The Original Affluent Society (041)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ต.ค. 2024
- Marshall Sahlins' famous thesis that palaeolithic hunters lived in relative abundance because of their apparent lack of wants, based on data from modern hunter gatherer populations, has been deeply influential on anthropology. Is it also a useful reading for historians?
Amazingly great... I am a subscriber now. I study household production from a microeconomics lense, and I started getting interested in Economic anthropology from my first year. And this "historization problem" just plagued me, I had it intuitively, sometimes ok with sometimes not so much. I found your discussion very relieving as I am an economist trying to find useful and interesting things in anthropology.
Hi again Robert, any pointers to seminal articles, review articles or books about the historicization of anthropological findings ?? that would help a lot, thx in advance.
I have to admit I am not sure what to recommend in this regard. The relationship between anthropology and history is fairly deep, with the two disciplines drawing on each other in different ways right the way back to the early twentieth century.
I think Google Scholar is your friend here, I was able to pull up a wide variety of works discussing different aspects (scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=historicisation+anthropology&btnG=) and I would suggest that if you find something that seems relevant look at other things by the author and that cite that work. That is how I usually chase down ideas I am interested in.
The geography of languages shows quite obviously that Scott is wrong. In the highlands of Burma we have Mru, Rengmitca, and all sorts of Chin languages, whereas in the plains, they just speak Burmese. It is quite obvious that the peoples of the highlands are original. Sure, some plains people may have fled taxation, but they assimilated to the Ureinwohner. Scott is one of those heady cocktails of the obvious (hilly places are hard to govern) and the obviously wrong (hill populations are just plains tax dogers) that always makes for a successful career in today's academia.
I don't want to defend Scott as you are quite correct that he is obviously wrong in a wide variety of respects, including the point you make with languages. But I think he is a tiny bit more sophisticated than that - he isn't saying the highland communities are entirely composed of tax dodgers but that there is a constant flow of people back and forth and that the flow, particularly the flight, helps to construct the highland society. Yes, there is assimilation, so some elements, like language can be preserved - but we are wrong to think of these peripheral peoples as living fossils, the society they have in the 19th and 20th century is, potentially, as different to the society they had in the first millennium BCE as the society their lowland agriculture counterparts had. As you say, that is kind of obvious when you say it out loud, but the idea that peripheral groups are living fossils of how everyone lived, despite also being obviously wrong (the last vestiges of pastoral nomads living as minority communities in land unsuited for agriculture are obviously not a guide to how the Alans, Huns, Yuezhi, Turks, or Mongols, politically organised themselves - though they are sometimes treated that way).
While Scott falls into a lot of traps he is not using a straw man, the position he argues against has been very real. And in this context there is no question that even Sahlin, who is smart enough to spot the danger, does treat modern hunter-gatherers as if they were fossils of the hunter gatherers who lived on relatively rich land now dedicated to agriculture, despite that being very doubtful (a lot of subsequent criticism does reflect heavily on how the people in Sahlin's data points are obviously not hunter gatherers, but rather they are 'play acting', that is they had modern tools, houses, etc, but they had an oral tradition preserving older practices and they went out to perform those for the benefit of the researchers).
Yeah, the length of that response reminds me why I didn't try to fully nuance it in the video :)