Lion and I discussed a week or so ago my disdain for Jared Diamond, which happens to be shared by most anthropologists and archaeologists. The main reason for not liking him is, as I explained to Lion, his unabashed, if slightly modified, unilineal evolutionism. This is the theory that held Western civilization to be the pinnacle of human achievement, with all "lesser" civilizations working toward that level of civilization. It don't take an anthropologist to see what's wrong with that.*
Now I don't think that Jared Diamond is either a) stupid, or b) racist. His reason for writing the New York Times best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel was to dispute the idea that there was something biologically, intellectually, or spiritually different between the Europeans and their descendants who influence the course of global history so much today and those other people who do not. In doing so, Diamond chose the environment to be his whipping boy - the underlying implication of that book was that any person in a given environment will respond exactly the same. If sub-Saharan Africans had had access to the same metals, fertile fields, and domesticable animals as Europeans did, they'd have been the ones to decimate the rest of the world's population and culture for four hundred and fifty years. Essentially, Diamond sees the world the same way as a game of Civ: every civilization is capable of the exact same things, but unfortunately they're also limited to the exact same line of development as one another (unique units notwithstanding).
Anyway, my real reason for writing this post is to bring this to everyone's attention. A year or two ago Diamond wrote a short piece for the New Yorker in which he described his field work in Papua New Guinea (originally as an ornithologist, mind you) and claimed that the tribal feuds that go on their can teach us something about the universal human need for revenge. Now, those tribal feuds probably can teach us something - that's not the problem. The problem is that Daniel Wemp, Diamond's interviewee, is now taking offense to what was written about him and attempting to sue. It's a pretty fun read, if you don't like the guy, and the original piece is a good intro to what's wrong with his way of thinking.
* Most anthropologists today subscribe to so-called "multilineal evolutionism," whereby individual cultures are considered to follow their own trajectories, and may or may not go through the phases identified by the earlier unilineal evolutionists. The legacy of the latter lingers, though, in anthropologists who try to isolate "stages" that are generally common between cultures, though the specifics will differ.
22.6.08
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