I was thinking about forming an advocacy group to protect the rights and reputations of synthesists/generalists--surely the most reviled and oppressed minority in the intellectual community--but I could not find any scientific reason to think that it would improve the situation.

Posted by: Nicholas Mycroft | August 3, 2005 10:02 AM

Nicholas: Read the history of the Ming trading fleets. They start off with shallow knowledge base of deep water navies as well, and fairly quickly converted alot of the brown water ships in existence to blue water. The Turks could have done the same, and the chinese had many foriengers aid in the construction and sailing of the fleet as well.

Paul G. Brown: I'm mostly having fun with the Turk arguments. Also, he had to focus alot more on Europe, as that his general premise was pretty dang vague. Considering how much of the world is europe, asia, and africa, compared to the americas, a conceiveable alt explanation is that greater land mass means more people, more people means that the competition was greater, and we wound up selecting best for the MF'ing tribe that conquers the world. So really, testing out a Turk counterfactual would probably weaken the bases of Diamond's theory, as later on he had to sorta admit with China.

Posted by: shah8 | August 3, 2005 10:08 AM

Coming in late:

There are lots of examples of nations getting up to speed in new technologies quickly. n after 1850 is the best example. The Mongols in China attacked Japan and Java by sea, and while all these attacks were ultimately unsuccessful, this was the first and only time anyone from China ever attacked either place. JapaYes, they were using Chinese technology, but they improved it and used it better and more aggressively than the Chinese had ever done. I believe that the great Ming dynasty fleets were inherited form the Mongols.

With the help of renegades, the Turks could have easily discovered America, if they had gained control of Gibralter.

However, at least some of the time the Ottomans controlled the Indian Ocean sea route to India and China. So they didn't need the Atlantic Route.

Diamond's book is a general-interest book for educated people such as Brad DeLong. His specialist writings are in historical biological geography as it relates to human life, and he's very sharp on that. At the second level, his historical writing is on the model of William McNeill and, while more ambitious in scope than most professional history, it's not really popularization just because of that. The bias of history toward perfectly-argued monographs on limited topics has an enormous down side.

The way he wraps up his overall story with narratives of Decline and Racism (his third level) is indeed poppy, and I do find it annoying.

Posted by: John Emerson | August 3, 2005 10:13 AM

"Japan after 1850"

Posted by: John Emerson | August 3, 2005 10:14 AM

I read GG&S a couple of years ago, and found it an interesting read, but I had no way to evaluate its thesis and wasn't about to start digging in the primary literature. Not my field! I have read some scholarly work on how the agricultural revolution got started about 10,000 ago, and it's a highly contentious and active field right now.

But because of this recent flap I just read "Road Belong Cargo" and I must recommend it to anyone interested in the career of Yali. He was quite the big man in New Guinea: he was the only survivor of a Japanese attack on his military patrol, and his epic trek through impenetrable jungle back to his home area became a legend among both the natives and the white colonists. He was a quasi-police officer in charge of suppressing cargo cults, which he dutifully did for some time.

But on his visit to Sydney he visited a museum and had the Darwinian theory of human origins explained to him, and it was a revelation -- but not the way we think it would be! He 'realized' that the whites had TWO totem systems: some believed in the God/Jesus totem as propounded by the white missionaries, while others believed they had come from early primates. So some whites were descended from Adam and Eve, while others came from the ancient ancestor 'monki'. He tried to figure out which one of them really controlled the channels to cargo.

The author of the book is convinced that Yali, in spite of his experiences with modern society, never left behind his native knowledge framework and eventually became involved in the cargo cults which he initially helped to suppress. Utterly, utterly fascinating.

Posted by: gary | August 3, 2005 10:48 AM

a good argument....

shah8, you are wearing me down, and now I have Emerson to contend with.

Perhaps it comes down to whether the Turks had the resources to take on the project (and I do maintain that it was a vast project). I'd need to know a lot more about the economic history of the Ottoman Empire than I do (my knowledge at present being minute and asymptotic as neurons decay) to tackle that one.

