This is fascinating, and as you say, what a missed opportunity for anthropology. Does the book mention Yanomamö practices relating to childbirth, or Helena’s experiences with it?
Yes. The book mentions that Helena gave birth to her first two children alone, in the forest. The circumstances of the first birth are explained in detail. She lied to her mother-in-law and said she had no pains and hid her pains as much as she could until she sneaked out into the forest and gave birth to a small, purple baby. She thought the baby was dead and went away to search for leaves in which to wrap the body. When she came back she heard faint screams and found the baby covered in ants and screaming. She cut the umbilical cord, but didn't know to tie it so it wouldn't bleed so much and returned to the village. The women complained that the boy had no hair and told her to kill him but Fusiwe said that she should bring him up, because a son offers protection. Helena returned to work very shortly after the birth because that is the custom of the Yanomamö, she explained. Already the day after the birth she was gathering wood.
I don't know much about how representative this is. Kenneth Good writes some things about the births of Yarima, his teenaged Yanomamö wife, who followed him to the US. She thought that going out alone in the forest in New Yersey to give birth was a good idea, but Kenneth didn't think so because he was afraid that Yarima would take matters in her own hands if things didn't go well.
It is a common occurrence that the kidnapped whites don't want to return to 'civilization' after several years living in their adopted indigenous culture. Benjamin Franklin, among others, worried about it.
Yep. The Yanomamo aren't a reasonable stand-in for all early societies; they don't even count past three. Some foragers, fishers, pastoralists, and horticulturalists were bound to be pretty awful, but the idea that the modern Yanomamo provide a window into the cultures of our ancient ancestors is dubious for those of us who can't trace our ancestors to tropical rainforests.
Go further north to the Amerindian midlatitude societies from North America and while their cultures were extremely varied, they lived in ecological conditions much more similar to those experienced by anyone who might have been my ancestor going back 10,000 years (and probably going back 100,000 years).
I have found too few reliable descriptions of North American natives. But I recently read Lucas Bridges' memoir about his life among the natives of Fireland. Lucas Bridges was the son of missionary Thomas Bridges and one of the first Europeans to be born on the island. He got very well acquainted with and learned the languages of two of the three groups on the island: The Yahgan in the south and the Ona/Selk'nam in the north.
Fireland is too far south for any large-scale agriculture. So the Yahghan and the Selk'nam were hunters and gatherers. The Selk'nam were impressively tall and strong, taller than the average Europeans at the time (about 180 centimeters).
I found the Yahgan and especially the Selk'nam similar to the Yanomamö: They killed each other in vendettas, they fought over women and stole each other's women. They guarded their women so they wouldn't run away. One man broke the leg of his wife through hitting her with a club. He made this mistake because he didn't have his arrows nearby: They also had the habit of shooting arrows into the legs of their wives when those wives did or said something they didn't like (although the natives of Fireland tended to use unbarbed arrows for the purpose while the Yanomamö used barbed arrows of bones). They also had rules for ritual fighting that was less lethal in order to resolve less severe conflicts.
All-in-all, a people of a very different ecological environment compared to the Yanomamö were about as unpleasant and in the same way. That being said, I don't consider the ways of the Yanomamö thoroughly awful. It was a hard world, but people were both pleasant and unpleasant: They were human, with very weak institutions to handle the most unpleasant individuals among them.
If you know any eye-witness account of a society you consider more similar to the ancestors of northern Europeans, please let me know. I will read it.
"Tradition relates, that armies beginning to give way have been rallied by the females, through the earnestness of their supplications, the interposition of their bodies, 54 and the pictures they have drawn of impending slavery, 55 a calamity which these people bear with more impatience for their women than themselves; so that those states who have been obliged to give among their hostages the daughters of noble families, are the most effectually bound to fidelity. 56 They even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, 57 nor disregard their responses."
