Polynesian navigator sketching Lobster exchange

Tupaia, Captain Cook’s Polynesian navigator, sketched a Maori man exchanging a large, live spiny lobster for a piece of cloth when the Endeavour landed in New Zealand in 1769. (VIA)

Triangulate the deep past

James C. Scott on Jared Diamond. Nothing new really but it sounds better when it comes from him.

He imagines he can triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are ‘our living ancestors’, that they show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns and government. This assumption rests on the indefensible premise that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are survivals, museum exhibits of the way life was lived for the entirety of human history ‘until yesterday’ – preserved in amber for our examination.

In the unique case of Highland New Guinea, which was apparently isolated from coastal trade and the outside world until World War Two, Diamond might be forgiven for making this inference, though the people of New Guinea have had exactly the same amount of time to adapt and evolve as homo americanus and they managed somehow to get hold of the sweet potato, which originated in South America. The inference of pristine isolation, however, is completely unwarranted for virtually all of the other 35 societies he canvasses. Those societies have, for the last five thousand years, been deeply involved in a world of trade, states and empires and are often now found in undesirable marginal areas to which they have been pushed by more powerful societies. The anthropologist Pierre Clastres argued that the Yanomamo and Siriono, two of Diamond’s prime examples, were originally sedentary cultivators who turned to foraging in order to escape the forced labour and disease associated with Spanish settlements. Like almost all the groups Diamond considers, they have been trading with outside kingdoms and states (and raiding them) for much of the past three thousand years; their beliefs and practices have been shaped by contact, trade goods, travel and intermarriage. So thoroughly have they come to live in a world of powerful kingdoms and states that one might call these societies themselves a ‘state effect’. That is, their location in the landscape is designed to help them evade or trade with larger societies. They forage forest and marine products desired by urban societies; many groups are ‘twinned’ with neighbouring societies, through which they manage their trade and relationship to the larger world.

We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.

The power to embrace and integrate entire continents

Jarod Diamond's latest book (the world until yesterday) I have not read but I have read reviews and it was trashed by almost everyone. Chris Knight, UK anthropologist and all round troublemaker is someone who I like to read. From Knight's review of Diamond's book this is I think a wonderful passage:

Excellent when he sticks to science, Diamond is less convincing when he turns to politics. Here is an example: “Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic… ” As I read these lines, I had the funny feeling they were directly aimed at me! It would be interesting to research the extent to which anthropologists’ political beliefs correlate with those of the people they study. My closest professional colleagues study African hunter-gatherers; all of us have witnessed and participated in emphatically egalitarian social, economic and gender relationships. As a result, we have all become “anarchist” in the sense Diamond intends. We have had an excellent education - by people who make anarchy work. I should add that anyone familiar with hunter-gatherer systems of extended kinship would be surprised at Diamond’s description of them as “small-scale”: unlike truncated Western notions of kinship and family life, these extraordinary systems have the power to embrace and integrate entire continents.

Bacteria as material culture

In a paper published in April 2012 Benezra, DStefano and Gordon argue for the foundation of an 'Anthropology of microbes'. Taking a step further from a) the notion that we humans are really a symbiotic supraorganism of humans and microbes and b) that this synthesis bring about "intra- and interpersonal variation of these species and gene assemblages as a function of body habitat, age, physiologic status, and family relationships." The insight that results is the idea that microbial variation is another facet of what informs/creates kinship and culture. Qoute: 

Our microbial communities provide snapshots of those with whom we have lived, the diversity of our daily habits, as well as the impact of our changing lifestyles. For example, our guts are homes to our largest collection of microbes, where the number of microbial cells is measured in terms of tens of trillions. Gut microbial communities in humans are shared among family members and underscore the long-lasting impact of our interpersonal relationships. Common as well as distinct features in gut communities are being documented among populations representing varied “cultural traditions” and geographical locations. The breathtaking rate of change in food availability and preparation methods, the expansive movement of human populations, the rapid proliferation of technology, and the ubiquitous use of antibiotics emphasize the importance of studying the microbiological heritage of humans, just as we study our genetic, linguistic, and cultural heritages.

 The BacterioSphere has no loose ends.
 

A visit to the ethnographic museum in Leiden

Haida Costumes

 "Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application." - Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

Chinese print with the carved boards it was made with.

Chinese terracotta figures

Chinese garment [bureaucracy style]

From block to figurine,click to enlarge

200+ year old Japanese bronze

Quipu

Eskimo Masks

Amazonian headdress, much larger than I thought they would be.

Another 200+ year old Japanese bronze

Hopi painting

'Molongo' is the new buzz word

In a paper called "Long-Term Foraging Expeditions (Molongo) among the Baka Hunter-Gatherers in the Northwestern Congo Basin, with Special Reference to the 'Wild Yam Question'" Hirokazu Yasuoka "describe[s] and analyze[s] a long-term foraging expedition (molongo) among the Baka of the northwestern Congo Basin as an example Long-Term Foraging Expeditions of foraging life in tropical rainforests. On the basis of these data, I then discuss the potential of tropical rainforests as a human habitat." 

