How Grains Domesticated Us, James C. Scott, SOAS, University of London

Food Studies at SOAS www.soas.ac.uk/...
This SOAS Food Studies Centre Distinguished Lecture titled "How Grains Domesticated Us" was given by James C. Scott (Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University) on 11 December 2014.
How is it that homo sapiens came, only in the last 5% of its long career on the planet, to live in concentrated heaps of people, grain, and domesticated animals and, later, governed by units we call states?
How were these earliest structured and governed? How did they persist (or perish) and how did they change the landscape and people they controlled? It is surely striking that virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. History records no banana, cassava, sago, or sweet potato states. Why are the grassy grain crops---typically barley, rye, wheat, rice, maze, and millets---so closely associated with the earliest states? My guess is that only grains are suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing.
Find out more about this event goo.gl/E2a8pl
A Q&A session was held the day after this event, you can find it at • Q&A with James C Scott...

[@matukd]

The actual lecture starts at 6:55

[@KenDBerryMD]

Very interesting concepts and theory here. A paradigm-shifter for sure!

[@eldaytripper2]

Would have beeen good if the camera could pan to the slides.

[@regrob16]

I really enjoyed this video. Thanks for uploading! I'm really new to this topic and found out about it from a podcast called Prof CJ Dangerous History Podcast. You have opened my eyes and I hope to use this information everyday in my life as I hope to gain more freedom everyday. Thanks again!!!

[@Suite_annamite]

You should totally check out his book "The Art of Not Being Governed" if you haven't already.
Or just check out any one of the TH-cam videos about it.
He talks about how tribes around the world deliberately avoided civilization not because they were just dumb savages, but because they were fleeing from all of the bad things that being "civilized" brought about :
taxes, conscription, war, disease, slavery, forced labour and resettlement, loss of local identities and forced assimilation into bigger cultures, etc.

[@andymullins84]

but if we avoided being civilized "The Art of Not Being Governed" You tube video would not be 1:34:30. It would be a cave art drawing, I'm sure by the same artist/teacher/scientist because artists are artists.

[@apersonlikeanyother6895]

Fascinating stuff. I was taught the whole cradle of civilisation myth. Hard to unlearn.

[@johns4775]

The tobacco plant, the marijuana plant, the poppy plant, the coca plant, and a few others have done an excellent job in domesticating people . Plants rule.