From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: The Return of Nasty, Brutish and Short
Distribution: world
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 01:44:24 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <149180148@hpindda.cup.hp.com> alanm@hpindda.cup.hp.com writes:

 > We've been here before.
 >  
 > The *factual* evidence is that hunter-gatherer societies often have *lower*
 > infant mortality and birth rates than do peasant societies, and lower birth
 > rates than early industrial societies did. Consult any standard modern intro 
 > textbook on cultural anthropology for info and references.
 >  
 > But these facts don't fit Sigurdsson's mythicized ideas about progress, so 
 > he dismisses them and replaces them with other a priori "facts" of his own 
 > invention, which are more to his liking but are not based on observation. 
 > E.g.  "Now, even if they had some stabilising mechanism to balance death&birth
 > rates before, it is usually adjusted for high infant death rates and therefore
 > doesn't need to be efficient in reducing conception."

Well, life *is* nasty, brutish and short in hunter-gatherer societies.
But the problem does not lie in the socio-cultural processes which had
underwritten their pristine stability as such, only in their inability
to adjust to invasion and domination by Western "civilisation" which
usurped their resourse base. Please note that in North American cities
life is also "nasty, brutish and short".

 > Here, Gil, is a case where it makes sense to demand field observations: 
 > Sigurddson is dismissing all the standard work without one iota of evidence
 > for doing so. When you ask him for his evidence, he says in effect that the
 > anthropological field workers are incompetent, and that his intuitions as
 > to what *must* be true are obviously more trustworthy than are their clearly
 > biased reports. They've all got it in for progress! That's why they say nice
 > things about hunter-gatherers or other traditional societies, where, as he
 > knows full well and beyond any need for facts, life was always nasty, 
 > brutish, and short. And nobody damned to such a life could possibly ever be 
 > smart enough to see that mightn't be a good idea to have another child.
 >  
 > This is a core tenet of technocentric faith, and you can't change it with 
 > any amount of evidence, any more than you can change a creationist's faith
 > with evidence. In both cases those producing the evidence are involved in
 > conspiracies against the One True Faith.

As part of my honours program at University I scripted and filmed a
short ethnographic video on this matter you mention, Alan. I suggest
that you and steinly are both part of the same Western agony, of the
same historic protagonism and antagonism which has warped the Western
consciousness about what is real and what is not real, yet sucks up
such massive world energy and resources to keep it fueled while others
are thus forced to live under constant existential duress.

 > ------------
 > Alan McGowen
 >  
 > "It ain't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for
 > sure that just ain't so that does it." -- Yogi Berra 

My response to your .sig would be to dump both of you together in the
Western Desert, and see how you can both finally get along well enough
that you both survive. Keep it in mind that that environment is so
marginal that if you wasted any energy at all trying to compete with
one another you will probably *both* perish.

That tells the whole story about the current state of the world, to my
way of thinking.

--
Gil Hardwick                          Internet:  gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                  Fidonet:  3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                         Voice:  (+61 9) 399 2401
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