There is lot of energy intake calculating going on in this paper but for our purpose it is enough to give you a few of the images and that part of the text that explain the daily proceedings of the Baka life during the vacations expedition. What amazes me is how slow the trek proceeds. The final camp is roughly 50 kilometres away but it takes 16 days to get there while it only takes 6 days to get back. On the molongo people take it slow. 

An important sociocultural aspect of molongo is the value placed on a nomadic life in the forest. When on the move, the group would usually decamp at about eight o’clock in the morning, often breaking into several sections to variously hunt such animals as they encountered or gather plants and honey. In the early afternoon when they decided on the location of the new camp, the women began to build huts of saplings and large Marantaceae leaves, while the men again went hunting with spears or to look for honey. When fresh tracks of a large animal were found, the hunter and his assistants perused it with the gun. The Baka moved the campsite every few days before arriving at the final camp of Mongungu, where they continued to use the forest intensively for their 43 night stay. 

Once at the Mongungu camp the men set cable snares along seven routes of 2–4 km stretching in a radial pattern from the camp. Hunters visited their snares every three days, because trapped animals spoiled within two days of dying. Men searched for honey or hunted with spears on the other days. The women went out digging for wild yams every two or three days, sometimes accompanied by their husbands. The wild yam species harvested most frequently was Dioscorea praehensilis, which can be found in large quantities in one place. Almost all of the cable snares and the major gathering sites for wild yams were within 3 km of the camp, so the most intensively used area was approximately ∼30km2.

The article is behind the academic firewall, with many tanks to a reader for the PDF.

How the invaded recorded the invaders

The earlier post of the Inuit carving of a Viking reminded my of Julia Blackburn's 1979 book 'The White Men, the first response of aboriginal peoples to the white men'. It's a collection of drawings, artefact and stories that remind us that just as 'they' entered our history, we entered theirs. The book begins with an excellent foreword by Canadian anthropologist Edmund Carpenter and continues with a zillion documents from Africa, North America, Oceania and Indonesia illustrated with artworks. The texts are a bit much for me but the images are stunningly fascinating as you can see for yourself in the small sample below. 

West African legend says that the white men came from a hole in the ground, a mud sculpture from Nigeria.

Fully rigged ship on a New Caledonian bamboo pole (1850ties).

Portrait of a missionary from the Western Congo. (1930-40ties)

Mask of a sailor from the West Coast of Africa around 1900.

Nicobar Island scare-devil in the form of a policeman.

Cave Painting in Arnhem Land showing the recent surge of European visitors. (1940ties)

A 1850ties Eskimo seal skin showing whales, ships and people. A map? 

A Dutch couple depicted by a South African bushman in the mid 1850ties.

Papua New Guinean Christ after WWII

Brass bracelet made by the Dogon in Mali.

Gathering portrayed in Paleolithic art

Near Valencia can be found the Cuevas de la Araña, a cave-system that contains 8000 year old images of hunting-gathering scenes: goat hunting and honey gathering. 

Even though Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's History of Food (800 pages small-print, first edition 1987) begins with 'gathering' she has remarkably little to say about it and what she does say usually is only about the things that would become the first staple crops of agriculture. She begins the segment on gathering with the gathering of honey and that is an odd choice because honey, in an otherwise sugar free diet, is the ultimate prestige food of hunter-gatherers. For instance, here is what Napoleon Chagnon writes about the Yanomami of Venezuela in 1968:

"Wild honey is one of the most highly prized foods of all, and the Yanomamo will go to great extremes to get it. Should someone spot a bee's nest, all other plans are dropped and honey becomes the priority of the day. One can usually assume that when someone returns to the village later than expected, he has been detained because he ran into a cache of honey."  

You can't really extrapolate but why would someone make the effort to paint a honey collecting scene if it wasn't important to him or her?

It is typical though that a modern-day historian can give a festive food a key position while food stuffs of far greater importance are completely ignored. If you are willing to take up the comparison with hunter-gatherers as they are living on in our own times Toussaint-Samat is essentially wiping out thousands of years of woman's labour in exchange for a few good moments.

The Savage and the Inncocent [picture set]

David Maybury-Lewis is an British anthropologist who lived with the Sherente and Shavante in 1955/56. He did a proper anthropological study that is well regarded but I have just finished his other book: 'The Savage and the Innocent' (1965, earlier). It's a popular account of the human story of fieldwork and the subjectiveness behind the data. There are more books like this, and they follow a certain pattern, but Maybury-Lewis does it better than most and this is largely the result from him taking himself not too serious and his refusal to sentimentalize himself, the people, the rainforest or travel itself. If you ever travelled two weeks with a loved one through some strange country where no one speaks your languages and the mores are different (even if it's only Italy or Poland) this story is appreciatively recognizable. Here are some of the pictures from this book, click to enlarge.

Listening to their own voices on the tape-recorder.

The woman watch as the men dance.

A paccary caught during a hunt.

Notice the anthropologist's feet.

Woman sitting next to a earth oven

Radical Anthropology #4 is available for download

Noam Chomsky is the shaman of the industrial-military complex, welcome to the intellectual highlight of the year! The fourth issue of the annual Radical Anthropology journal has just been made available as free PDF.