Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 7:38 pm
jimbob wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 6:20 pm
Stranger Mouse wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 5:31 pm
You’re not wrong. He’s an entertaining read and he stimulates some thought but he isn’t quite the genius some people seem to think he is. I found the Tipping Point good though even if it wasn’t very scientific. Nowadays I think about him in much the same way as Stephen Pinker - read and enjoy but exercise caution.
Or indeed as my daughter regards Jared Diamond - at least Guns, Germs, and Steel. Her word was "problematic".
I've heard people say this, but when I read the book nothing really stood out to me as particularly awful. Obviously it focuses on environmental rather than cultural issues, but I don't recall it as arguing that cultural factors are unimportant or irrelevant, but just that they take place within the context of the environment - e.g., Europeans may have been culturally predisposed towards colonialism, and there are plenty of books on the ifs and whys of that, but why were they able so often to
win? Diamond's argument that environmental limitations on e.g. domesticatable crops or useful metals seems
less problematic to me than the alternative argument (that it's due to inherent factors of the respective people/cultures).
The critiques offered on
Wikipedia aren't much help. For instance, the first part of the book talks a lot about the massacre at
Cajamarca, where Pizarro's conquistadores were up against an army of 80,000 Incas + allies. Somehow that gets twisted into "Natives succumb passively to their fate," which is odd as Diamond concerns himself with the question of why their resistance to the far smaller force was unsuccessful (he thinks horses and guns played a part). Or we have, "Blaut criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that arose in the Middle East and Asia." The book makes it very clear that loads of technology used in Europe originated in East Asia or the Middle East, and proposes that ease of trade across the Eurasian landmass was one of the reasons for European successes (e.g. gunpowder originating from China playing a key role in the Spanish conquest of South America). Apparently Blaut thinks readers would be too stupid to notice all the facts in the book, and would just get confused by the first three letters of a word.
Obviously it's broad-brush big-picture stuff from a geographer, and I expect people who focus on individual conflicts probably get very excited about small details and are miffed when they're not all included. But I'd be interested in hearing sensible reasons for why it's problematic.
The criticisms I've seen focus on his interpretations of history and anthropology. This
Inside Higher Ed piece from 2005 gives a good summary of the early criticisms, which can be summarised as:
1) the book ignores inequalities within countries, even though it may be just as important if not more important than inequality between countries for explaining technological differences
2) by saying that global inequalities are merely a fluke of geography, it lets countries off the hook for their role in exacerbating those inequalities
3) he ignores the importance of chance, societal frameworks and personal choice - for example, Spanish colonialism in the New World differed from British and French colonialism which impacted the subsequent histories of those countries.
A piece published in The Geographical Review in 1999 (
reproduced here) provides another good critique. One major complaint made by the author, Jim Blaut, is that Diamond underestimates the importance of the north-south axis - crops can and have been grown across a great many latitudes, giving examples of maize being grown by Native Americans from Canada to Peru, and wheat grown as far south as Ethiopia. The piece also picks apart the arguments made by Diamond about why Australia did not have cultivated crops and makes some good counters, though I would also recommend reading Bruce Pascoe's
Dark Emu which provides compelling evidence that Aboriginal Australians did have agriculture, just in a form not easily identifiable to Europeans (in a similar way to them completely missing the agriculture of the Native Americans). The piece also deconstructs Diamond's reasoning for why Europe dominated but China did not, despite being on the same east-west axis.
A
2010 piece in the Journal of Social Archaeology looks at both
Guns, Germs and Steel and
Collapse and how they misconstrues pre-colonial North American history to fit their narratives.
The TL:DR is that Diamond ignores inconvenient facts which don't fit his narrative. Ultimately, the criticism could be reduced to, I think you'll find iabmctt.