Diamond’s Vengeance: Diamond frequently starts with an argument that’s some kind of sociobiology or Marvin-Harris-style material determinism and then goes delving for some kind of anecdote that he thinks illustrates it. Sometimes he gets it from his own travel—and as a lot of folks observed in that previous discussion, he is often at the very least inclined to re-cut whatever he’s told to fit whatever he wants to have been told—or he grabs something from published work that fits the bill, usually ignoring what the bulk of publication says. If this was just to spice up something, it would be annoying enough, but he often seems to think he’s actually proven something with this kind of embroidery. In a way, that’s less Diamond’s unique flaw: it’s how a substantial amount of sociobiological/evo-psych argument proceeds when it wants to compile a claim that a particular practice or behavior is universal, by a careless grabbing at whatever confirms a hypothesis out of work which has a great deal else to say, as if all the contest and complexity of cultural or social anthropological research is irrelevant as long as there are two or three round-peg sentences that can be pounded into the square hole of a hypothesis....
Diamond and Savage Minds: the Savage Minds bloggers on the subject of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. I also have problems with the SM bloggers in their reading (or viewing) of Diamond, but there are some legitimate criticisms of Diamond to be made.... First, on the contested question of Diamond’s “racism”. It’s a serious mistake to even imply that Diamond is racist, as Henry Farrell properly observes. I would say that he has a stubborn inclination to use racial terms when they don’t serve any empirical or descriptive purpose.... Throughout the book, Diamond seems to me to cling to terms and categories that he doesn’t need, and I’m not really sure why. However, I also think this is a relatively minor technical argument that doesn’t demand or deserve any kind of strong rhetoric.
Second, Diamond has a tendency to exclude—not even mention or argue against, but simply bypass—deeply seated causal arguments and evidence that don’t fit his thesis. Let me take the Bantu-speaking migration... iron working and farming were very important to driving their movements across the central, eastern and southern portions of the African continent, and were the central reason why older populations of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers were either absorbed into Bantu-speaking societies or fled from their advance. But Diamond takes it as a given that iron working and farming are sufficient explanation of the migration itself, that they made the expansion of the Bantu-speakers inevitable. That may be so, but he doesn’t even bother to discuss segmentary kinship as a form of social organization within Bantu-speaking societies, and its possible role in pushing expansion. This is the key explanation that many Bantu-speaking societies offer themselves for their migrations, that when there was at some past point strife or tension among kin, a portion of a lineage would break off behind a charismatic lineage head and move on. That’s obviously not the whole story, but I think it’s part of it. Diamond’s materialism is so confidently asserted and at such a grand scale that he doesn’t even pause to defend it trenchantly the way someone like Marvin Harris does. It’s more at times as if he’s not even aware of other causal arguments. This is especially acute, as many readers of GGS have noted, with his views on Chinese history and the venerable question of why China did not industrialize but the West did. There’s a tremendous weight of evidence that the general political traditions of the Chinese state plus the particular decisions of its political elite at key moments are much more powerfully explanatory of China’s failure to expand or dominate in the post-1500 era than the big-picture materialism that Diamond offers.
Third, he is a bit prone, like many sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, to what I think of as “ethnographic tourism”, scooping up all the cases of human practice or culture that fit his assertions about universal patterns or behaviors.... You can get away with that when you’re just describing a tendency, but the stronger your claims are couched in terms of universality and adaption, the harder it becomes. Diamond is by no means as egregious in this kind of cherrypicking as some evolutionary psychologists are, but the selectivity of his evidentiary citation grates a bit....
Fourth, on Yali’s question, I have a few problems. Though Brad DeLong insists that Diamond only means his answer to explain the relative imbalance in material wealth and power between many non-Western societies and the West up to 1500 and not afterwards, I think it’s clear that Diamond thinks that post-1500 events are no more than the icing on the cake, that the fundamental explanation of post-1500 inequalities and disparities in the world derive from the grand arc of pre-1500 development, from the luck of the geographical draw. He’s not alone in that: this is a venerable argument which takes on variant forms among world-systems historians and Marxists. But De Long is being a bit unfair to insist somehow that the Savage Minds bloggers have in this respect misread Diamond: he clearly argues that the pre-1500 history is crucially determinant of the post-1500 history.
More, Diamond’s arguments about Yali’s question strike me as sometimes being too large.... Because the grand argument of GGS turns on the slow accumulation of geographical advantage to people inhabiting the Eurasian continent, it sometimes ignores much more short-term material explanations which are potentially in and of themselves sufficient explanations. To explain the Atlantic slave trade in materialist terms, for example, you may need nothing more than the relative proximity of Africa and Europe, the trade wind system across the Atlantic, improvements in European nautical capability prior to 1450, and the relative lack of harbors plus poor habitability of the West and Central African coastline. To explain other aspects of Western expansion, you may need little more than the Crusades, the Mongols, and an understanding of long-distance trading patterns circa 1200. That may sound like a lot, but it’s a much more constrained set of factors with a much shorter temporal scale than what Diamond puts into play. And the Atlantic slave trade may itself be a nearly sufficient explanation of the expansion of the West after 1500, given the cascade of effects it unleashed.
