Never-the-less, it is wonderful to see all the ideas laid out in one program.

Mr deCamp apparently also had an interesting theory regarding the other thread: "Though overshadowed by his popular fiction, deCamp wrote a number of less-known but significant works that explored such topics as racism, which he noted is more accurately described as ethnocentrism. He pointed out that no scholar comparing the merits of various ethnicities has ever sought to prove that his own ethnicity was inferior to others." (from Wikipedia)

I'm not trying to hijack this thread into a eulogy of L. Sprague deCamp, but his X-1 radio show, "A Gun for Dinosaur" is one of the best radio plays of all time, imo.

[ 12 July 2005: Message edited by: Adam T ]

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but it did sound like Diamond was taking credit for all of this at times.

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Cree Elders have a saying: You are the land you live on. This belief is a part of every aspect of Cree culture. Jared Diamond's 'theory' just rehashes this ancient belief.

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Jared Diamond's 'theory' just rehashes this ancient belief.

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by anthropologists Savage Minds 1:
Savage Minds 2
Savage Minds 3 - links collection

and historians etc.

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As someone who has read his books... no, he doesn't. His basic premise is: you are the land you live on. Nice of him to provide examples, but he ain't figure nuttin out that wasn't already figured.

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Cool.
I'll save you a lot more shelf-space:

"A stitch in time saves nine."
"The fish rots from the head down."
"Idle hands do the devil's work."
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
"Clothes make the man."
"Hoist with his own petard."
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who then was the gentleman?"
"Many geese can defeat a boar."

I'm sorry if you've never written an essay before nonsuch, but the idea is to start out with a basic premise and then prove it. Mr Diamond started out with the premise that, You are the land you lived on. However, it is not a new idea.
I would suggest that you be very careful in your responses as Mr Diamond's book also showed that there is no difference in intellect that lead to European 'progress'. Which means Cree Elders can be just as smart and intellectually capable as Mr Diamond, or Aristotle, or Socrates, or Sun Tzu, or Sigmund Freud. If you like I can further explain my Elder's beliefs that you are the land you live on. But just because I didn't do a fair description does not mean their wisdom or beliefs aren't valid.
Your answers show you have very little information on the value, the impact and the diversity of oral teachings. Beware of Thoth's monkey.

Ursa, see in the quote below how Diamond ignores oral testimony of Bantu people because it does not fit in with his thesis. When you're writing about such a large geographical area and long time period, it's easy to cherry-pick things which support your grand thesis and ignore the rest; and this seems to be what some of the academics are complaining about in Diamond's work. I haven't read it myself.

More comments about Diamond's book by Timothy Burke July 29:

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...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 again. There’s no question that iron working and farming were very important to driving their movements across the central, eastern and southern portions of the African continent...

...But Diamond takes it as a given that iron working and farming are sufficient explanation...

...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...

...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...

...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...

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Mr Diamond started out with the premise that, You are the land you lived on. However, it is not a new idea. I would suggest that you be very careful in your responses as Mr Diamond's book also showed that there is no difference in intellect that lead to European 'progress'. Which means Cree Elders can be just as smart and intellectually capable as Mr Diamond, or Aristotle, or Socrates, or Sun Tzu, or Sigmund Freud.

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I have only read one of Diamond's books. I thought "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was quite a fine book, because it showed that Europe had a number of advantages in its geographical setting which allowed it to create a technological lead (which it used to suppress others, including native peoples.)

For example, it is important that a continent's East-West extension allows for the adoption of new inventions which are climate-sensitive, whereas the North-South extension of Africa and the Americas are disadvantageous.

I don't think I said that "You are the land you live on" is the alpha and omega of First Nation knowledge; however, I did say I wasn't explaining it well. Believe me, sit down with an actual Elder sometime and ask him/her to explain it to you. I'm guessing they probably haven't read Diamond's book, but I can assure you that by the end you will feel they deserve a Ph'd.

I do think that age old wisdom can be improved upon. But I also think Willy Shakes has a point when he says, "There is nothing new under the sun." To be honest, I think Mr Diamond would agree with me.

Stephen King has made a career out of taking short stories and making novels out of them. Why can't scientists do the same?

