From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology
Subject: Fluvial paradise (was: Which Came First, Agriculture
Distribution: world
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 92 03:55:34 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1992Dec29.162613.27911@panix.com> stcmille@panix.com writes:

 > I wonder what "devolve" means in this context?  Does it mean return to a
 > less intensive lifestyle?  If it does, this is difficult to accept.
 > There is a "trap" effect in intensification where there are points of no
 > return.  You can't just go from intensive agricuture to hunting and
 > gathering because the carrying capacity of the land under the two
 > systems is totally different.

I wonder if this is the reason people begin to feel "trapped", then
just give up and drop out to take up a "less intensive lifestyle". I
think you are making the mistake here of unifying and personifying the
mass as a single active entity, when all I need do is indicate people
of all races derived from larger, "more intensive" societies who now
live as pastoralists, horticulturalists and/or hunters and gatherers,
to create really big problems for your evolutionary theory.

The carrying capacity of land is what we make it, yes? The decision is
whether we want to manage it and farm it with sustainable husbandry, or
just continue to exploit and diminish it.

Now, whether or not your urban interests will subsequently invoke their
usual hysterical propaganda against land based peoples, and act against
them so egregiously as history reveals that they will fail to thrive,
does not provide any proof for cultural evolution. Rather it reveals
the extent to which the City-State seeks to hide its violence behind
pseudo-scientific legitimation and propaganda.

Charles Darwin was of the *industrial* land-owning class of capitalist
employer sustaining the system which spawned the wealthy, intellectual
dilettanti of the English Midlands, while both Marx and Engels derived
from their German counterparts. Further, I would point out that every
revolution during the past two hundred years and more was propagated by
such urban intellectuals who regarded the peasants as only capable of
taking sides with whoever gained power, while the surviving indigenous
peoples were just tossed in together with the gypsies, beggars, idiots
and cripples as a hopeless lumpenproletariat.

While its economic roots are clearly established from the sixteenth
century, it is during that more recent period that autochthonous and
indigenous societies everywhere, as a mass phenomenon, have suffered
greater dislocation, disenfranchisement and marginalisation than at
any other time in history, coinciding with the development of the City
State into the city-based Nation State of today, with the growth in
popularity of Evolutionary Theory, and with social revolution arising
from discontent among the industrial working classes to achieve it.

 > Cities engender different relations of production.  The economic "base"
 > is transformed.

During the past thirty years, farm terms of trade have declined by
around 50% while massive environmental damage is being experienced on
a global scale. Your "relations of production" are falling apart
around your ears, and your "economic base" is becoming increasingly
worthless. You might think about that a little more thoroughly.

While you are doing that, you might also like to map the cultural
resurgence of indigenous peoples and the "Third World", especially
since the 1960s and in particular related to the common experience
of Vietnam and Afghanistan. The decline of the USSR, and the growing
racial, social and cultural diversity in the Americas set to simply
overwhelm during the next two to three generations the European system
established there, are also relevant trends you might take into account.

 > I'll believe this when a significant number of people do this.  Right
 > now far more people who used to be metal benders are becoming paper
 > pushers.  The percentage of the population involved in food production
 > (as opposed to food preparation) continues to fall.

Ah, only a *significant* number of people? All I need do is map any
regular pattern away from metal benders becoming paper pushers toward
metal benders becoming self-sufficient gardeners to discredit your
theory. The nail in your coffin is an examination of how the remaining
paper pushers are to be fed and clothed, when farmers and gardeners,
and certainly indigenous peoples, see no value in all that paperwork.

Again, the global discursive trends are very much toward returning to
the land to take care of it much better lest we all perish, and that,
my friend, is the most substantial evidence even here on the Internet
for the present cultural devolution toward more traditional forms.

1993 is the International Year of Indigenous Peoples, BTW. I trust you
will avail yourself of the opportunity to learn something during the
next twelve months.

 > Well, maybe things are different where people live upside down.  Why
 > don't you all fall off the earth down there, anyway?  Do you have glue
 > on your shoes?

Well, no. Our strategy is to to hold on with one hand while batting
the rest of you back up to the top with the other. If we can manage to
finally make the whole shebang top heavy maybe this stupid business will
flip right over again, and then we will be on top, won't we?

Gil