I hope you're dog-earing pages, and keep a pencil with your book. What strikes you as noteworthy?
Dog-earing pages!?!
Not even Battlefield Earth or Atlas Shrugged.
Nonsense. Books are not sacred. Few are valuable. A scribbled up book with intelligent marginalia is a record of my engagement with the material, where I keep track of questions and sometimes answers to them.
I add value to my books -- in pencil and underline with a straight edge.
Anymore I keep my current nonfiction read in a small zipper bag with a pencil case, bar magnifier and notebook.
Quite some time ago I got it from my public library. It was above my level but I ploughed through nearly all of it with considerable interest.
For me it provides some sort of reinforcement to what I gained from reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman; that we don't have to accept a Hobbesian view of human nature where a hierarchical leadership system is essential to society functioning at all.
the incredibly narrow, dominant, linear progression story of social evolution.
Hmmm. Can you elaborate, please?
We were hunter gatherers, then nomads, then pastoralists, then farmers, then townies and divided labour and patriarchally accumulated wealth and power in social pyramids with slaves at the broad bottom and a priest-king at the top, as we went, and we never looked back.
@Martin54 , don't abandon hope. You must read further.
I find this bit refreshing (pages 236 and 237):
Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts. Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity, and may be gendered female even when practised by men. This is not quite an anthropological universal, but it's about as close to one as you are ever likely to get. 44 Hypothetically, of course, it is possible that things haven't always been so. It's even conceivable that the current situation is really the result of some great global switch-around of gender roles and language structures that took place in the last few thousand years--but one would imagine that such an epochal change would have left other traces, and no one has so much as suggested what such traces might be. True, archaeological evidence of any kind is hard to come by, because aside from charred seeds, very little of what was done culturally with plants survives from prehistoric times. But where evidence exists, it points to strong associations between women and plant-based knowledge as far back as one can trace such things. 45
By plant-based knowledge we don't just mean new ways of working with wild flora to produce food, spices, medicines, pigments or poisons. We also mean the development of fibre-based crafts and industries, and the more abstract forms of knowledge these tend to generate about properties of time, space and structure. Textiles, basketry, network, matting and cordage were most likely always developed in parallel with the cultivation of edible plants, which also implies the development of mathematical and geometrical knowledge that is (quite literally) intertwined with the practice of these crafts. 46 Women's association with such knowledge extends back to some of the earliest surviving depictions of the human form: the ubiquitous sculpted female figurines of the last Ice Age with their woven headgear, string skirts and belts made of cord. 47
There is a peculiar tendency among (male) scholars to skip over the gendered aspects of this kind of knowledge or veil it in abstractions. Consider Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous comments on the 'savage mind', those 'Neolithic scientists' he imagined as having created a parallel route of discovery to modern science, but one that started from concrete interactions with the natural world rather than generalizing laws and theorems. The former method of experimentation proceeds 'from the angle of sensible qualities', and according to Lévi-Strauss it flowered in the Neolithic period, giving us the basis of agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, conservation and preparation of food, etc.; while the latter mode of discovery, starting from the definition of formal properties and theories, only came to fruition much more recently, with the advent of modern scientific procedures. 48
Nowhere in The Savage Mind--a book ostensibly dedicated to understanding that other sort of knowledge, the Neolithic 'science of the concrete'--does Lévi-Strauss even mention the possibility that those responsible for its 'flowering' might, very often, have been women.
Just these headings from Chapter 8 give life:
8 Imaginary Cities
Eurasia's first urbanites--in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Ukraine and China--and how they built cities without kings
And then there's this from 284 and 285:
In point of fact, the largest early cities, those with the greatest populations, did not appear in Eurasia--with its many technical and logistical advantages--but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered traction or transport, and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy. This raises an obvious question: why did so many end up living in the same place to begin with? The conventional story looks for the ultimate causes in technological factors: cities were a delayed, but inevitable, effect of the 'Agricultural Revolution', which started populations on an upward trajectory and set off a chain of other developments, for instance in transport and administration, which made it possible to support large populations living in one place. These large populations then required states to administer them. As we've seen, neither part of this story seems to be borne out by the facts.