"The matrimonial bond is, nevertheless, strict and severe among them; nor is there anything in their manners more commendable than this. 106 Almost singly among the barbarians, they content themselves with one wife; a very few of them excepted, who, not through incontinence, but because their alliance is solicited on account of their rank, 107 practise polygamy. The wife does not bring a dowry to her husband, but receives one from him. 108 The parents and relations assemble, and pass their approbation on the presents—presents not adapted to please a female taste, or decorate the bride; but oxen, a caparisoned steed, a shield, spear, and sword. By virtue of these, the wife is espoused; and she in her turn makes a present of some arms to her husband. This they consider as the firmest bond of union; these, the sacred mysteries, the conjugal deities. That the woman may not think herself excused from exertions of fortitude, or exempt from the casualties of war, she is admonished by the very ceremonial of her marriage, that she comes to her husband as a partner in toils and dangers; to suffer and to dare equally with him, in peace and in war: this is indicated by the yoked oxen, the harnessed steed, the offered arms. Thus she is to live; thus to die. She receives what she is to return inviolate 109 and honored to her children; what her daughters-in-law are to receive, and again transmit to her grandchildren."
These are not people who casually shoot their women in the legs to keep them from running away.
(I'd say something else but I'm out of time and I'm trapped in a room with a screaming 3-year old so I guess this is basically all)
You advised me to read Germania once before, so I did it. And it was a really good idea (I mean, what could be the reason NOT to read that book?).
The Germanic tribes were much more civilized than the Yanomamö or the Yahgan or the Selk'nam. Most of all, they had surpassed that stage of cultural development when people form armies. That is a much more advanced social structure than the South American societies I'm talking about.
Somehow, the Germanic tribespeople built the foundation of a civilization. A civilization that was comparatively nice to women compared to other civilizations. That is a sign that also the more primitive societies that preceded them were comparatively nice to women. But how far back? Ultimately all humans can be traced back to the same apes. At some point we all should have more or less equally pleasant or unpleasant ancestors.
"people who have actually lived with hunter-gatherers and have actively looked for male bias within the society find it far easier to accept that there can be societies where sexual egalitarianism can exist... There are, of course, several foraging societies where the relationship between the sexes is far from being egalitarian... Woodburn divides all foraging societies into those which have a delayed return on labour and those which have an immediate return on labour..." Evidently, it's the immediate return foraging societies like the !Kiung, Mbuti, Agta, Hadza, Paliyan, and Malapantaram where egalitarianism is observed, while among delayed return pastoralists, sedentary hunters, fishers, trappers, bee-keepers, and pastoralists we see less sexual equality.
On the basis of these readings, I think it is likely that as societies develop, they tend to pass through a stage where they become more oppressive towards women, children, and low status men. Then as they develop further technologies, they advance past this stage and again become less oppressive, as I've described at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/human-societies-across-the-world.
________________________________
But you point out:
> The Germanic tribes were much more civilized than the Yanomamö or the Yahgan or the Selk'nam. Most of all, they had surpassed that stage of cultural development when people form armies.
This should make the "Germanic" barbarians less egalitarian, since they're closer to the low point where modern Muslim societies are found. In fact, the Yanomamo actually seem to have even less equality than modern Muslims. That's something I find interesting. So what about this?
> At some point we all should have more or less equally pleasant or unpleasant ancestors.
Well, you may be right. Ancestral human groups could have been more or less randomly distributed across the cultural space for hundreds of generations before things started to happen. Or I may be right that societies tend to get more oppressive, and then less, as they develop.
But this isn't safe to assume, especially since technological development wasn't something that every society did. We can ask, "Why did some societies develop when others didn't?" Well, obvious answers include:
* Some societies were positioned in areas that supported the technology (e.g. the Fertile Crescent encouraged horticulture to develop)
* Some societies were comprised psychologically advanced individuals (e.g. homo was smarter than pan, and thus able to develop hunting strategies)
* Some societies were culturally different (e.g. the Yaomamo way of life was uncongenial to invention, and thus they remained as they were when their neighbors developed)
Given the way these three factors might tend to intertwine, there are good reasons to think that all three of these things have been in play from the very beginning. Maybe there's something different in terms of these violent societies that prevents them getting anywhere. If nothing else, they seem pretty mean, and cooperation is of immense value to social progress.
