autobiology
The field of, um, whatever this guy's field is certainly has its own collection of buzzwords. For the lay reader, it seems distinctly difficult to get what he's actually saying (and I'm not even quite a lay reader, I have a good formal idea of what a complex system is).
I hit a serious snag when I got to the section about hunter-gatherers, though. I've read lots and lots of anthropology about hunter-gatherer societies because of its relevance to my interest in evolutionary science. His description of hunter-gatherer society has quite a lot in common with "noble savage" myths going back hundreds of years, and little similarity with any of the science I've read.
Hunter-gatherers are far less adept at adapting to the environment than modern humans - they lack the technology, and the flexibility given by a modern upbringing. They're much better at being hunter-gatherers and at "living with" nature than we are, simply out of very long experience and tradition. They most definitely tried to "simplify and control" their environment wherever they actually know how. The nomadic Plains Indians turned most of North America into a buffalo habitat by burning it in giant conflagrations every year, for example.
He seems to refer entirely to "The Other Side of Eden", one anthropologist's book on life among the native people of the Canadian Arctic - a book which eschews neutrality to describe a hunter-gatherer existence as better than an agricultural existence. For example he praises their egalitarianism. Hunter-gatherer societies are, indeed, very egalitarian. That's because they are willing and able to actively enforce it - not necessarily a bad thing, but they do it in ways that people from tolerant modern societies would likely balk at. People who seem to be "putting on airs" tend to end up exiled or dead (and for the pre-modern Inuit exile can be tantamount to death). The Inuit aren't particularly violent as hunter-gatherers go, as their environment doesn't support a lot of conflict, but hunter-gatherers elsewhere have a horrible record of violent conflict that dwarfs the worst excesses of modern civilization.
Just to select a few examples...
"indigenous peoples are almost never authoritarian with their children"
Hunter-gatherers (Indigenous peoples doesn't mean the same thing) often don't pay much attention to their children after infancy - they're mostly raised by the older kids, more of a schoolyard order than a parental order.
"the words that accompany greetings are those of great joy, not politeness"
Hunter-gatherer communities are relatively small groups, where everyone knows everyone else (and the "great joy" bit is somewhat belied by high levels of interpersonal fights). The greeting for a stranger could be instant death (literally true in the New Guinea highlands - two strange men meeting in the forest would immediately fight).
"words are as precise as they need to be"
When your language has had basically thousands of years to adapt to your environment, hardly a surprise.
"part of the learning of indigenous languages is learning when to speak, when and how to listen, and even when and how to tease"
As opposed to other cultures where these aren't important?
"drawing analogies and use of inductive reasoning are not as 'forced' or deliberate a process as they seem to be in Indo-European languages"
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that details of language structure influence what people can think of has been pretty thoroughly discredited.
"not spoiling the land"
Does deliberate burning of a huge portion of the land in what is now the US count as "spoiling the land"? What about mass alteration of the Amazon rainforest to turn it into a sort of giant orchard?
"the stories of indigenous peoples of how they 'arrived' where they now live are in total conflict with our history of them (e.g. that they crossed the land-bridge from Asia during ice age retreat) -- their stories are that the people emerged where they are now, rather than traveled to them"
Their stories are wrong. I mean, what the heck?
"These cultures show profound respect for women as full equals"
Sex roles are generally dramatically different, and enforced (there are records of accepted transvestites, where a man could dress and act as a woman and so forth, but "mixed gender roles" were not at all normal). Men don't rule over women but that's because nobody rules over anybody. It's common for women to be officially excluded from collective decision-making councils, though.
Ark, I've got to stop here. This guy is *extremely* credulous towards views that range from outright wrong to extremely misled. The differences between modern and hunter-gatherer culture are overwhelmingly due to profound differences in their environment. For example, yes, they often don't much care if some people don't agree with a decision and choose to go their own way. That's because they don't have nearly the requirement for collective action that an advanced society does - their most major collective decision is deciding when to move or split up the camp, and if some families leave it's no big deal. Modern people often have to make collective decisions where it's not realistic or even possible for some people to just go their own way. All of these comments about hunter-gatherers paint an utterly different picture if you get the whole perspective.
Ai. I feel that I'd need another few pages to respond to this, and I don't want to run on. I also don't want to disagree with you; I'm quite skeptical myself of the notion of some pre-civilized Eden, and I tend to look askance at views which romanticize the past or adulate some prior way of being. But where to start? I think there's some arguing at cross-points going on; if your view of 'better' is something different than the author of "The Other Side . . . ", conversations about what's at stake will obviously be challenging.
What I'd hope is not for a return to the gatherer-hunter state (this seems patently absurd, and I daresay it would take the worst possible climate crisis finale to get there), but a transcendence of our current reliance on science and experts and a return to a more embodied experience of our environment and a deeper understating of and relationship to the felt sense of the interconnection of the world. I think it's this that Pollard is driving at; that our current from-the-outside appreciation of the intercomplexity of global systems was, to some degree, understood from a core sense by those earlier peoples who had only their animal-selves and instinct to guide them.
In any case, I'm seeking - and I think that Pollard is too - a both / and solution; an integration of our current technologies with the self-trust and collective interdependence of earlier tribes. I don't think the two are necessarily opposed. Anyway, even if every description of those "indigenous people" is flat-out wrong, and never existed in the past, the vision painted of healthy, happy communities is one that I believe is worth striving for in the future.
(Also, about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis . . . this is from this May: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/
...,414291,00.html )
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