Posted by: Nicholas Mycroft | August 3, 2005 11:23 AM

The Turk did not have access to large forests within easy reach of the major shipbuilding areas- specifically tall trees that served as the masts. Even England and Spain were essentially out of large timber suitable for masts by 1600 and were importing them from the Baltic and Maine. The Turks could probably have got enough out of bulgaria and romania, but why bother if they were busy in their end of the Med. Vienna and Lepanto were the answer to Mohacs. Experience was the best teacher and infrequent sailing out of the med did not lead to developing long sailing ability. Paradoxiacally in the Red Sea, the sea of arabia and the east coast of africa there was quite a bit of long haul sailing by the arabs- but they didn't like the turks....

Posted by: AllenM | August 3, 2005 11:33 AM

Nicholas Mycroft

'I was thinking about forming an advocacy group to protect the rights and reputations of synthesists/generalists--surely the most reviled and oppressed minority in the intellectual community--but I could not find any scientific reason to think that it would improve the situation.'

Nice :)

Posted by: anne | August 3, 2005 11:46 AM

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p2.html

How To Get Rich
A Talk by Jared Diamond

In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and sub-Saharan Africans, rather than vice versa.

Most of that book, was concerned with comparing the peoples of different continents, but I knew that I couldn't publish a book comparing the histories of different continents and considering Eurasia as a unit without saying something about the fascinating problem of the differences of history within Eurasia. Why, within Eurasia, was it Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or the Middle East? I devoted seven pages to that subject at the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think I arrived at the correct solution. Nevertheless, since the publication of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I've received a lot of feedback, and the most interesting feedback has been about the implications of that comparative analysis of the histories of China, Europe, India, and the Middle East.

In particular, in addition to the review of my book by Bill Gates, I've received a lot of correspondence from economists and business people, who pointed out to me possible parallels between the histories of entire human societies and histories of smaller groups. This correspondence from economists and business people has to do with the following big question: what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation, and wealth? Should your human group have a centralized direction, in the extreme having a dictator, or should there be diffuse or even anarchical organization? Should your collection of people be organized into a single group, or broken off into a number of groups, or broken off into a lot of groups? Should you maintain open communication between your groups, or erect walls between them, with groups working more secretly? Should you erect protectionist tariff walls against the outside, or should you expose your business or government to free competition?

These questions about group organization arise at many different levels and for many types of groups. They arise, of course, about the organization of entire governments or countries: what is the best way to govern a country? Remember the classic arguments about whether the best government is a benign dictatorship, or a federal system, or an anarchical free-for-all. The same questions also rise about the organization of different companies within the same industry. How can you account for the fact that Microsoft has been so successful recently, and that IBM, which was formerly successful, fell behind but then drastically changed its organization over the last four years and improved its success? How can we explain the different successes of what we call different industrial belts? When I was a boy growing up in Boston, Route 128, the industrial belt around Boston, led the industrial world in scientific creativity and imagination. But Route 128 has fallen behind, and now Silicon Valley is the center of innovation. And the relations of businesses to each other in Silicon Valley and Route 128 are very different, possibly resulting in those different outcomes.

Of course there are also the famous differences between the productivities of the economies of different countries: the differing national average productivities of Japan and the United States and France and Germany....

Posted by: anne | August 3, 2005 11:48 AM

All these charges of racism and anti-racism call to mind a favorite song from Avenue Q, which ends:

Everyone's a little bit racist
It's true.
But everyone is just about
As racist as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being
So PC
Maybe we could live in -
Harmony!

If I can offer some casual ethnographic observations on the field anthropology, perhaps we cold have a little more understanding of the various critiques going on here. Anthropology as a discipline developed as part and parcel of colonial enterprise. Much early anthropology was involved, often directly, in enabling and justifying colonial exploitation. More recent anthropology has been undertaking serious reflection on the role and complicity of the discipline in colonialism, racism, and ethnocentrism--in identifying their own covert racism. It has been a long and painful process, and debates over what to do about it are still ongoing.

In the process, anthropology has, I think, become one of the academic disciplines most aware of its impact--both current and historical--on the people and cultures it studies, and it has also developed an intense attention to structures of power starting at a very micro level.

This disciplinary history has at the same time lead to a high level of suspicion towards grand unifying theories--precisely because of the role such theories played in the history of anthropology.