Chimpanzees didn't progress. Neither did these Yanomamo and Selk'nam tribesmen. Might this have something to do with their cultural or psychological characteristics? "We have no word for the number three" seems suspicious. What if the Yanomamo, the Yahghan, and the Selk'nam just weren't able to develop? What if all these stories are from a cultural or evolutionary pit where some societies got stuck, and then hung around for thousands of years to horrify anthropologists descended from people who were just never like this at all?
I think we differ on one specific point: While I see violence as the crucial component in the development of societies, I interprete your comment (and your earlier post) as if you put a greater emphasis on technology - a bit more toward the Marxist side.
For that reason I'm sceptical to the kind of text you linked to, because, as far as I could see, the writer was not attentive to the diverse security situations of the forager groups in question. A people who need to manage their own defense live in another reality than a people who is protected by a much more powerful military power.
I believe that technology development is more or less a function of politics, not the other way around. Technology develops because societies get peaceful enough to make it possible and crowded enough for the incentives to occur. For that reason I don't believe very much in theories about which kind of subsistence mode leads to this or that degree of inequality. I think military strength is such an important question for the distribution of resources that production mode is an insufficient factor to study alone.
You are entirely right that the Yanomamö, the Yahgan and the Selk'nam all failed to cooperate. I just assume that at some point, Europeans failed to cooperate to the same degree and lived in equally small-scale societies. Were those European ancestors uncooperative in a more pleasant way than the South American peoples? I don't know. But both archeological and genetic evidence suggests that they both killed each other quite a bit and profited genetically from their murderous ventures.
There were many surprises in 'A Land So Strange'. Here is the amazon description:
"
In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the four hundred men who had embarked on the voyage, only four survived-three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest. They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, and they were forever changed by their experience. The men lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned several indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever before seen. In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, Andrés Reséndez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.
I read that one. It is about Cabeza the Vaca, who probably was the first Woke person in world history. He and the three other survivors managed to impress the native Americans so much with his religion that they were worshipped as gods. Cabeza de Vaca then believed that he had found an universal formula for how to deal with native peoples and spent the rest of his life on unsuccessful projects to repeat the miracle.
I was a bit disappointed that the book is rather little about the native Americans themselves. But the Woke thing was fascinating.
The Montagnais of Labrador are probably more representative, if nothing else from living in a climate closer to that of northern Europe, and we are lucky to have first person accounts of their lives from the early missionaries that met them before their lands started to be encroached by westerners:
A Jesuit, Father Baird, wrote of the Montagnais and neighboring peoples:
"They love justice and hate violence and robbery, a thing really remarkable in men who have neither laws nor magistrates; for among them, each man is his own master and his own protector. They have Sagamores, that is, leaders in war; but their authority is most precarious, if, indeed, that may be called authority to which obedience is in no wise obligatory"
"[Another Jesuit,] Le Jeune recorded many times his commendations of the people's cooperativeness and unstinting generosity. However, he was shocked by and disapproving of the concomitants: the casual, unfearful attitude toward the gods; the sheer love of living, feasting, talking, singing; the sexual freedom of the women (that of the men the good Jesuit apparently took for granted), and lack of concern for legitimacy of "heirs"; the constant banter and teasing, often intolerably lewd to the missionary's ears, that both women and men indulged in (a practice we recognize today as a means of defining and reinforcing social mores in thoroughly egalitarian societies)."
Both quotes from "Myths of Male Dominance" by Elanor Burke Leacock (who herself lived for a period with the Montagnais, but far later).
I think in general that it is interesting to look at the state of societies before they get put under pressure by the encroachment of civilization. The Yanomano specifically, had been under constant pressure since the 1750's, where Spanish and Portuguese adventurers started ranging through the Amazon looking for slaves. No surprise that they turned into a fierce and dysfunctional society.
Although I'm a bit allergic to anthropological literature put together in order to prove a certain thesis, I will try to find that book in order to find the direct sources to the stories about the Montagnais.