This from page 322, you might find heartening:
Overall, one might be forgiven for thinking that history was progressing uniformly in an authoritarian direction. And in the very long run it was; at least, by the time we have written histories, lords and kings and would-be world emperors have popped up almost everywhere (though civic institutions and independent cities never entirely go away). 104 Still, rushing to this conclusion would be unwise. Dramatic reversals have sometimes taken place in the other direction -for instance in China.
According to Pasztory, Teotihuacan was not just 'anti-dynastic' in spirit, it was itself a Utopian experiment in urban life. Those who created it thought of themselves as creating a new and different kind of city, a Tollan for the people, without overlords or kings. Following in Pasztory's footsteps, other scholars, eliminating virtually every other possibility, arrived at similar conclusions. In its early years, they concluded, Teotihuacan had gone some way down the road to authoritarian rule, but then around ad 300 suddenly reversed course: possibly there was a revolution of sorts, followed by a more equal distribution of the city's resources and the establishment of a kind of 'collective governance' .13
The general consensus among those who know the site best is that Teotihuacan was, in fact, a city organized along some sort of self-consciously egalitarian lines. And, as we've seen, in world-historical terms all this is not nearly as weird or anomalous as scholars--or anyone else, for that matter--tend to assume. It is equally true if we simply try to understand Teotihuacan within its Mesoamerican context. The city didn't come out of nowhere. While there might be a recognizable 'package' of Mesoamerican kingship, there also appears to have been a very different, dare we say republican, tradition as well.
And finally (for now) from 348 and 349:
We like to tell ourselves that Europeans introduced the Americas not just to these agents of destruction but also to modern industrial democracy, ingredients for which were nowhere to be found there, not even in embryo. All this supposedly came as a single cultural package: advanced metallurgy, animal-powered vehicles, alphabetic writing systems and a certain penchant for freethinking that is seen as necessary for technological progress. 'Natives', in contrast, are assumed to have existed in some sort of alternative, quasi-mystical universe. They could not, by definition, be arguing about political constitutions or engaging in processes of sober deliberation over decisions that changed the course of world history; and if European observers report them doing so, they must either be mistaken, or were simply projecting on to 'Indians' their own ideas about democratic governance, even when those ideas were hardly practised in Europe itself.
As we've also seen, this way of reading history would have been quite alien to Enlightenment philosophers, who were more inclined to think their ideals of freedom and equality owed much to the peoples of the New World and were by no means certain if those ideals were at all compatible with industrial advance. We are dealing, again, with powerful modern myths. Such myths don't merely inform what people say: to an even greater extent, they ensure certain things go unnoticed. Some of the key early sources on Tlaxcala have never even appeared in translation, and new data emerging in recent years has not really been noticed outside specialist circles. Let's see if we can't set the record straight.
How, exactly, did the Tlaxcalteca arrive at a decision to ally with Cortés on the field of battle, thereby ensuring the Spaniards' victory over the Aztec Empire? It is clear the matter was fraught and deeply divisive (as it was in other Pueblan cities as well: in Cholula, for example, the same dilemma occasioned a rupture between the leaders of six calpolli--urban wards--three of whom took the others hostage, whereupon the latter absconded to Tlaxcala). 48 In Tlaxcala itself, though, the argument took a very different form to what happened in Cholula.
They provide much more support than Star Trek Replicators to counter the idea that land ownership and a stratified society are inevitable for a large urban population that relies on agriculture.
Read on!
I hope you're dog-earing pages, and keep a pencil with your book. What strikes you as noteworthy?
Dog-earing pages!?!
Not even Battlefield Earth or Atlas Shrugged.
Ee-yew (wrinkles nose). I worked in a bookstore when that doorstop (Battlefield earth) came out. We loathed and despise it, and were always glad when we got permission to strip it (remove cover and trash book—a returns procedure for paperbacks that nobody wanted).
I'll get there in the end @Kendel. As is usual with me, I've lost all critical capacity: I'm all in. I'm glad there is light further along the tunnel. Hope. I never read ahead.