Anthropologists don't always rehash this whole history for conversations among themselves, but it is important for an outsider to understand that internal to anthropology, there has been a lot of attention to uncovering and outing the field's own covert--and unconscious--racism and colonialism. There are certainly a few who will try to use that as a hammer to cudgel others with, or to cut off conversation & dialogue. But there are many for whom the question of unconscious racism is itself an important dialogue.

Posted by: oubliette | August 3, 2005 12:07 PM

Oubliette, does your experience give any indication about good ways to deal with unconscious racism in others?

It occurred to me that if somebody accused me of unconscious racism my first response would be to notice that I didn't like them.

While of course my question doesn't say what my goals are, and I'm sure my goals would be different in different circumstances, I hope you might have meaningful advice anyway.

Posted by: J Thomas | August 3, 2005 12:45 PM

For the Turks to pick a fight with the Iberian states over control of Gibralter would have touched off a very big, messy and unneeeded war. They didn't need to do it, so they didn't.

I think the reason the Turks did not join the New World land grab was that their leadership had a pretty clear view of what the Ottoman Empires vital spheres were, and the the Western Hemisphere wasn't one of them. The Balkans were far more important, so that is the region that got their attention. Anyone who doubts their strategic judgement shoud bear in mind that the Turks maintained significant power in both absolute and relative terms to their neighbors longer than the Spanish did.

Posted by: Steven Rogers | August 3, 2005 03:36 PM

Diamond is an ornithologist who has done a lot of work in New Guinea. He does his research moving back and forth across the infamous Wallace Line. On one side there are small mammals filing a niche, and on the other side it's the birds filling the same niche. Head down to Australia for a break, and the place is crawling with marsupials! No wonder he's willing to accept that geography has some impact on human society and history."

Yes, no wonder :)

[anne]

Oh dear, oh dear. Brad, something seems to have happened to my post. Somewhow the post attached to many previous comments. I cannot imagine what happened. I am so sorry. Darn.

[Silent E]

piotr,

>Caravels were probably indispensible in stormy Atlantic
> waters, but not in the Indian Ocean. Turks had access to
> all needed technologies and the control of relevant
> ports. If anything, they would operate much closer to
> the home base and with much larger recources than the
>Portuguese.

The Portuguese couldn't really ship or import anything without caravels. The Ottomans, by contrast, had lots of coastal waters and shallow seas where galleys and fixed-sail craft were suitable, and even the Arabs who did navigate the deep waters had to come into Turkish ports to trade goods.

Also, the Ottomans could rely on an overland route. The Silk Road and the coastal route along the Arabian Sea coast carried much larger volumes of commerce than the sea route. That's why, even after the Portuguese gained control of the Indian Ocean trade, Turkish trade didn't collapse. The Portuguese may have become competitors, but their market share was small and their overhead was absurdly high.

[Peter]

@Steven:
"When it comes to grabbing the New World, the Iberian states got the jump on everybody - not just the Turks, because of a *very* advantageous geographic position."
More accuratly, Columbus was trying to get funding from anyone and everyone. He even sent his brother to Britain. Britain responded favorably, but Bartholomew was kidnapped and held for ransom by (British) pirates. How different would things be if it were a British expedition that landed in the "West Indies" instead of a Spanish one?

The attention that a 7-year-old book is now getting is rather interesting. And the attacks that it is "racist" are also interesting. My conclusion is that the reason GGS is under scrutiny is to draw attention *away* from Collapse. The reason to paint it as a racist tome is to also frame Diamond as a racist so that Collapse will be ignored.

[John Emerson]

Well, I talk more about GG&S because I've read it, but not "Collapse". It's a 7-year-old book, but it's still relevant because of its ambition and abundant unfinished business. It should drive research for quite awhile.

According to Steensgaard (The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century) the caravan trade from the Indian ocean through the Persian and Ottoman empires remained very significant until the 1600's. The land route from China also did not die out quickly.

[anne]

"Collapse" is excellent and adds much to an understanding of the geographic framework set out in "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

[J Thomas]

"My conclusion is that the reason GGS is under scrutiny is to draw attention *away* from Collapse. The reason to paint it as a racist tome is to also frame Diamond as a racist so that Collapse will be ignored."

