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I find the thread from Cecile Mills and Mike Warren very interesting.
I'm interested in Mike's statement about not being able to envisage utopias. I'm
the same, but I wonder whether that's a fault with me (and Mike) rather
than with the possibility of utopias. I find Dante's Inferno more convincing than
his Paradise. I find Huxley's Brave New World all too believable, whereas I don't
even find his Walden Two attractive. Is this just lack of imagination on our
part?
I also disagree with Mike's statements about Human Nature. Maybe it really is
bad, or good, or a bit of both, or infinitely malleable - I don't know. What I do
know is that it is in the interests of the powerful to make us think that it is
bad, and that is reason enough to believe it to be good. I think it is amazing
the way that the elite has so successfully grabbed hold of the reins of discourse
that they have made the badness of Human Nature transcend the basic philosophical
issues of life.
- If you believe in spirituality, 9 chances out of 10 you're going to believe in
Christian (especially Catholic and Calvinist) doctrines of original sin.
- If you're materialist, on the other hand, you're likely to fall for the opposite
bigotry of science, with its Darwinist ideas about human evolution (Dawkins, etc).
> Some people envision the Hunter/Gatherers as men in tiger skins killing
> large beasts while the women sat in the caves cooking something. This is
> probably the result of male-dominated anthropomorphic anthropology and it
> is changing as observers remove gender bias from their remarks.
> You can now read about how women did much of the food acquisition, that
> rather than large animals, the mainstay of the diet was plant-based with
> small rodents and insects also eaten. The vision of social stratification
> (men hunting;women at home) is now one of more egalitarian cooperative
> hunting and gathering done by both sexes but probably more by women. Social
> stratification was (and is today) almost non-existant, with people of
> importance serving temporarily (no life-long status change, in other words).
Very true.
> To address your idea that specialization occurred at the time of the
> Agricultural Revolution, we know it is much older than that. To use a
> familiar example, tribal peoples in pre-Columbian American (as today) had
> specialized jobs that people did during certain stages of their lives. Some
> retained that job by dint of talent for long periods of time. This did not
> mean their societies were not egalitarian--they were. The issues of
> ownership of the job title were different.
1. Many/most pre-Columbian Americans were agricultural. Quinn gets round this by
saying that they were not totalitarian agriculturalists. I find the logic of
his distinctions difficult to follow. I'm no great fan of Quinn's.
2. Not all pre-Columbian Americans were tribal, and not all were egalitarian.
Some formed kingdoms, with division of labour and priestly elites, etc. (eg. the
mound builders). If you mean "American" to mean the whole of the Americas, then
many were urban.
All the best,
Richard
PS. Cecile, did you find my stuff about kuzu interesting/helpful?