And, er, I, er, read Battlefield Earth. And, er, enjoyed it. I'm not that person now... But dog ear?! Marginalia?!?!? Sounds fetishistic! Tabu is no uncertain terms. I get electronic copies and do it.
I hope you're dog-earing pages, and keep a pencil with your book. What strikes you as noteworthy?
That archaeology is bunk.
A bit more support for the statement would be helpful.
Not the science, but the incredibly narrow, dominant, linear progression story of social evolution.
That narrow, linear view (which I learned as an undergraduate anthropology major long ago) is exactly what G & W argue against. Our ancestors were just as intelligent as us, just as capable of thinking reflectively about social systems and making conscious choices about how to arrange their affairs. There was no necessity or inevitability to the historical path that resulted in "Western Civilization," and the insistence on viewing all societies through that template both does our ancestors an injustice and constricts our view of the possibilities for our future.
I hope you're dog-earing pages, and keep a pencil with your book. What strikes you as noteworthy?
That archaeology is bunk.
A bit more support for the statement would be helpful.
Not the science, but the incredibly narrow, dominant, linear progression story of social evolution.
That narrow, linear view (which I learned as an undergraduate anthropology major long ago) is exactly what G & W argue against. Our ancestors were just as intelligent as us, just as capable of thinking reflectively about social systems and making conscious choices about how to arrange their affairs. There was no necessity or inevitability to the historical path that resulted in "Western Civilization," and the insistence on viewing all societies through that template both does our ancestors an injustice and constricts our view of the possibilities for our future.
Are we catching the turn in the zeitgeist @Timothy the Obscure? Tho' I expect the right to rage against it as it does in the States, and even in the reactionary Oxbridge establishment here, as they do against Newsinger in history, and in alumni like Johnson.
Martin54, your last post shows to me a bit more of your encyclopaedic knowledge but I'm none the wiser unfortunately.
Sorry @Merry Vole. The right foam at the mouth at correct revisionist woke history, cancel culture and critical race theory. Here in the UK as expressed by Boris Johnson and the like. As did I for decades. Oxbridge historians writhe like salted slugs because the superb John Newsinger, introduced to me by @Gramps49, exploded their myth that the British Empire was the best of a bad lot.
Have you done a survey of Oxbridge historians and observed what proportion are writhing like salted slugs? Or is this something you don't have to observe because you consistently can't be wrong?
Have you done a survey of Oxbridge historians and observed what proportion are writhing like salted slugs? Or is this something you don't have to observe because you consistently can't be wrong?
Indeed not. I'm as wrong as any guided missile I'm sure. They hit by missing don't they? I'll do some 'research'. Actual reading, not googlin'.
I hope you're dog-earing pages, and keep a pencil with your book. What strikes you as noteworthy?
That archaeology is bunk.
A bit more support for the statement would be helpful.
Not the science, but the incredibly narrow, dominant, linear progression story of social evolution.
That narrow, linear view (which I learned as an undergraduate anthropology major long ago) is exactly what G & W argue against. Our ancestors were just as intelligent as us, just as capable of thinking reflectively about social systems and making conscious choices about how to arrange their affairs.
Sure, but like us they are constrained by the practical possibilities that material reality makes available to us.
I hope you're dog-earing pages, and keep a pencil with your book. What strikes you as noteworthy?
That archaeology is bunk.
A bit more support for the statement would be helpful.
Not the science, but the incredibly narrow, dominant, linear progression story of social evolution.
That narrow, linear view (which I learned as an undergraduate anthropology major long ago) is exactly what G & W argue against. Our ancestors were just as intelligent as us, just as capable of thinking reflectively about social systems and making conscious choices about how to arrange their affairs.
Sure, but like us they are constrained by the practical possibilities that material reality makes available to us.
Yet clearly saw and practiced a variety of practical possibilities within that material reality. The point is that
1) There were/are options beyond what we have been lead to believe was a narrow, linear progression, the only alternative to which was the Star Trek replicator.
