History questions not worth their own thread IV

[strijder20]

Turkije is the Dutch word for Turkey.

Yes, and considering the high amount of Turks in the Netherlands, I think that druid guy was just trying to make a bad joke.

 

[JohannaK]

Neither. The name is Panoramix.

 

[Agent327]

So the Egyptians decided they were stupid, unfashionable wastes of time.

No, they didn't. As I just informed you.

We do at least have evidence that the connection of the Egyptian monarch to the gods of Egypt continued throughout this period, so we can justly infer that this belief - in the divinity of the Pharoah - was a very stable one.

Actually, belief in the divinity of pharaohs had all but ceased after the Second Intermediate period. They were still connected to the gods, but so where the high priests of Thebes, to name the most important example. In short, the pharaoh was no longer exclusively linked to a god, nor was he believed to be one anymore. In a way divinity had 'democratized', similar to the pyramids/mortuary tombs.

 

[TheLastOne36]

It's also Jared Diamond.

Which brings me to the question, why does CFC not like Jared Diamond? I've noticed it a few times on here.

 

[Traitorfish]

From what I gather, the feeling is that his work tends towards material reductionism, to depicting historical processes and events as functions of biology and environment, and to downplay the significance of the social, cultural and personal (in a word, human) dimensions to history.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

My opinion of Diamond is mostly based on the fact that he tends to get so much praise for his "revolutionary" ideas, which are no different from what I'd been taught since elementary school except that he says them with much greater redundancy and with a self righteous assumption that his readers must have believed in some really racist alternatives before he came along to enlighten them.

He also seems to portray things in a fairly deterministic ways, underrating how slightly different individual decisions or cultural values could have radically changed the course of history.

Note that the only thing by Diamond I've actually read was Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I read at about the same time as Charles C Mann's 1491. The later is a much more interesting book, which covers the causes and efects of guns, germs, and steal to a greater degree, but also points out that the Europeans really did not have as much technological superiority as is so often assumed.

 

[sophie]

Because everything he espouses revolves around environmental determinism. Although the environment does play many factors in the shaping of history, it is only one small factor in a much wider and more complex history.

Also some of the theories he espouses are erroneous. The rest are better explained by other historians. Also his writing style is dull and dry.

 

[Traitorfish]

Also his name sounds like a cheezy Vegas lounge musician.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

My problem with Diamond is that he portrays the entirety of human society's evolution as both desirable, natural, and inevitable, in the only way it could possibly have happened. He doesn't just explain weaponry, technology, and immunity as being influential factors, but rather desirably influential ones. Humanity has emerged as the supremely immune, stable, and prosperous way possible, because history happened the way that it did, is the underlying text. And sometimes the overlying text.

guns, germs, and steal

What a fantastic Freudian slip.

 

[ace99]

He deprives the so-called "natives" of their agency, even though he ostensibly seeks to defend and explain why things went the way that they did, but really he relegates them to being nothing more than victims of their environment.

 

[History_Buff]

Edit: well I was quite a bit behind there now wasn't I. Do ignore.

 

[Masada]

'Sustainable' means that the amount of resources consumed in a year is equal to or less than the amount of resources produced the next year, surely?

Awful definition. See: food storage.

Masada is really the one to ask, but one thing I can say is that rather than surpassing the devastation outsiders brought, any decline of the state of living on the island was insignificant compared to the destruction that came on the island's population in the 19th century.

Nah, there's not even archaeological evidence for a population decline, let alone support for the claim that the population reached the stratospheric levels (10 000 to 20 000!) mentioned in Diamond (2007). A more realistic figure is in the low 1000's i.e. in-line with the population densities attested in other Polynesian islands. Hunt and Lipo (2007) do a good number on the 'ecocide' thesis here. The article I've linked is free, but I have a feeling it might be a draft, so I've quoted the conclusion from the full article just in case:

Stated simply, no evidence exists for a pre-European contact population collapse. It is merely supposition, repeated over and over. A pre-contact demographic collapse remains untested, undemonstrated archaeologically. The historic slave-trading, epidemic diseases, intensive sheep ranching, and tragic population collapse – indeed the genocide of the Rapanui People –is well documented, and has been recognized for a long time

Some other problematic claims include: the complete lack of archaeological evidence for cannibalism, the fact that only a small number of bones show signs of violence and the kicker for me is that the what were thought to be 'spear points' have turned out to have wear patterns consistent with cutting and scraping plant material and close analogues (used for those purposes!) found elsewhere in East Polynesia (e.g. Hawai'i and Taihiti). These points are important because they make some of the more lurid claims look naive and a little bit offensive.