My daughter-in-laws Aunties, who are my grandchildren's blood family and thus, through the grandchildren, now my relatives, have told me "We have always lived here.". When I ask about the theories of the land bridge, the ice bridge, this migratory theory or that one, they chuckle and remind me that the children of First Mother spread out after the flood, followed the magic of the number four; four directions, four winds, four seasons, four great rivers... and repopulated the earth. We are all cousins. Some of the cousins returned, and were obviously mentally ill. Others followed. Some of them are slowly re-learning the old truths. And we do not have to understand everything, we only have to endure, and to live our lives the very best way we can, honouring and respecting the earth which feeds us.

If that's a cute little story to amuse the not-bright children, well, it'll do just fine for me.

Of course we are the land we live on. Land claims are not about who the land belongs to, they are about who belongs to the land.

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But I also think Willy Shakes has a point when he says, "There is nothing new under the sun."

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Almost as well as another best seller, The Celestine Prophecy.

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You have yet to convince me that he has surpassed the depth of understanding that I've heard from people who are educated in oral history.

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Homo sapiens (heck, i'll go back a bit more and include Neanderthals), everywhere, all through recorded and quite a lot of unrecorded time, have had the same degree of intelligence. They have applied their intelligence in different ways to different problems. No one way is best - though i personally believe that some ways are better than others, and that the homocentric, technological way is the most dangerous at this moment.

The thing is: peoples have very effectively defeated and destroyed other peoples. If we don't all want to destroy one another and the whole planet, it might be useful to see how it was done before. And it might be useful to have someone who speaks their language explain it to the people who are currently most powerful.

Plus, it just gets up my nose to see somebody who has done a lot of painstaking work dismissed in a single line. ("Well, geez, Newton, we all know things fall down!")

[ 30 July 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Thank you for admitting you know nothing about oral histories or sciences.

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Another comment

Dissection of an article by Diamond which has some of the same problems.

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Interesting debates, thanks for posting them Contrarian. I think some of them go a little far in arguing that Diamond is invoking some sort of 'environmental determinism', particularly the ones who hadn't even read his books first, but I thought those arguments were refuted fairly well by others there. Yes, he says that differing environments play a major role in determining different cultures and, through that, the way we tend to view the world, but I don't think that's anything new either. Diamond also argues that how well societies survived in the long term depended in part on how their people responded to the challenges and learned from past mistakes.

Eg: some pastoral groups in marginal areas (grasslands being generally marginal most years) carried on overgrazing for various cultural or historical reasons (competition with other tribes, short sighted hierarchies etc) while others like the African Fulani developed such sophisticated means that the quality of their pastures actually improved on nature (in yields) over the generations. Even his weak theories about why the Europeans eventually overtook the Chinese technologically are based in part on decisions made in high places, that under slightly different circumstances may not have been made. The more progressive group of Mandarins may well have won out over the reactionaries desire to shut out the "outside" world; while Cristofero Columbo could have easily been rejected by the Spanish king too, or maybe just "disappeared" over the horizon forever if the winds had sent his ships to an area with more aggressive warrior Nations. Another five centuries of medievalism in Europe then?

Maybe it's a bit like the difference between what Marx originally said about the economy and its structures being the general overriding *influence* on individual fortunes and the hardline Marxists who took it to mean that individual (or even collective) efforts and insight have practically no influence at all. Big difference in practice, particularly among individuals.

My main worries with his stuff is that it might be interpretted by others as letting us off the hook, as others there noted, or worse, that such demographic disasters as the invasion of the "New" Worlds really are just universal patterns and therefore pretty much unavoidable, even if some good people objected. (which a very few Christians did)

Not quite true, as he's mostly just observing the conquests that did in fact happen (what I call 'the inevitability of the past' fallacy) not the many others that failed or weren't even attempted in the first place. The Inca and Aztec empires were unusual developments in the New world, preColumbian linguistic diversity is proof that most small groups survived for millennia, and the relative diversity and abundance of wildlife that still existed when "we" arrived proves that most Aboriginals really did respect and understand the land in ways we've forgotten. Like most others in the field, Diamond tends to focus too much on the exceptional failures among Aboriginal cultures, while glossing over the much much worse environmental effects ours has had in a tiny fraction of the time.

[ 31 July 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

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Originally posted by UrsaMinor:
Tan'si,

I don't think I said that "You are the land you live on" is the alpha and omega of First Nation knowledge; however, I did say I wasn't explaining it well. Believe me, sit down with an actual Elder sometime and ask him/her to explain it to you. I'm guessing they probably haven't read Diamond's book, but I can assure you that by the end you will feel they deserve a Ph'd.

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A PHD? I can't understand for a second why you would wish such a thnk upon someone that you apparently like and respect.