The Yanomamö definitely were under strong pressure: I haven't read enough about the history of South America yet, but I find it plausible that they could be descendants of more advanced cultures that desintegrated during the colonization process.
I tend to agree, and that book does have a few chapters that are more politics than history. But the parts about the Montagnais are very interesting, and she does have first-hand knowledge of them, so it is not just some theoretician coming up with ideas.
The Montagnais are also an interesting case study in how the pressure from outside cultures can change a society. When the Jesuits first encountered them, they noted how the people abhorred violence, and were so egalitarian that even the idea of even telling others what to do was anathema to them (to the extend that they wouldn't even scold or command children, much to the jesuits chagrin).
But the introduction of the fur trade changed all that. Since the fur trapping was mostly done by men, and the western fur traders only wanted to deal with the men, it quickly destabilized the gender relations. by awarding males the highest status.
It also made the society much more violent. Where before there wasn't much to fight over, when hunting and gathering, you could always just move around to avoid conflicts, now the fur lines suddenly became valuable, and the concept of personal ownership started to creep in, ending with actual war against the Iroquois over hunting territory.
> The Yanomamö definitely were under strong pressure: I haven't read enough about the history of South America yet, but I find it plausible that they could be descendants of more advanced cultures that desintegrated during the colonization process.
It is mentioned that the highland tribes that were more isolated from colonial pressures were much more peaceful than the lowland Yanomamö.
Charles Darwin writes about the situation with the natives in South America in his Voyage of the Beagle. I didn't read the whole book (just some excerpts to my son, who'd gotten it from the library,) so I can't say how thorough he is, but the book is at least easy to get.
I think her story is a typical example of the importance of social position and social status for a person's wellbeing. Cynthia Ann was one of the highest ranking women among the Comanches: The wife of a chief who decided to marry no more women because he liked Cynthia Ann so much. Then her husband was killed and she was transformed from a high-status person to an object of attention. How could that be a good deal?
Some Yanomamö seem to agree. I just stumbled over the following note in Napoleon Chagnon's book Noble Savages:
"In the 1970s when more contact between the Yanomamö and Venezuelan culture was developing, one Yanomamö man was being trained in practical nursing in the town of Puerto Ayacucho, where he learned about police and law. He excitedly told me about this when he realized that “law” would deal with homicides and this meant the end of blood revenge—and his worry that he might be a legitimate target of revenge for killings that his brothers had been involved in."
Regarding promiscuity. It seems Helena actually improved genes of her children by only having sex with the most deranged(=alfa) men in their society. In fact she was wife of a headmen .
Being a woman is not that simple. Chief genes are high risk - one of Helena's sons was a nurse and died from alcoholism. There is a reason why all people are not alphas - there can only be so many of them before they kill each other. Also, genes for alpha behavior in the wrong body can be disastrous.
High risk - high reward. She might have been killed for being so sexually selective as well. Yes being alpha has many downsides ( not the least life or death competition for power ). Yet from gene propagation perspective alphas have the most offspring.
As about being wrong body - that is why many short man are sly and ambitious. They have to compensate for physical drawbacks in other ways
This is fascinating, and as you say, what a missed opportunity for anthropology. Does the book mention Yanomamö practices relating to childbirth, or Helena’s experiences with it?
Yes. The book mentions that Helena gave birth to her first two children alone, in the forest. The circumstances of the first birth are explained in detail. She lied to her mother-in-law and said she had no pains and hid her pains as much as she could until she sneaked out into the forest and gave birth to a small, purple baby. She thought the baby was dead and went away to search for leaves in which to wrap the body. When she came back she heard faint screams and found the baby covered in ants and screaming. She cut the umbilical cord, but didn't know to tie it so it wouldn't bleed so much and returned to the village. The women complained that the boy had no hair and told her to kill him but Fusiwe said that she should bring him up, because a son offers protection. Helena returned to work very shortly after the birth because that is the custom of the Yanomamö, she explained. Already the day after the birth she was gathering wood.
