hi i read your post about jared diamond, and unlike you, i don't have any strong opinions about gun germs and steel, likely bc i don't have much background knowledge abt the topic. do you have any recommendations for someone who want to read more on the subject?
Yes absolutely - this is a very scathing takedown of Diamond’s scholarship and the assumptions it’s riding on; this picks apart his arguments and their eurocentrism; this explains how he’s both wrong and dangerously misleading. If you’d like recommendations on critical geography and environmental determinism in general, I can also collect some.
(crossing my fingers the links work. If not, google the authors - Correia, Blaut, Sluyter - and “environmental determinism” “Jared Diamond” etc, and hopefully their work will show up?)
The long and short of it is: geography is important - place matters. I love geography and thinking about how societies interact with the physical world, and how people and place mutually shape one another. BUT environmental determinism - treating geography/the environment as this overarching external force ultimately responsible for how people act and societies develop - is both oversimplified to the point of just being wrong, and also allows for a clever mental sleight of hand in which the social and ideological dimensions of a given society matter less than their physical geographic conditions. In Diamond’s case, his explanation of why European colonialism occurred (rather than the rest of the world colonizing Europe) attributes it to the geographic factors that put Europe in a position to have the material capacity to build their empires and subjugate most of the planet - but overlooks the extremely relevant roles of ideology within European expansionist societies, as if mere geographic happenstance allowed for (or even fated) present-day power relations.
The implications are sobering - it removes much of the responsibility for colonialism, doesn’t it, if Europe was simply acting in accordance with various geographic opportunities and pressures? It suggests that the people within the colonizer and colonized societies were largely irrelevant, as if any society in their respective conditions might have acted the same. It adds a dangerous inevitability to historical attempts to trace the trajectory of colonial and “development” relations, or to imagine a decolonized future, and although Diamond is trying to avoid reproducing race-science explanations of history, his shifting the responsibility into the hands of impartial physical forces and coincidences inadvertently naturalizes the relations of exploitation and violence between colonizing and colonized peoples.
Diamond didn’t invent environmental determinism by any means - it’s a very old tradition within geography, which as a discipline has a long history as an accomplice to imperialism - but he gave it new life and critical acclaim (think about why a book like Guns, Germs, and Steel would be so appealing... so comforting... to an audience eager for a scapegoat for atrocities that would require no change or culpability on their part). So I think it’s irresponsible, intellectually lazy, and frankly dangerous to keep uncritically treating him like a legitimate scholar, given the factual, logical, and sociocultural gaping holes in his arguments.
