PBS Series on "Guns, Germs and Steel": part
one
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to www.marxmail.org on
Despite having dozed off for ten minutes toward the end of the first installment of the PBS series based on Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel," I feel that I have a pretty good handle on what it was trying to establish--namely, the idea that the development of agriculture is a sine qua non for civilization.
The show centered on comparisons between Papuan New Guinea
and places like ancient
He sets out by stating that "Guns, Germs and Steel" was written to understand why there are winners and losers in world history. This was prompted by an encounter with a Papuan named Yali who asked why the Westerners had so much "cargo"--a term they use for commodities. It originated in the cargo cult, which viewed things such as evaporated milk (and even the containers they came in) as gifts from the gods.
For Diamond, the big breakthrough occurred in the so-called
He points to evidence that a formerly hunting and gathering group learned how to plant wheat seeds for future crops--thus eliminating the need for a nomadic existence. Once you have a stable settlement, it becomes possible to create housing of a more permanent nature, etc.
You can find a scholarly presentation of this in a Science Magazine article titled Location, Location, Location: The First Farmers" that Diamond wrote in November 1997:
In short, einkorn [a
kind of wheat] domestication in the Karacada mountains exemplifies the enormous head start that western
Eurasian societies gained from
Full: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z52E22A6B
It is understandable why "Guns, Germs and Steel" might have been appeared as a breath of fresh air when it first appeared, since it dispenses with ideas of racial superiority. The Europeans overran the Lakota not because they were racially superior but because they had happened upon agriculture through the contingencies of history.
The other thing that has some appeal for radicals is Diamond's seeming affinity for historical materialism. The notion of agricultural societies superseding more primitive (but communal) societies is obviously laid out in Engels's "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State." Engels writes:
"Horticulture, probably unknown to Asiatic barbarians
of the lower stage, was being practiced by them in the middle stage at the
latest, as the forerunner of agriculture. In the climate of the Turanian plateau, pastoral life is impossible without
supplies of fodder for the long and severe winter. Here, therefore, it was
essential that land should be put under grass and corn cultivated. The same is
true of the steppes north of the
Diamond, who roots for the Papuans as if they were a losing team, sounds like Engels when he mourns for the more egalitarian but less technologically advanced Zulus:
"We have seen examples of this courage quite recently
in
Of course, Diamond departs from Engels on the all-important
question, which is how to recover the egalitarian and democratic essence of
hunting and gathering societies while maintaining the scientific and technical
breakthroughs of all societies that succeeded them.