I don't know much about how representative this is. Kenneth Good writes some things about the births of Yarima, his teenaged Yanomamö wife, who followed him to the US. She thought that going out alone in the forest in New Yersey to give birth was a good idea, but Kenneth didn't think so because he was afraid that Yarima would take matters in her own hands if things didn't go well.
For those who insist, against all the evidence, that tribal life is one big happy episode ofAll The Children Of The Rainbow Sing Together.
FWIW, there also are accounts of white girls kidnapped by native Americans who didn't want to remain part of White society once they were returned.
It is a common occurrence that the kidnapped whites don't want to return to 'civilization' after several years living in their adopted indigenous culture. Benjamin Franklin, among others, worried about it.
Cynthia Parker wasn't the only one. At the same time, kidnapped natives broke loose at the first opportunity.
Yep. The Yanomamo aren't a reasonable stand-in for all early societies; they don't even count past three. Some foragers, fishers, pastoralists, and horticulturalists were bound to be pretty awful, but the idea that the modern Yanomamo provide a window into the cultures of our ancient ancestors is dubious for those of us who can't trace our ancestors to tropical rainforests.
Go further north to the Amerindian midlatitude societies from North America and while their cultures were extremely varied, they lived in ecological conditions much more similar to those experienced by anyone who might have been my ancestor going back 10,000 years (and probably going back 100,000 years).
I have found too few reliable descriptions of North American natives. But I recently read Lucas Bridges' memoir about his life among the natives of Fireland. Lucas Bridges was the son of missionary Thomas Bridges and one of the first Europeans to be born on the island. He got very well acquainted with and learned the languages of two of the three groups on the island: The Yahgan in the south and the Ona/Selk'nam in the north.
Fireland is too far south for any large-scale agriculture. So the Yahghan and the Selk'nam were hunters and gatherers. The Selk'nam were impressively tall and strong, taller than the average Europeans at the time (about 180 centimeters).
I found the Yahgan and especially the Selk'nam similar to the Yanomamö: They killed each other in vendettas, they fought over women and stole each other's women. They guarded their women so they wouldn't run away. One man broke the leg of his wife through hitting her with a club. He made this mistake because he didn't have his arrows nearby: They also had the habit of shooting arrows into the legs of their wives when those wives did or said something they didn't like (although the natives of Fireland tended to use unbarbed arrows for the purpose while the Yanomamö used barbed arrows of bones). They also had rules for ritual fighting that was less lethal in order to resolve less severe conflicts.
All-in-all, a people of a very different ecological environment compared to the Yanomamö were about as unpleasant and in the same way. That being said, I don't consider the ways of the Yanomamö thoroughly awful. It was a hard world, but people were both pleasant and unpleasant: They were human, with very weak institutions to handle the most unpleasant individuals among them.
If you know any eye-witness account of a society you consider more similar to the ancestors of northern Europeans, please let me know. I will read it.
OK, what about Tacitus' Germania? The best translation I've yet found is here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7524/7524-h/7524-h.htm#linknote-119
"Tradition relates, that armies beginning to give way have been rallied by the females, through the earnestness of their supplications, the interposition of their bodies, 54 and the pictures they have drawn of impending slavery, 55 a calamity which these people bear with more impatience for their women than themselves; so that those states who have been obliged to give among their hostages the daughters of noble families, are the most effectually bound to fidelity. 56 They even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, 57 nor disregard their responses."
"The matrimonial bond is, nevertheless, strict and severe among them; nor is there anything in their manners more commendable than this. 106 Almost singly among the barbarians, they content themselves with one wife; a very few of them excepted, who, not through incontinence, but because their alliance is solicited on account of their rank, 107 practise polygamy. The wife does not bring a dowry to her husband, but receives one from him. 108 The parents and relations assemble, and pass their approbation on the presents—presents not adapted to please a female taste, or decorate the bride; but oxen, a caparisoned steed, a shield, spear, and sword. By virtue of these, the wife is espoused; and she in her turn makes a present of some arms to her husband. This they consider as the firmest bond of union; these, the sacred mysteries, the conjugal deities. That the woman may not think herself excused from exertions of fortitude, or exempt from the casualties of war, she is admonished by the very ceremonial of her marriage, that she comes to her husband as a partner in toils and dangers; to suffer and to dare equally with him, in peace and in war: this is indicated by the yoked oxen, the harnessed steed, the offered arms. Thus she is to live; thus to die. She receives what she is to return inviolate 109 and honored to her children; what her daughters-in-law are to receive, and again transmit to her grandchildren."
