Leaving Eden
I've just thoroughly enjoyed a 2018 book by an author new to me, "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott. The author challenges the assumption that the great civilizations that sprang up after the dawn of agriculture improved things for anyone. Without romanticizing the hunter-gatherer life, he reports solid evidence bearing on the severe disadvantages of sedentary agriculture, and explores the considerable changes (including genetic) it wrought on the human race. He argues that sedentary agriculture succeeded for millenia before agrarian states arose. He draws a parallel between tax-collecting states and the surrounding barbarian civilizations engaged in what must be recognized as a protection racket. Both treated the farmers essentially as domesticated livestock and extracted as much as possible of the excess food they produce via the momentous replacement of hunter-gathering with sedentary cultivation.Scott's prose is a pleasure. There is no tiresome hectoring against colleagues who might dispute his revisionism. He organizes his thinking clearly and makes a sustained argument with solid evidence and logic--something that shouldn't be rare in academic literature but sadly is. I'm off to read some of his other books, including one on anarchy, a subject he obviously has grappled hard with. It's no easy thing to construct a society that restrains people from seizing the results of other people's labor by force, rather than requiring us all to proceed by some form of consent.
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4 comments:
What is this latter book called?
One of the questions I had to answer during my orals (PhD) was about agriculture that was sustainable in time as compared to sustainable in place. Some forms of swidden (slash and burn) can be practiced for thousands of year in the same region, but not the same place. Then there were cultures that encouraged "wild" plants to grow in more places, and that practiced hunting, herding, and gathering over the year, moving to different parts of their territory to make use of what was seasonal. The more archaeologists start looking, the more complicated the variations on agriculture seem to be. Small grains are not all that people grew, but those are the most visible in the archaeological record, or were until very recently.
LittleRed1
Two Cheers for Anarchism
Scott spends a lot of time on swidden and other non-sedentary or flexible agricultural or mixed techniques. He appreciates the resiliency. A monoculture approach has got to produce awfully well to make up for its vulnerability to predation, human and otherwise. Not only the crops but the farmers are prone to devastation by disease, varmints, and bandits.
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