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A Laboratory of Civilization

In Opting in and Opting out of Civilization, I mentioned having found a copy of Man’s Rise to Civilization by Peter Farb. When I looked up the book on Amazon I did what I often do with unfamiliar books: I look at the one star reviews. If the one star reviews (if there are any) are simply complaints that the book failed to validate the reviewer’s narrative, or the reviewer is merely spewing ressentiment, there is a good chance that the book is as good as the four star reviews claim it to be. On the other hand, if the one star reviews are intelligent and well written, then the four star reviews are probably shills and true believers and can be safely set aside.

There was a single one-star review of Farb’s book, which read:

Please read Vine Deloria Jr's book Custer Died for Your Sins, chapter 4 to get an understanding of the damage this book has done in its perpetuation of negative stereotypes and misportrayal of indigenous peoples in the U.S. Aka hogwash. (Should be zero stars, but not an option)

While I don’t consider this comment to be especially well-written or well thought out, it does give a specific reference, so, of course, I had to look up Custer Died for your Sins. the full title of which is Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. One would expect that the book that announces itself as a manifesto in its subtitle would be polemical, and perhaps even aggressively polemical. Deloria does not disappoint on this score.

I am interested in Farb’s book for what it says about civilization; Deloria condemns Farb’s book for what it says about Indians, and for what he believes to be the policy implications for Indians of the ideas in Farb’s book. I must admit I’m not really interested in the policy implications of Farb’s book, and I sincerely doubt that there was any such influence. Even if a government bureaucrat read Farb’s book -- even if the entire Department of the Interior read Farb’s book -- the possibility that a scholarly study of the native civilizations of North America would influence US Government policy on Indian reservations or the Bureau of Indian Affairs is ludicrous at best.

Here is a sample of Deloria’s take on Farb:

“Farb's basic assumption is that somehow Indians have risen to civilized heights by being the victims of four centuries of systematic genocide. Under these assumptions the European Jews should be the most civilized people on earth from their graduate course in gas ovens given by Eichmann.”

Needless to say, this is not Farb’s basic assumption. Deloria is closer to the truth, but no less venomous, in this passage:

“Farb continues to use phrases such as ‘test tubes’ and ‘living laboratories’ in describing the development, or rather unfolding, of Indian cultural change. In essence, then, Indian communities exist primarily for people to experiment with. Bureaucratically this means ‘pilot projects.’ Anthropologically, as we have seen, it means the continued treatment of Indian people as objects for observation.”

This is a malicious take on Farb’s approach -- Deloria here is like Santayana’s book Egotism in German Philosophy, published in 1916 during the First World War, when all things German were taken to be euphemisms for barbarism -- but it least it does have some justification.

I must confess I was delighted with Farb’s methodological conceit of viewing North America as a kind of laboratory for civilizations. Farb’s approach was implicitly integral with an intuitive understanding of what I recently called the dissolution theshold: the Native American civilizations of North American all remained below the dissolution threshold, and so the study of civilization in North America is a perfect opportunity to study different permutations of civilization in isolation.

If it sounds cold and bloodless to describe the historical development of the peoples of North America in this way, I assure you that it is no more cold and bloodless than to describe the development of western civilization, or indeed of any civilization, in dispassionate scientific terms. I know from personal experience that when one attempts to be dispassionate in the analysis of what, for someone else, constitutes what Paul Tillich would have called their “ultimate concern,” that such an attitude is not received as being neutral or objective, but is perceived as sacrilege and an attack upon what is seen as due piety. And I have seen this even, if not especially, when one treats the meanings of values of one’s own civilization in this kind of unsentimental way.

A degree of defarmiliarization is a necessary prerequisite to arriving at a scientific understanding of any object of knowledge; when that necessary defamiliarization means that one must renounce the human, all-too-human that necessarily informs the human sciences, then there is often hell to pay.

Clifford Geertz once said that Foucault was an “anti-humanist human scientist.” Exactly. We should all be anti-humanist human scientists if we aspire to any knowledge in the human sciences. This isn’t going to win friends or influence people, but it will advance the cause of scientific knowledge. If Custer died for our sins, let his death not be in vain.

#Peter Farb #civilization #dissolution threshold #Vine Deloria

In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships. Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society’s members... to know what, where, how, when, and with whom people say is to know the character of their society.

Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating

#anthropology #q #food #peter farb #george armelagos