Anthropologists and historians interested in non-Western societies and Western colonialism also get a bit uneasy with a big-picture explanation of world history that seems to cancel out or radically de-emphasize the importance of the many small differences and choices after 1500.... [I]f you want to answer Yali’s question with regards to Latin America versus the United States, you’ve got to think about the peculiar, particular kinds of political, legal and religious frameworks that differentiated Spanish colonialism in the New World from British and French colonialism, that a Latin American Yali would have to feel a bit dissatisfied with Diamond’s answer.
For me, I also feel a bit at a loss with any big-picture history that isn’t much interested in the importance of accident and serendipidity at the moment of contact between an expanding Europe and non-Western societies around 1500. That seems a part of Cortes’ conquest of Montezuma, or the early beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade, when West African practices of kinship slavery fed quite incidentally into exchange with Portuguese explorers who weren’t there for slaves at all. It may be that such accidents are not the cause of the material disparity that Yali describes, but in many cases, they’re what makes the contemporary world feel the way that it does. It’s not that Diamond argues against such matters, but he doesn’t leave much room for them to matter, either.
Diamond, Cultural Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory: Gewertz and Errington’s basic antipathy to Diamond’s use of “Yali’s Question” is a fairly representative instance of recurrent problems in the epistemology of contemporary cultural anthropology and postcolonial theory (some of which practicioners are perfectly cognizant of, and in many cases grappling with). On a simple level, you could observe that it’s a kind of full-battery epistemological and methodological overreaction to what is in the end no more than a rhetorical device in Diamond’s book, that Diamond’s... interested... just in using Yali as a framing device.... I don’t have much patience for simple or crude assertions of “ownership” in this regard, that it is somehow wrong to use something like Yali’s Question anecdotally or rhetorically, because they’re never going to be meant to propose a serious methodological standard, just a kind of passing cheap shot against a soft target.
I don’t think that’s the real issue, however. There’s something more substantive at stake.
Diamond is faulted by Errington and Gewertz for provisioning a history which is the history that “we in the contemporary West already believe in”. Yali’s question, they suggest, ought to be understood instead in the contexts that Yali himself was produced by and within, the histories which generated him (and his question). Three moves are made at once in the way they talk about Yali and his question, each one of them to me ultimately unsustainable... a kind of epistemological constipation that cultural anthropology, postcolonial theory and cognate academic practices are presently suffering from....
The first is the compression of the heterogeneity of “the West” so that Diamond can be that which “we” in the West already believe in, rather than taking Diamond as an argument within a heterogenous assortment of intellectual presentations of the causality of world history.... [T]hey accord to Yali the importance of understanding him in context, but deny it in turn to Diamond....
Second, Yali is remanded to the sphere of the non-West, returned to being fully “PNGuinean” and his question removed out of the context of any specific dialogue or performance he might have had with particular Western individuals.... Contemporary anthropology well understands the problems posed by the old paradigm of non-Western societies as pristine entities contaminated by Western modernity.... So Errington and Gewertz react to Diamond’s appropriation of Yali’s question by trying to place Yali safely back into a narrative of the non-West’s struggle for sovereignity, to make his question safely an expression of anger and frustration with the impositions of colonialism rather than an expression of avid desire for capitalist modernity, back into a history of nation formation and cultural recuperation, away from a history of incorporation and transformation. The problem is that Yali’s specific individual history ought to inhibit us from any such categorical moves, and instruct us that his question can be all these things at once: both reaching out for incorporation and resisting it, open to Diamond’s reading of it and yet also filled with surplus meaning that Diamond is completely insensate to....
Here is where the third problem enters the picture, and it is the most devastating of all. It’s also the one that postcolonial theory and much cultural anthropology readily acknowledges, thinks about and indeed obsesses over, but nevertheless also often predictably reproduces in all its full problematic glory. Diamond is faulted for a history which... comforts the “educated haves”, leaves them “feeling good about themselves”.... [That] is just as inevitably a critique of Gewertz and Errington... of the aspiration of cultural anthropology to represent non-Western societies in the terms they would represent themselves in.
If you follow Gewertz and Errington’s presentation, Yali already understands his own question.... The non-West knows itself.... [T]he desire to know the non-Western Other as it is presumed to know itself is just as native to the “educated haves” as they claim the desire for Diamond’s presentation is. It is just as much as a presentation sought for its aesthetic and political satisfactions, for its instructions of humility and self-abjection, just as much a retrospective metanarrative of modern history and a prospective reordering of the future. But Errington and Gewertz want to fault Diamond for merely performing those functions, for being expressive of “the West” and appropriating Yali to satisfy audiences in the West. On that point alone, their interpretations are indistinguishable from his.
So either perhaps one could dispense with the shadowplay, and get to some political heart of the matter in which Errington and Gewertz (and many others) can acknowledge that this is not about whose knowledge is epistemologically preferable but about whose politics (intellectual and substantive) are righteous. If not... the accusation that a particular way of knowing Yali originates out of and is instrumental to some audience or interest in the West is an immediate dead end....
I think the way out of the hall of mirrors in part is to strip the arguments offered by Gewertz and Errington of their epistemological finery and their rhetorical adornments, to stop casually throwing so many gauntlets on the ground, to stop climbing atop certain kinds of moral pedestals. The critique of Diamond for his exclusionary disinterest in meaning, culture, expression, for the importance of the microhistorical and the particular, can be made exactly as such, as a fairly ordinary if important remark about what’s worth knowing...
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