I would have guessed the main reason people talk about GGS is the TV show. That would have gotten a lot of people interested who hadn't read the book, and who will never read the book.

And I'd think that people accuse him of unconscious racism because that's on their minds. He bent over backwards to phrase things so it wouldn't sound racist, and they accuse him of it anyway. His own wording is evidence that he was conscious of the issue.

So -- why not start talking about _Collapse_ and see if anybody responds? If you're right, you'll be working against the people who're trying to stop that from happening. And if they need to do strategems to keep us from talking about _Collapse_ then chances are you would get a response. At least, if people wouldn't talk about it regardless then they're wasting their time trying to stop us.

For myself, I don't care whether he's a racist or not. More important is how interesting or useful his ideas are.

[anne]

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?050103crbo_books

The Vanishing
By MALCOLM GLADWELL

In "Collapse," Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves.

A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It was largely uninhabitable—a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But along the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords protected from the harsh winds and saltwater spray of the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed upriver they saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and bluebells, and thick forests of willow and birch and alder. Two colonies were formed, three hundred miles apart, known as the Eastern and Western Settlements. The Norse raised sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy slopes into pastureland. They hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of parish churches and a magnificent cathedral, the remains of which are still standing. They traded actively with mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years—and then they vanished.

The story of the Eastern and Western Settlements of Greenland is told in Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (Viking; $29.95). Diamond teaches geography at U.C.L.A. and is well known for his best-seller "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which won a Pulitzer Prize. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In "Collapse," he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history's losers—like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans. We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture and politics and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn't particularly interested in any of those things—or, at least, he's interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important question, which is a society's relationship to its climate and geography and resources and neighbors. "Collapse" is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth's ecosystem—soil, trees, and water—because societies fail, in Diamond's view, when they mismanage those environmental factors.

There was nothing wrong with the social organization of the Greenland settlements. The Norse built a functioning reproduction of the predominant northern-European civic model of the time—devout, structured, and reasonably orderly. In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in Hvalsey Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, following the proclamation of the wedding banns on three consecutive Sundays.

The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to grow hay to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down the forests for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To make houses warm enough for the winter, they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of turf, which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of grassland.

But Greenland's ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure. The short, cool growing season meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn meant that topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents, like organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil resilient in the face of strong winds. "The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil than is grass," he writes. "With the trees and shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep and goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland's climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from occasionally heavy rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles from an entire valley." Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields shrank; without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through the long winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies of wood, getting fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult.

The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock—particularly cows, which consumed an enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had contempt for the Inuit—they called them skraelings, "wretches"—and preferred to practice their own brand of European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen's robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death.

Diamond's argument stands in sharp contrast to the conventional explanations for a society's collapse....

[J Thomas]

Oh! That reminds me of a long-dead controversy where I thought I saw a pont that nobody picked up on. I might as well try it out now even though it has nothing obvious to do with Diamond at all. Maybe it will inspire Brad to start a topic on something similar sometime.

A long time ago there was a book named _The Bell Curve_ where Shockley etc argued about intelligence differences between races.

I thought the goals were not good, and the methodologies had some problems. But one of their side points was that american whites tended to have a different pattern of strengths on subtests than american blacks or africans. This held true apart from the absolute scores. Children of affluent american blacks scored higher than children of poor american blacks but had the same general pattern. And the argument was that this showed a real racial difference in thinking. It wasn't an argument that one is better, it was an argument that they're different.

I thought it was plausible that there might be differences, and it would be worth some research. It could help us improve teaching methods -- teach people using the sorts of approaches they're good at. And we might learn ways to teach people to do better at all the different approaches.

When I thought further on it, it didn't matter so much whether some races were on average better. What mattered is that some people are better at different types of thinking, so teachers should try to use multiple approaches and see what gets learned. And we might look for ways to help teachers teach with ways of thinking that the teachers themselves aren't good at. I'm much better at visual, kinesthetic, transformative, and mathematical thinking than at verbal thinking. It's hard for me to teach people whose thinking is primarily verbal. But maybe I could learn how.

But when I tried to discuss this, back then, nobody I tried it with was interested. They only wanted to talk about how Shockley was a racist, and why his research was no good. Or else why it proved they were right all along and "some people" really were inferior.