These are not people who casually shoot their women in the legs to keep them from running away.
(I'd say something else but I'm out of time and I'm trapped in a room with a screaming 3-year old so I guess this is basically all)
You advised me to read Germania once before, so I did it. And it was a really good idea (I mean, what could be the reason NOT to read that book?).
The Germanic tribes were much more civilized than the Yanomamö or the Yahgan or the Selk'nam. Most of all, they had surpassed that stage of cultural development when people form armies. That is a much more advanced social structure than the South American societies I'm talking about.
Somehow, the Germanic tribespeople built the foundation of a civilization. A civilization that was comparatively nice to women compared to other civilizations. That is a sign that also the more primitive societies that preceded them were comparatively nice to women. But how far back? Ultimately all humans can be traced back to the same apes. At some point we all should have more or less equally pleasant or unpleasant ancestors.
OK, so the other reading I wanted to suggest regards foragers:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karen-Endicott-2/publication/233095485_The_conditions_of_egalitarian_male-female/links/53d693260cf220632f3db3cf/The-conditions-of-egalitarian-male-female.pdf
"people who have actually lived with hunter-gatherers and have actively looked for male bias within the society find it far easier to accept that there can be societies where sexual egalitarianism can exist... There are, of course, several foraging societies where the relationship between the sexes is far from being egalitarian... Woodburn divides all foraging societies into those which have a delayed return on labour and those which have an immediate return on labour..." Evidently, it's the immediate return foraging societies like the !Kiung, Mbuti, Agta, Hadza, Paliyan, and Malapantaram where egalitarianism is observed, while among delayed return pastoralists, sedentary hunters, fishers, trappers, bee-keepers, and pastoralists we see less sexual equality.
It appears that as simple socieies develop technologically, they become less egalitarian. However, we also have clear findings that for post-agrarian societies, more development makes them *more* egalitarian: https://i.redd.it/the-inglehart-welzel-world-cultural-map-2023-v0-5wwgo2iyktja1.jpg?s=165f80e90e5e5ffbeeb638d2886cef98be479e44
On the basis of these readings, I think it is likely that as societies develop, they tend to pass through a stage where they become more oppressive towards women, children, and low status men. Then as they develop further technologies, they advance past this stage and again become less oppressive, as I've described at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/human-societies-across-the-world.
________________________________
But you point out:
> The Germanic tribes were much more civilized than the Yanomamö or the Yahgan or the Selk'nam. Most of all, they had surpassed that stage of cultural development when people form armies.
This should make the "Germanic" barbarians less egalitarian, since they're closer to the low point where modern Muslim societies are found. In fact, the Yanomamo actually seem to have even less equality than modern Muslims. That's something I find interesting. So what about this?
> At some point we all should have more or less equally pleasant or unpleasant ancestors.
Well, you may be right. Ancestral human groups could have been more or less randomly distributed across the cultural space for hundreds of generations before things started to happen. Or I may be right that societies tend to get more oppressive, and then less, as they develop.
But this isn't safe to assume, especially since technological development wasn't something that every society did. We can ask, "Why did some societies develop when others didn't?" Well, obvious answers include:
* Some societies were positioned in areas that supported the technology (e.g. the Fertile Crescent encouraged horticulture to develop)
* Some societies were comprised psychologically advanced individuals (e.g. homo was smarter than pan, and thus able to develop hunting strategies)
* Some societies were culturally different (e.g. the Yaomamo way of life was uncongenial to invention, and thus they remained as they were when their neighbors developed)
Given the way these three factors might tend to intertwine, there are good reasons to think that all three of these things have been in play from the very beginning. Maybe there's something different in terms of these violent societies that prevents them getting anywhere. If nothing else, they seem pretty mean, and cooperation is of immense value to social progress.
