Blame Game

Cultural anthropology is an unfortunate science. Hardly had it managed to do more than invent itself than its most interesting subjects began to vanish before its eyes. The same forces that brought investigators into contact with technologically primitive societies tended to rapidly destroy them. The homogenization of world culture that had its origins in Western colonial expansion has now grossly affected every culture in the world.

Combine this circumstance with the generally difficult prospects for anthropological professionals and some internal tics developed under the influence of French post-structuralism and literary theory, and you get a cranky, querelous kind of science, distrustful of itself and especially of the society from which it sprang. A science, in short, likely to be suspicious and dismissive of grand theories like those Jared Diamond espoused in Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.

George Johnson, writing in the New York Times, has been listening to some of these anthropological soreheads dissing Jared Diamond. He was listening to the seminar “Choices and Fates of Human Societies” held this fall at the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona.

So what had the pros to say of the brilliant amateur and his theories, and did they lay a finger on him?

What the scientists held in common was a suspicion that in writing his two best-selling sagas of civilization — the other is “Guns, Germs and Steel” — Dr. Diamond washed over the details that make cultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history.

“A big-picture man,” one participant called him. For anthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae — the specifics and contradictions of human culture — the words are not necessarily a compliment

Just the sort of telling critique that could be made of say, Darwin, Newton, or Einstein, in fact. Like all of them, Diamond spends a lot of time in the nitty gritty, though.

“Everybody knows that the beauty of Diamond is that it’s simple,” said Patricia A. McAnany, an archaeologist at Boston University who organized the meeting with her colleague Norman Yoffee of the University of Michigan. “It’s accessible intellectually without having to really turn the wattage up too much.”

Now that's a dim bulb critique if I ever heard one. Insulting, content free, and utterly vapid. "Everything," said Einstein, "should be mad as simple as possible, but not simpler." If Diamond crossed that line in a material way, the critic had better bring some examples.

But why resort to ugly facts and logic when you can brandish some leftish ideological fetish:

“Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame,” said Deborah B. Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. “The haves are not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots.”

Damn! Now why didn't Darwin think of that?

It's a long article and generally a good one, I think. Unlike your author, Johnson doesn't directly confront Diamond's critics, but he does allow Gewertz enough rope to hang herself, and indeed she surely does. For the details, you will need to read Johnson's article.