[natasha]

Matt - "Calling it science popularization is not a putdown, and the fact that so many people think of it as a putdown is a deficiency in American intellectual culture."

Amen. If there was more good quality science popularization, we might not be in the situation we're in now, where the media can discuss with a straight face the 'debate' between evolution and creationism.

[anne]

The work you are looking for is by Howard Gardner, "Multiple Intelligences." This work stems from widely accepted ideas of Israel Scheffler, and though well known and deserving is not focused on much in education schools. Israel Scheffler never used the word potential, only "potentials."

[J Thomas]

Anne, your short description of Diamond's explanation of the greenlanders shows him with a fundamental misunderstanding of the ecology of the area.

The inuit were already living at carrying capacity for their technology. In good years their population expanded a bit, in bad years it shrank.

If the norse had tried to live like inuit they would have faced the same limits, unless they managed other tech. They might have survived -- as scraelings.

Could they have managed their population on seals? Or would they have overhunted the seals and been stuck that way too?

His criticisms look valid, but his suggestions less so. Expeditions to get lumber might have been worth doing. Getting more fish and drying them might have been worth it. But one value for cattle is that even though they were bad in the long run, they were reasonably dependable in the short run. You know how many cattle you have now, and you can usually predict within 10% how many cattle you'll have next year. You can't do that with fish or seals. They have good years and bad years, and when they have a bad year your population shrinks. All utterly outside your control. So it makes sense for the norse to keep cattle as a backup.

But then, the greenland inuit themselves haven't always done so well. They lost track of the rest of the world just as the greenland norse did, for awhile they thought they were the only people in the world. And they started losing technology. They have the story how a powerful angakok figured out that they must have been cut off from the rest of humanity, and that the way to find other people was to go north, toward the north pole. Starving on the ice, his group found canadian eskimos who took the survivors back to canada, and the canadians later sent an expedition to greenland bringing them sled dogs and other resources they'd lost. If things had gone a little different maybe the inuit would have gone extinct in greenland too.

And it isn't just humans. There used to be musk oxen living in greenland. Eastern greenland isn't just an ice sheet, sometimes it has pleasant meadows. But one year there was a bad time and the tundra was covered with ice to a depth of 8 inches or so, more than the musk ox could break through for food, and they all died out.

I remember reading that things in greenland got gradually worse for the norse for some time. They got shorter, they had more deformities, etc. But it's quite likely that when they died out it was due to some transient bad time that might have gotten them even if they'd been doing better over tha previous 50 years. Greenland is an uncertain place. There are good years and bad years, and in the worst years things go extinct.

Looking back we can see there were things they needed more than church bells. But then there were things the philippines needed more than shoes for Immelda. And looking back, iraq would have been better off with more landmines and fewer palaces. Etc.

[piotr]

Silent E:

my point was -- consistent with you observations -- that while it is rather fanciful to consider potential Ottoman expansion into Atlantic, they had ample capability and some motivation to dominate Indian Ocean.

The only reason that they did not do it is that this motivation -- control of trade routes -- was not important to them.

By the way, I am not sure if Silk Route was of any importance ca. 1500. Europe had its own silk and the importation of tea and china did not start yet. Spices from Indonesia could be transported from India through Persia, Iraq and Syria by a combination of land and water but this is not Silk Route.

But who would sort the military priorities according to the demands of trade ca. 1500? Certain small states. Big guys had serious problems related to the control of large territories providing tribute, lands to distribute among favorites of the Crown etc. Venice, Portugal, cities of Netherlands were bit players, relatively speaking, compared to France, Spain, Turkey etc.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Piotr, the Turks themselves could have reached either the Indian Ocean or the Atlantic without having to overcome Christian powers, but they would have had to extend their influence over either Morocco or Oman to do it. In fact, the Arabs did have a resurgence against the Portuguese under Ali, driving them out of many posts - islands and coasts - that they had taken in their first arrival in weakly defended waters, e.g. Zanzibar. Turkey really became a threat in the 19th century when it was forced to look away from Europe; see Burton's reports of native feeling in the Horn of Africa.

But there were many Arab raids from Morocco against European and North American shores on those occasions when local naval protection was neglected. They never had to fight their way out of the Mediterranean.