Chimpanzees didn't progress. Neither did these Yanomamo and Selk'nam tribesmen. Might this have something to do with their cultural or psychological characteristics? "We have no word for the number three" seems suspicious. What if the Yanomamo, the Yahghan, and the Selk'nam just weren't able to develop? What if all these stories are from a cultural or evolutionary pit where some societies got stuck, and then hung around for thousands of years to horrify anthropologists descended from people who were just never like this at all?
I think we differ on one specific point: While I see violence as the crucial component in the development of societies, I interprete your comment (and your earlier post) as if you put a greater emphasis on technology - a bit more toward the Marxist side.
For that reason I'm sceptical to the kind of text you linked to, because, as far as I could see, the writer was not attentive to the diverse security situations of the forager groups in question. A people who need to manage their own defense live in another reality than a people who is protected by a much more powerful military power.
I believe that technology development is more or less a function of politics, not the other way around. Technology develops because societies get peaceful enough to make it possible and crowded enough for the incentives to occur. For that reason I don't believe very much in theories about which kind of subsistence mode leads to this or that degree of inequality. I think military strength is such an important question for the distribution of resources that production mode is an insufficient factor to study alone.
You are entirely right that the Yanomamö, the Yahgan and the Selk'nam all failed to cooperate. I just assume that at some point, Europeans failed to cooperate to the same degree and lived in equally small-scale societies. Were those European ancestors uncooperative in a more pleasant way than the South American peoples? I don't know. But both archeological and genetic evidence suggests that they both killed each other quite a bit and profited genetically from their murderous ventures.
There were many surprises in 'A Land So Strange'. Here is the amazon description:
"
In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the four hundred men who had embarked on the voyage, only four survived-three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest. They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, and they were forever changed by their experience. The men lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned several indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever before seen. In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, Andrés Reséndez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.
"
I read that one. It is about Cabeza the Vaca, who probably was the first Woke person in world history. He and the three other survivors managed to impress the native Americans so much with his religion that they were worshipped as gods. Cabeza de Vaca then believed that he had found an universal formula for how to deal with native peoples and spent the rest of his life on unsuccessful projects to repeat the miracle.
I was a bit disappointed that the book is rather little about the native Americans themselves. But the Woke thing was fascinating.
I learned about the book from Jake Veigl's blog, https://natfac.substack.com/p/on-books-ive-been-reading
I also learned a lot from 'Man's Rise to Civilization' by Peter Farb about the pre-contact indigenous cultures of North America.
It really is a good book (reading it now).
The Montagnais of Labrador are probably more representative, if nothing else from living in a climate closer to that of northern Europe, and we are lucky to have first person accounts of their lives from the early missionaries that met them before their lands started to be encroached by westerners:
A Jesuit, Father Baird, wrote of the Montagnais and neighboring peoples:
"They love justice and hate violence and robbery, a thing really remarkable in men who have neither laws nor magistrates; for among them, each man is his own master and his own protector. They have Sagamores, that is, leaders in war; but their authority is most precarious, if, indeed, that may be called authority to which obedience is in no wise obligatory"
"[Another Jesuit,] Le Jeune recorded many times his commendations of the people's cooperativeness and unstinting generosity. However, he was shocked by and disapproving of the concomitants: the casual, unfearful attitude toward the gods; the sheer love of living, feasting, talking, singing; the sexual freedom of the women (that of the men the good Jesuit apparently took for granted), and lack of concern for legitimacy of "heirs"; the constant banter and teasing, often intolerably lewd to the missionary's ears, that both women and men indulged in (a practice we recognize today as a means of defining and reinforcing social mores in thoroughly egalitarian societies)."
Both quotes from "Myths of Male Dominance" by Elanor Burke Leacock (who herself lived for a period with the Montagnais, but far later).