2) Past civilizations have changed course, even after what to a human lifetime appears to be a long period of time.
I hope you're dog-earing pages, and keep a pencil with your book. What strikes you as noteworthy?
That archaeology is bunk.
A bit more support for the statement would be helpful.
Not the science, but the incredibly narrow, dominant, linear progression story of social evolution.
That narrow, linear view (which I learned as an undergraduate anthropology major long ago) is exactly what G & W argue against. Our ancestors were just as intelligent as us, just as capable of thinking reflectively about social systems and making conscious choices about how to arrange their affairs.
Sure, but like us they are constrained by the practical possibilities that material reality makes available to us.
Yet clearly saw and practiced a variety of practical possibilities within that material reality. The point is that
1) There were/are options beyond what we have been lead to believe was a narrow, linear progression, the only alternative to which was the Star Trek replicator.
Yes, I've read the book, but that is still a much weaker statement than Graeber/Wengrow's opener.
Comments
I add value to my books -- in pencil and underline with a straight edge.
Anymore I keep my current nonfiction read in a small zipper bag with a pencil case, bar magnifier and notebook.
A bit more support for the statement would be helpful.
For me it provides some sort of reinforcement to what I gained from reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman; that we don't have to accept a Hobbesian view of human nature where a hierarchical leadership system is essential to society functioning at all.
Not the science, but the incredibly narrow, dominant, linear progression story of social evolution.
We were hunter gatherers, then nomads, then pastoralists, then farmers, then townies and divided labour and patriarchally accumulated wealth and power in social pyramids with slaves at the broad bottom and a priest-king at the top, as we went, and we never looked back.
Which is all wrong.
I find this bit refreshing (pages 236 and 237):
Just these headings from Chapter 8 give life:
And then there's this from 284 and 285:
This from page 322, you might find heartening:
...
And then from 331:
And finally (for now) from 348 and 349:
They provide much more support than Star Trek Replicators to counter the idea that land ownership and a stratified society are inevitable for a large urban population that relies on agriculture.
Read on!
Ee-yew (wrinkles nose). I worked in a bookstore when that doorstop (Battlefield earth) came out. We loathed and despise it, and were always glad when we got permission to strip it (remove cover and trash book—a returns procedure for paperbacks that nobody wanted).
And, er, I, er, read Battlefield Earth. And, er, enjoyed it. I'm not that person now... But dog ear?! Marginalia?!?!? Sounds fetishistic! Tabu is no uncertain terms. I get electronic copies and do it.
That narrow, linear view (which I learned as an undergraduate anthropology major long ago) is exactly what G & W argue against. Our ancestors were just as intelligent as us, just as capable of thinking reflectively about social systems and making conscious choices about how to arrange their affairs. There was no necessity or inevitability to the historical path that resulted in "Western Civilization," and the insistence on viewing all societies through that template both does our ancestors an injustice and constricts our view of the possibilities for our future.
Are we catching the turn in the zeitgeist @Timothy the Obscure? Tho' I expect the right to rage against it as it does in the States, and even in the reactionary Oxbridge establishment here, as they do against Newsinger in history, and in alumni like Johnson.
Sorry @Merry Vole. The right foam at the mouth at correct revisionist woke history, cancel culture and critical race theory. Here in the UK as expressed by Boris Johnson and the like. As did I for decades. Oxbridge historians writhe like salted slugs because the superb John Newsinger, introduced to me by @Gramps49, exploded their myth that the British Empire was the best of a bad lot.
Indeed not. I'm as wrong as any guided missile I'm sure. They hit by missing don't they? I'll do some 'research'. Actual reading, not googlin'.
Sure, but like us they are constrained by the practical possibilities that material reality makes available to us.
Yet clearly saw and practiced a variety of practical possibilities within that material reality. The point is that
1) There were/are options beyond what we have been lead to believe was a narrow, linear progression, the only alternative to which was the Star Trek replicator.
2) Past civilizations have changed course, even after what to a human lifetime appears to be a long period of time.
Yes, I've read the book, but that is still a much weaker statement than Graeber/Wengrow's opener.