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I do think that age old wisdom can be improved upon. But I also think Willy Shakes has a point when he says, "There is nothing new under the sun." To be honest, I think Mr Diamond would agree with me.

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I firmly disagree with this type of reductionsim. Anyone one can step back from a subject, and reduce it to a few descriptive generalities: "All planets are round, therefore they are essentially the same." On some level this is true but on other not, and in this is the subtlety of life.

This is a great example, contrary to your idea that there is nothing new under the sun. At one point, in human narrateive, planets were rogue stars, and the earth was flat.

It seems there is a dichotomy in your thinking, one were you are expressing this essential simple idea, but this is jusxtaposed against very complex (PHD-type, no less) narratives which must serve the purpose of adding colour and texture to meaning -- if not why would it be necessary for Elders to go on and on and on, when they might simply say, "you are the land you live on," and leave it there? Something even you have failed to do since you have gone to some length to provide grounding evidence to support your idea and espostulate it.

Is the main area of dispute here is the value of "determinist materialism?"

I believe "ideas" have material agency, even if it is only because people choose to believe they do. Jared Diamond's book, even as retelling of other truths, still has newness in it, even if it is only because its relationship to its context (Starbucks, you suggested), is different than other ideas.

That said, I think it interesting that you assert that not only the specific evidence presented by Diamond, but the overall thesis is learned from the cultures examined. Hard to tell that, but worthy of examining.

[ 01 August 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

He says that human beings will resort to the worst behaviour when starving or living in isolation. He paints very broad pictures of the kind of groups that make for human societies and suggests that larger social groups and more complex organizations result in higher levels of civilzation. For example, he demonstrates that, contrary to our notions of the peace loving noble savage, among stone tribes that are dispersed throughout the south asian jungle there are quite a few murders and revenge killings that last for generations. he illustrates elsewhere in his writings how co called "vcivilized' survivors of plane crashes in remote mountains will resort to "primitive" cannibalism to survive.

But the best thing about Diamond's books is that they provide factual data and state of the art science about human history. Hegel and Marx's philosphy were founed on an idea of human history that were limited by their knowledge of how humans actually behave. Diamond asserts in the last few chapters of GG&S that there is a framework now for a true science of history based on the interdisciplinary sciences that inform us about human environments.

quote:

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Originally posted by UrsaMinor:

The reason I meantioned PHDs is to give a comparable measurment. My unspoken meaning was that people do not need a piece of paper to say the are experts in their field, or bush, or mountain, or community.

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Yes, yes, I see that I was teasing in a manner of agreement.

No I don't agree with the thesis that "we are the land we live on," solely but I think it is a useful thesis and an interesting tool for understanding. I think that multiple and even apparently contradictory social theories can occupy the same analytic and social space, and that their truth is as much contained in the context in which they are understood, and subject to which they are applied.

[ 01 August 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by Boinker:

I think that a lot of the carping about his arguments is that by saying that there were natural advantages that allowed Cortez to invade Mexico there is an implicit value that statement. That is, by ssying that the Spaniards were "superior in many ways, militarily, and intellectually (because they had writing and the Aztecs didn't)the first line of defence against racist arguments is lost. I don't agree that this is that strong an argument.

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Good point, neither do I. In fact I think that saying we're entirely a product of our own decisions or cultural conditioning denies the obvious influence of dumb luck on our lives, while passively accepting the same kind of negative value judgements traditionally assumed about suposedly more "primitive" societies.

Extreme positions of "nature vs nurture" can also lead into similar deterministic thinking (not much difference really between the old Communist idea that were all 'blank slates' open to any extent of programming, and the Aristocratic belief that we're basically a product of our 'breeding') and I believe both are based on the old naturalist fallicy that nature is of itself good. That IMO was one of the biggest mistakes made by early humanist thinkers.

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No I don't agree with the thesis that "we are the land we live on,"

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The problem with simple statements of a theory is that the theory can then lead to very negative consequences.

For example, "We are the land we live on" was certainly a part of Nazi ideology. It was used to claim that Jews and others were utterly different, outsiders, that Germany should be "judenrein" etc.

I think Diamond is far more sophisticated than this, and simply argues that the physical and geological place in which one resides, the means of making a living, all are factors in creating an identity. But they don't determine anything.

Genetics plays a role. So does our capacity to be free.

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For those who dig Diamond they ought to check out John Zerzan. He dwelves well into symbolic thought and how dangerous it is. Also his and other's view on how civilization got started is in my view the best explanation of the lot.

