review of our kind by marvin harris

Review of Our Kind by Marvin Harris

[note, if anyone read the first draft of this...I'm sorry.]

So much of history, as it's usually presented, is either a local

microcosm or a culturally specific snapshot, it fails to capture the

big (the big impersonal) picture of the human experience. Philosophy

follows a similar flaw of intimacy, driving for a first-principals

explanation of the human condition, proceeding from axioms created in

our skulls to as many future conditional progressive tenses as may be

(here's how I think I think, therefore, here's how society should

work). I am liking the empirical perspective lately, that is, the

anthropological one, observing the evidence of human coexistence and

making inductive generalizations from the pattern of the data. It's

been my growing conviction that for all the myriad ways we're fucked

up on an individual level, human behavior in the aggregate is a lot

more predictable and explainable than six billion partisans would have

you believe.

In Our Kind, Marvin Harris moves quickly to an important distinction

in this explanation, in truth another one I've been wrestling with:

that cultural evolution is different than the biological sort, faster,

and even if it's not working through genetics, it's force is similarly

powerful. Harris describes how cultural development as an unconscious,

collective means to most efficiently realize our various biological

imperatives. The species is, more or less, equally endowed, but we

react in different ways to the externalities of different communities:

different availabilty of proteins, vitamins, and heat sources,

differnt population density, different history, and varying degrees of

feasibility that somewhere else exists to go. The outlines of politics

and culture derive from these parameters. He puts the lie to fertility

as a biological imperative, digging up anthropological evidence and

biological analogies to show that humans are more wired more for sex

than we are for babies, and develops the consequences. He pokes at

race as an artifical construct. Our body shapes and colors over the

generations correlate more to local geography than our ethnic

heritage, both because of cultural selection and extensive

interbreeding (Jews, he notes in an example, generally look more like

the locals than they do Jews elsewhere, which is maybe one hint that

journalists should be careful not to casually conflate ethnography

with genomes.)

It gets touchy in parts. Harris outlines ways in which early societies

dealt with population pressures, reducing the idea of war to a means

to deal with this, and correlating that with misogyny. Preservation of

a warrior class limits population more than in the obvious way, Harris

says, and includes selection for male heirs for the patriarchy,

pushing toward female infanticide as a remarkably common device, even

in modern times. Historically, life has officially begun at the point

parents decided to keep the child, sometimes months ex utero. He

questions the cost of misogyny in terms of male life expectancy (along

with the contemporary unwillingness to question this), paints

government as an inevitable consequence of animal domestication.

I don't think any of the above discussions are comfortable, but the

cases are strong. His religious angle is perhaps the most sensitive.

He describes "killing" religions, entailing animal and human

sacrifice, as a development of a means of protein redistribution,

drawing patterns across the globe from Aztecs to the Vedic to the

Pacific island traditions. The non-killing faiths he paints as

reactionary creeds developed to address the failure of the faiths that

passed out meat, usually in response to specific political pressures.

He draws a line from here directly to subjugation empire, implicating

the gentler religions as a direct enabler of military powers. Why?

Because making a virtue of poverty and delaying material rewards past

death suits would-be emperors brilliantly. The first act of conquest

of non-killers, cites Harris, is to convert to the non-killing faith,

as true of Christianity, as of Jainism, as of Buddhism. The

proscription against killing, historically, has been easy enough to

circumvent, but the faith in ethereal rewards much harder to shake,

and murderous zealots have been useful tools of tyrants. (One amusing

point: even as Harris constructs a general condemnation of religioun

that quite clearly includes the Pauline faiths, he sticks with the

western conceit of weighting Biblical history toward the factual,

using Christian-formal terms like 'year of Our Lord', and citing that

holy book, and only that one, using chapter and verse. It's got to be

force of habit.)

Stylistically, Marvin Harris both worked for me and didn't. His

ultra-short sections--the book is five hundred pages long, but every

third page was a blank title--got right to the point, but they were so

brief and un-footnoted, that it lent to a less than scholarly feel.

It's not that the sections are unresearched: the author has done his

share of influential work the field himself, and there is a a detailed

bibliography for each tiny chapter in the back. He just doesn't point

to it. He also has a penchant for scribbling over his weaker points

with anecdote or irritable analogy. For example, he's probably out to

lunch on his message of gender identity--not so culturally controlled

between sexes as all that--but on the other hand, his message that

cultural selection usually satisfies the biological preferences in the

aggregate is almost certainly true, and biologically, he's largely

divorced sexuality from both reproduction and gender anyway. I admit

that I'd be more bothered by his idiosyncratic style if I agreed with

less of it.

We all know how short the timeframe of civilization is compared the

earth's history, but even our species is young, only around for a

hundred thousand years or so. By contrast, our various hominid

ancestors populated the earth for about 3 million years. (Our most

recent evolutionary analog, the Neandertals were a short-lived

species, only lasting about 200 thousand altogether). Even given the

age of our genome, sapient, language-using humans have only been

evidenced for a fraction of that, about 35,000 years. I can't accept

neither can Harris, which is why he describes evolution in the

cultural sphere). In that short time, we've graduated from the stone

tools that our ape-plus ancestors and cousins had used, and covered

the earth in dense societies, razing mountains and forests, and

erecting countless evidence that we lived. Although we may still fight

like animals, we've made a hell of a mark in the short time our kind

has been civilizing.

And the big question remains this: are we going somewhere, or have we

achieved our ecological niche? According to ideas of punctuated

equilibrium, species persist for a long damn time, but originate and

fill in their ecological space very quickly. In terms of biological

evolution, the fossil record and all that, 35 kiloyears ain't much. We

humans are probably still spreading into our role As a conclusion,

Harris calls our penchant for empire and evil as the likely inevitable

cultural consequences of our nature. Our failures to will into being

benevolent governments are a result of the unfortunate statistical

average of human action. They've all followed similar paths. Is there

hope, he wonders, a conclusion beyond the state? I have to think that

there's not going to be any success in regressing pre-state, that the

factors that pushed governments into existence--food dependence,

population, and circumscription--seem to only drive one way. But

here's the thing, the catch: trying to will cultural evolution forward

is how our biological imperative works, and there may be a point we

haven't yet achieved with it. We're certainly on different ground this

time in terms of communication, size, and boundaries. Is there still

time to realize a better existence than empire?

I'm not very optimistic actually--existential brinkmanship can't

continue forever--but the idea of a better future beyond nation-staes

is the hope I can find. Maybe we'll get there.