To understand these actions—and to enable an evaluation of accountability for harms done—we must take seriously the historical and cultural contexts from which these people come and what it is that they desire and think of as feasible to do.
An influential cargo-cult leader in his day, Yali actively protested such colonial power dynamics, engaging in ritual practices that focused symbolically on Western things, but did so to effect social parity with Westerners.
Their analysis focuses—perhaps somewhat surprisingly—on a sugar plantation, Ramu Sugar Limited, or RSL, a large-scale national development project created in order to free Papua New Guinea from dependence on sugar imports. Needless to say, a sugar plantation is not the type of setting one normally associates with the anthropology of Papua New Guinea, and indeed, RSL contrasts sharply with familiar images of exotic, traditional Papua New Guinean life.
By taking seriously the specific history of the plantation, however, Errington and Gewertz demonstrate that RSL is actually a fundamentally contingent outcome, reflecting not the inexorable march of natural, morally neutral, world-historical forces, but rather a series of choices made by differently positioned people, with very different visions of how the world can and should be organized.
To understand the actions of the people in question, the authors conduct an ambitious ethnography of everyone involved with the plantation, presenting their findings in the form of a series of contrapuntal narratives. Further readings:. Related links:. Print page to PDF. Themes Infrastructure.
Keywords farming colonialism diseases food geography wars. Hamilton, Brian. Diamond will often rely on case studies—that is, individual, somewhat isolated, examples—before generalizing his findings to all of human history the fourth part of the book is made up almost entirely of case studies of specific regions. Diamond takes a moment to clarify what his book is and isn't, and to respond to some potential objections to his book.
First, Diamond could be misinterpreted to be saying that he celebrates the Europeans for their conquests. Diamond will study many different cultures around the word, not just European culture. One could also misinterpret Diamond to be arguing that hunter-gatherer culture for example, Native Americans and aborigines is inferior to agricultural or industrial civilization the civilizations that conquered the Native Americans and the aborigines.
In many ways, hunter-gatherers are actually better off than people in a country like the U. Diamond will show how humans learned to replace their hunter-gatherer practices with agricultural and industrial practices.
On the contrary, agriculture is just the most efficient way to extract food for certain times and places in the world—just as hunting and gathering has been the most efficient way in other places and at other times. Racism, Violence, and Colonization. For centuries, people believed that Europeans conquered the rest of the world because Europeans were naturally superior.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the idea that people in hunter-gatherer cultures are less talented or intelligent than their counterparts in an industrialized country. In no small part, Diamond writes his book in order to refute persistent, but ultimately unscientific, claims that whites, Europeans, and Westerners are superior to people from other parts of the world. Diamond describes his experiences as an anthropologist in New Guinea.
There, he met all sorts of brilliant New Guinean people. It could even be that New Guineans are as a whole smarter than Westerners. In Western society, survival was largely a product of being healthy and lucky—i. In New Guinea, on the other hand, survival was more often a product of talent and intelligence: being able to hunt food, avoid accidents, etc.
Furthermore, New Guineans spend more time exploring the world than average Westerners who watch lots of TV. Therefore, one might even think that natural selection has made New Guineans smarter than Europeans though Diamond doesn't explicitly argue so. Diamond relates another popular explanation for human inequalities across culture: climate stimulates the mind.
Europeans who lived in cold climates received many of their most important ideas and technologies writing, the wheel, etc. Many of the most famous European philosophers of the early modern era, such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that humans responded to their environment in a limited sense: cold weather influenced them to be harder working.
While these thinkers may have been on the right track to argue that environment can shape society, their particular interpretation of such an idea has turned out to be factually wrong. Many of the earliest civilizations did emerge near big rivers Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc. One of the most popular answers to the question of why certain regions became more powerful than others is that the powerful, successful regions were located near rivers.
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