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http://imperium.lenin.ru/~kaledin/tmp/agricltr.txt

http://www.primitivism.com/language.htm

http://www.primitivism.com/author-index.htm[/URL]

that link takes you to his other stuff.Which I don't entirely agree with, but provocative none the less.

[ 06 August 2005: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

[ 06 August 2005: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

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Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno recognized as the "assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history," which Freud felt as "something imposed on a resisting majority," of which Stanly Diamond found only "conscripts not volunteers," was dictated by agriculture

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So you can imagine an intellectual Neandrethal (much like a number of us here on babble) having the precursor of the dregulation free trade debate with the nascent farmer...

" Sorry my dear a garden is a crutch that that saps the initiative and sissifies us men keeping us from our natural function of bopping a mastedon with this big club here." (pat, pat)

One aspect: Some groups of people in history have organized themselves into heirarchical (sp?) agricultural groupings that are better for expanding, killing, and making stuff (ie. industrialization), while others have taken a more egalitarian aproach (and one more respectful of nature and other groups) and have gone down another, perhaps more (long-term) sustainable path. The first group is "modern" civilization, while the second are generally the aboriginal peoples of the earth. The charactaristics of both groups being what they are, the first group now controls almost everything, not always with good effect.

http://imperium.lenin.ru/~kaledin/tmp/agricltr.txt

http://www.primitivism.com/language.htm

]http://www.primitivism.com/author-index.htm"

Vigillante,
I got up the nerve to take a look and I can only tell you that the agricultural revolution was lost a long long time before the industrial revolution was and arguing against language is like...I dunno, debating with our own tongue.

Edited to save time. And hopefully remove the glitch.

[ 09 August 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

[ 09 August 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

I mean, it's hardwired into our brains, we know that now, but it's not an immutable self referential cage, it also depends on independent experience, it changes and evolves along with us and our growing (or shrinking) awareness, and it remains partly grounded in earlier forms of pattern recognition and understanding which we happen to call intuition and commonsense. I just can't tell if some postmodernists are playing an elaborate joke on us or themselves.

I'm starting to suspect they're confusing the processes universal to language with its endlessly flexible verbal content, which we can use almost at will, even if only unconsciously. Deconstruction is fine if it's focused on exposing self interest hiding behind high sounding rhetoric, but if it deconstructs the only tool we have for critically judging anything -itself- then its worse than useless. Just because most movies are pure crap now, and all are based on illusions, it doesn't mean we should trash all dramas or the projectors we now use. When we go to the movies we already know that much and can choose accordingly.

[ 09 August 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

[ 09 August 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

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Originally posted by UrsaMinor:
Tan'si,

Erik, I understand your point about refrigerators and stand up comedians. However, an Elder once said to me, "We didn't know we were poor until someone explained it to us."

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Hi Ursa Minor, Tan'si,
I've been told that too. My maternal great-grandmother was Ojibwa/Anishenabe (once a thriving Metis colony in Victoria), my uncle Albert married into the local Songhees band, and I've always had an attraction to aboriginal cultures myself, even though I grew up in a typical middleclass suburb. Never been an argument here on which is a saner, healthier and more sustainable way of life, just that it isn't genetically inherited and IMO we can't very well go all the way back from where we are now. Too damn many of us now and too many heavily armed neighbours...

The idea of land ownership and private property were consciously pushed onto native people almost from the beginning, even if it meant killing off the bison or banning fishing and potlatches. Alot of the present day poverty is also because most the 'means of production' -the land- was taken away too. Not so different than what happened to my Scottish ancestors, except they had somewhere else to escape. No reason that those who can still live on the land shouldn't be able to carry on either, or that land claims shouldn't move forward, and whatever culture the people still value couldn't be preserved for future generations. If we're going to survive much further we'll All have to learn how to reconnect to nature and ourselves somehow.

Most Eastern and Southern nations also farmed a long time before the Europeans arrived, as did some of the later plains cultures, like the Lakota and Cheyenne before the reintroduction of horses; while West Coast people didn't really need to to sustain complex societies and large populations. Probably know all this already, but history isn't a straight line either, even what little is recorded.

[ 09 August 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

IMO most Western philosphers have been making the same basic mistakes since Plato, namely that because the senses sometimes Do lie (or rather are subject to illusions and interpretation) we can't trust them either. Instead we should Trust Their word for it. That and the belief that 'Gods will' or morality or whatever they prefer to call it are inherent within nature but best apprehended at a distance. The kind they supposedly provide. Both lead right back to the same confusion that something solid yet subject to individual interpretation (what isn't?) is nomore manifestly real or understandable than anything else we can dream up. Even Plato started reconsidering that mistake before he died, but the medieval church prefered his earlier more pliable line of reason. That's My completely subjective theory on why us Westerners are still crazier than most others.

