Steeling Germinating Guns?

[Tabouli]

Hang in there Ebony... I'm about 2/3 of the way through 'Guns, Germs and Steel', and I haven't forgotten you!

Interesting.  Very interesting.  Being a fan of natural history and anthropology, I could happily read all day about geography and plants and animals.  Politics I find much less exciting (so now he's reached modern times and is going on about taxes and political structures my reading rate has started to drop off), but I'll get there in a few days.

On the culture issue, it's long been speculated in the cross-cultural literature that cultural values arise from the sort of things he's writing about, namely environment, geography, climate, etc.  From what I've read, he does a good job of summarising those factors, but keeps his reference to the associated cultural values oblique because he, perhaps, doesn't want to weaken his thesis.  Cultural values muddy the waters, make it easier to blame groups for their own misfortune, so he avoids them as much as he can.  He does, for example, briefly comment that there were a lot of small bands with different attitudes towards adopting new technology in New Guinea, and says something like "as one would expect in so varied a terrain", but then changes the subject hastily.  I'm interested in where the different attitudes come from, and how they're related to the specific terrain that band of people was in, and so on.  If some bands resisted technology, why was this?  Having an inflexible leader?  If so, how did that person rise to the leadership?  What skill or behaviour or appearance did that band value, and why?  And so on.

But hey, it's a long book as it is, and speculation about crops and tools and things that leave concrete remains is much easier than speculation about airy-fairy abstract concepts like "values".

What prompted me to write at this interim stage is not the book yet.  Oo no.  It's the amazon.com reviews I've just been reading, prompted by your comments.  Some of the negative ones (you know the ones I mean) are enough to chill the blood...

Tabouli.






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