Hunt and Lippo's Revisiting Rapa Nui (Easter Island) "ecocide" is also fantastic. It's behind a paywall though

 

[r16]

Turkije is the Dutch word for Turkey.

Yes, and considering the high amount of Turks in the Netherlands, I think that druid guy was just trying to make a bad joke.

I don't trust druids unless his name is Paranomix.

I think you mean Getafix. Dirty foreigner language speakers.

Neither. The name is Panoramix.

actually it's dead serious business . As countries grow richer local myths and stuff get replaced by imports . Wouldn't be a thing in itself , but one can see London improving on the gambit of Prince Charles , the Muslim . Now we have a King Offa , around 700 AD who had Islamic inscriptions on the golden coins he had cut , John I or whatever wanted to be a Muslim , taking the whole country with him after he was ex-communicated but rebuffed by the Caliphate in Spain . And this is supposed to be a good thing ? Sir , ı know my Robin Hood ... ı think ...

and finally to improve the chances of people accepting a solution a la Brits vs IRA , Spain vs ETA we now hear Catalans are descendants of Alan Turks ( the nomadic Hun type people ı guess ) and of C-Hattis ; though ı must say such periods are beyond my rant-scale . Followed by laughter at the claims Sumerians were Turks ; such a follow-up makes it fully scientific . The guy is even ready to discuss Turks either as Neoanderthals or on the lost continent of Mu .

which one day will make the Easter statues Turks ı guess ....

 

[Flying Pig]

Awful definition. See: food storage.

Even with that, you can't keep going forever if you're consuming more stuff than you're making - which includes making stuff to trade for more consumable stuff.

 

[Masada]

Even with that, you can't keep going forever if you're consuming more stuff than you're making - which includes making stuff to trade for more consumable stuff.

It still undermines your whole definition, no?

 

[Peck of Arabia]

Well I guess that's shown me; I liked Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. The logic in them seemed pretty sound and made a lot of sense. Shame it seems to have been built upon fraudulent claims and data.

 

[Lord Baal]

Well I guess that's shown me; I liked Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. The logic in them seemed pretty sound and made a lot of sense. Shame it seems to have been built upon fraudulent claims and data.

It's not so much fraudulent, as unknowledgable. Diamond isn't an historian, he's an evolutionary biologist. He therefore seeks an evolutionary reason for history.

By coincidence, I'm watching House right now. The patient has an illness that one character, Foreman, diagnoses as being neurological, whereas another character, Cameron, diagnoses as an allergy. Foreman is a neurologist, Cameron is an immunologist. Diamond has the same problem. He apparently decided to write GGS and Collapse because he wanted to see how a non-historian would handle looking at history. In his attempt to prove that historians are too invested in history and therefore can't be objective, Diamond has ironically proven why history is best left to the experts in the first place, by suffering from the exact same problem as he accuses historians of doing.

 

[Masada]

It's not so much fraudulent, as unknowledgable.

There's a lot more to the story than that. See here for more details.

Diamond isn't an historian, he's an evolutionary biologist. He therefore seeks an evolutionary reason for history.

I don't think that's all that relevant, given that he's quite obviously arguing from an anthropological perspective though he's usually wrong when arguing from that perspective too.

 

[Traitorfish]

On Diamond, I think that his work typifies a lot of popular history/anthropology/etc. in that appears to present radical or non-conventional explanations, but ultimately functions as a defence of, or at least resignation to, the existing social and global order. His environmental determinism appears to be a solid step away from older racial, cultural or economic theories of European hegemony, and so in that sense appears a radical challenge to presumptions of European superiority. But at the same time, his narrative is one of iceberg-like inevitability, that Western Europe was always going to come out on top, that the current world order was always going to look like this, and there's really not much any of us can do about it, so fundamentally it's really quite conservative. Thus Diamond can pose as a convention-bucking maverick even while laying out a March of History as inevitable, if not as enthusiastic, as that of any latter-day Whig.

When you get right down to it, he's basically a pessimistic version of Niall Ferguson.

 

[Peck of Arabia]

Ooh, I like Niall Ferguson!

..am I a bad person?

What about environmental determinism as part of a larger set of considerations? That is, the role of individuals, and a raft of social, military, economic, political conditions and decisions as well as chance all have a major bearing on the development of the world as we know it, but environmental conditions rig the game, as it were but not so as to make the outcome certain, just more likely?

Or am I just hedging my bets?