I think in general that it is interesting to look at the state of societies before they get put under pressure by the encroachment of civilization. The Yanomano specifically, had been under constant pressure since the 1750's, where Spanish and Portuguese adventurers started ranging through the Amazon looking for slaves. No surprise that they turned into a fierce and dysfunctional society.
Although I'm a bit allergic to anthropological literature put together in order to prove a certain thesis, I will try to find that book in order to find the direct sources to the stories about the Montagnais.
The Yanomamö definitely were under strong pressure: I haven't read enough about the history of South America yet, but I find it plausible that they could be descendants of more advanced cultures that desintegrated during the colonization process.
I tend to agree, and that book does have a few chapters that are more politics than history. But the parts about the Montagnais are very interesting, and she does have first-hand knowledge of them, so it is not just some theoretician coming up with ideas.
The Montagnais are also an interesting case study in how the pressure from outside cultures can change a society. When the Jesuits first encountered them, they noted how the people abhorred violence, and were so egalitarian that even the idea of even telling others what to do was anathema to them (to the extend that they wouldn't even scold or command children, much to the jesuits chagrin).
But the introduction of the fur trade changed all that. Since the fur trapping was mostly done by men, and the western fur traders only wanted to deal with the men, it quickly destabilized the gender relations. by awarding males the highest status.
It also made the society much more violent. Where before there wasn't much to fight over, when hunting and gathering, you could always just move around to avoid conflicts, now the fur lines suddenly became valuable, and the concept of personal ownership started to creep in, ending with actual war against the Iroquois over hunting territory.
> The Yanomamö definitely were under strong pressure: I haven't read enough about the history of South America yet, but I find it plausible that they could be descendants of more advanced cultures that desintegrated during the colonization process.
It is mentioned that the highland tribes that were more isolated from colonial pressures were much more peaceful than the lowland Yanomamö.
Charles Darwin writes about the situation with the natives in South America in his Voyage of the Beagle. I didn't read the whole book (just some excerpts to my son, who'd gotten it from the library,) so I can't say how thorough he is, but the book is at least easy to get.
Yes, most notably Cynthia Ann Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Ann_Parker
I think her story is a typical example of the importance of social position and social status for a person's wellbeing. Cynthia Ann was one of the highest ranking women among the Comanches: The wife of a chief who decided to marry no more women because he liked Cynthia Ann so much. Then her husband was killed and she was transformed from a high-status person to an object of attention. How could that be a good deal?
I think Empire of the Summer Moon is the best version of her story.
Lots of domestic cats learn to be feral, but it is very hard to domesticate a feral cat that is more than a few months old.
I bet in a parallel universe there’s a whiny editorial from the NYT or the Guardian with the theme "Why can’t the Yanomamo be more like Denmark"
Some Yanomamö seem to agree. I just stumbled over the following note in Napoleon Chagnon's book Noble Savages:
"In the 1970s when more contact between the Yanomamö and Venezuelan culture was developing, one Yanomamö man was being trained in practical nursing in the town of Puerto Ayacucho, where he learned about police and law. He excitedly told me about this when he realized that “law” would deal with homicides and this meant the end of blood revenge—and his worry that he might be a legitimate target of revenge for killings that his brothers had been involved in."
Regarding promiscuity. It seems Helena actually improved genes of her children by only having sex with the most deranged(=alfa) men in their society. In fact she was wife of a headmen .
So all in all she played her cards pretty well
Being a woman is not that simple. Chief genes are high risk - one of Helena's sons was a nurse and died from alcoholism. There is a reason why all people are not alphas - there can only be so many of them before they kill each other. Also, genes for alpha behavior in the wrong body can be disastrous.
High risk - high reward. She might have been killed for being so sexually selective as well. Yes being alpha has many downsides ( not the least life or death competition for power ). Yet from gene propagation perspective alphas have the most offspring.
As about being wrong body - that is why many short man are sly and ambitious. They have to compensate for physical drawbacks in other ways
"I urge anyone who has the opportunity to buy a copy and save it and I really hope that this book is in line for digitalization. "
As a librarian I endorse this product. (Trying to remember if I have seen this in our backlog???)
And this one:
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No affliation.
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