"The idea of land ownership and private property were consciously pushed onto native people almost from the beginning, even if it meant killing off the bison or banning fishing and potlatches."

[ 15 August 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

nobody knows...

similarly, someone needs an axe...ah, there's one... which may or may not come back to the original chopping block...

it drives me NUTS!!

People have challenged my use of the term "cultural" and have said, often angrilly, that today's residential school educated, reserve living First Nations people no longer have a culture, that they are a TV generation just like the rest of us. Well, many may well be a TV generation, but "the rest of us" doesn't apply. There is a culture, and it isn't the original culture, and it sure isn't mainstream culture, but it IS a culture, and like any other it has areas where it shines gloriously and other areas where it's a crying shame...

And those crying shame areas I see as being where the Department of Indian Affairs carefully and painstakingly "educated" some residential school survivors in bureaucratese, so they could function in Band Offices which were set up by guess who modelled on guess what..add a few non-native "consultants" who come in once in a while to help out and check up on and stir the mix and you get example after example of how "they" can't even govern themselves "properly"...

convince me it's an accident...
convince me it hasn't been carefully constructed..

and so Grandma is grandma to whoever wants to call me grandma...and to ALL those grandchildren Grandma says things like Language is a tool but it can be a weapon...Grandma wants you to pay attention and don't believe one single thing until you check it out for yourself... have another peanut butter cookie sweetie and let's look at this homework again.. no, Dearie, we'll give them the answer they want so you pass the test but let's find out for ourselves how much of this is true... Christopher Columbus was a BUM but tell them what they want to hear...

We won't change the world with peanut butter cookies and rain coats and hot chocolate on a stormy evening, but we WILL continue to teach the children that we are the land we live on, we are the sea which feeds us, and we are under a deep obligation to care for and respect both land and sea.

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Originally posted by charlieM:
Is there a large difference in the idea of land as property between the first nations and europeans? I mean a difference in the most basic sense.

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Well, just the opinion of a white guy but I'd say there is. Cree and Innu families having designated hunting territories that others are supposed to respect is different in the sense that it's based on preserving viable hunting territories for whole family groups. Only "Old World" cultures would allow an individual to liquidate it for immediate personal profit, then move on. Most Aboriginal peoples I've heard of saw themselves as "belonging" to the land, rather than the reverse, which makes more sense to me actually.

Should also add there was also a lot of land used in common in most tribal cultures, some overlapping with neighbouring groups, and they often had more communal ways of raising their young than what we'd consider as typical "extended" families. And what Canadians or Americans might see as mutually profitable trade may actually involve some sort of mutual obligation or long term agreement between parties, often more important than whatever goods were exchanged. A more socially integrated outlook in general. What I've been told anyhow.

[ 17 August 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

I think in some prairie tribes the wife was considered the owner of the tepee; and after horses arrived, they became valuable property which could be given away, traded or stolen.

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Originally posted by UrsaMinor:
I would be interesting in finding out how 'traditional' Western European cultures - represented in today's day and age by groups such as Mennonites, Amish and Hudderites would look at the cousins and aunts and uncle. I don't know, but I imagine you find that they might consider 'their immediate family' to include aunts, uncles and cousins... I often wonder how the creation of this type of housing and the idea of one family per house affected Western European culture.

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Originally posted by UrsaMinor:
I would be interesting in finding out how 'traditional' Western European cultures - represented in today's day and age by groups such as Mennonites, Amish and Hudderites would look at the cousins and aunts and uncle. I don't know, but I imagine you find that they might consider 'their immediate family' to include aunts, uncles and cousins.

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Ursa,
I wouldn't consider the Mennonites anymore 'traditional' to European culture than Dukhabors or Moravians. They were a fairly recent outgrowth of utopian Christanity, an exception rather than the rule. At least in the last two and half thousand years or so.

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Originally posted by UrsaMinor:
Through the idea, "You are what you do" I'd say the Amish and Mennonite cultures are much more 'traditional Western European' than say a Canadian Englishman who currently lives in downtown Toronto. Yes, they are not what every one was doing back then, but they are much more 'tradional' than the end product, which is sitting on a leather sofa playing X-box.

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